Crush the Norm: Diversity Rules (At King)

[Music] hello and welcome to this session crush the norm diversity rules it's a session about diversity and inclusion in games and first of all I hope you can uh turn off your mobile phones so we don't get Disturbed uh we are from King in Stockholm Sweden and my name is Kiki Olson and I am Senior Studio director for Candy Crush and I'm Chris odson and I'm a brand creative studio art director let's start with a quick check check in what's your relation to this topic um diversity and inclusion I want you to show with your fingers one to five and the scale is one I haven't really thought about it to five I'm already very interested and have some knowledge so put your hands up now ah good we have a mixed audience and it will be easy for all of you to follow because the presentation is on a basic level

why do we have this session King is a company known for casual games with candies and cute characters even so we've had our challenges when it comes to diversity and inclusion we decided to do something about it to educate and enlightened people so they can reflect and reflect and make informed decisions when creating or using Game characters we've been running this workshop at King for a while leading to games teams opening up their eyes for the subject more concretely creating less stereotypical characters um like stronger female characters and broadening ethnic diversity in this presentation we'll look at examples from popular culture both positive ons and pitfalls we also get personal and look at mistakes that King has made in the past we've developed the test uh which is used to test how diverse a game is uh and you will get to try out later that's the the

screens on the walls so what do we want to achieve with this session the goal is to empower you to make informed decisions and it's not about setting limitations it's about creating new possibilities and most important of all this gives you the opportunity to be leaders and not followers and if everyone in this room starts thinking about this today imagine what we can achieve together in less than a year let's design games for everyone no matter where they are or who they are if you want a diverse player base from all over the world you will need to think big and crush the norm because everything we do adds to the world we live in and the world we play in so why replicate when we can work against stereotypes a great Saga needs all kinds of Heroes and that's it so what is diversity it can apply to many different areas like age body type

culture disability ethnicity gender identity sexual orientation socioeconomic background or class if you will mental health and religion and diversity is closely connected to equality feminism anti-racism accessibility intersectional analysis and human rights all good things aren't they and if we want the greater inclusion is the way to go an exclusion is the opposite to inclusion and if you take it to the exr extreme exclusion is discrimination as some groups that don't fall within the norm are repeatedly rejected and that's how the norm is maintained and reinforced time and time again and the yellow and the green dots on the outside of the big circle represents those who are excluded and let's take a look at inclusion instead hold on because this is an advanced PowerPoint animation I

made it myself so see what happened there the circuit was expanded to get a better mix room for more variation and to be more inclusive and of course inclusion doesn't mean that just everyone needs to be represented at all time especially not in a game with just a few characters it's more about having a greater variety and the more true representation we get more types of cars that our players can identify with and get to know and in the end that's just more fun Where Do We Begin our output reach millions of players of all sorts and we have a unique chance to make a difference by showing a diverse World in our games so to do so we need to make conscious decisions so let's explore a character Universe with a wide range of options and before continuing I want to make clear that the pictures we will show is chosen because they are under understandable examples it doesn't mean

that all characters in that game or film are good or bad from a diverse perspective you need to investigate your own assumptions and presets who you are and how that affects the work you do it doesn't necessarily need to be your own culture that affects what you do it's also about the mainstream culture that we're constantly fed with for instance do you use a white man as a foundation when you create a new character and do all women have the same body type slim and curvy and yes let's investigate have you by any chance only created characters of the same cultural background as you so remember to always question all stereotypes ethnicity this is an interesting and embarrassing example because this is actually from a king game called African rain maker released 6 years ago

and it's a typical example of an African stereotype and does the personality and looks go beyond ethnicity cliches no they don't and that's what we call type cost and don't worry because we taken this game down age some people might think that you can solve the age spread by adding an old evil witch well it doesn't really work like that and when it comes to gender a female character needs more personality than just being a woman if you trip back the gender traits and looks is there anything left more than a blank canvas if not you need to go back to the drawing board and the Smurfs really should disability an evil pirate with a wooden leg we've seen that before haven't we think bigger because people with disabilities can be heroes too and when it comes to sexuality and romantic motivation Mario saves the princess over and over again but maybe we don't have to limit us to that what

if a girl can save a girl or a boy can save a boy there are so many things to build an original character with so let's explore the toolbox no one ever successfully fought a war in a bikini and really clothing that calls attention and sexualize the female body is not necessary for most narratives on the other hand have you addressed all male characters in all covering cool and teaware functional clothes and have armor don't get stuck in Old rats you have to mix it up A good rule of thumb is to compare the clothing between genders to unlock stereotypical representations this is a positive example from Assassin's Creed Syndicate the twin the male and female twin assassins have same kind of clothes armor and weapons are all males dark and brooding and all females happy and colorful uh short you can use blue for

boys and pink for girls but there are endless possibilities for color schemes that can be used and if you go for cliche you could at least play around with it this is a great example from the film inside out and look Beyond The Usual Suspects fat doesn't mean lazy and smart doesn't need to wear glasses and someone that looks like Prince Charming isn't always the good guy this is Faith a plus-size superhero we all can admire because she has tremendous psychic powers a diverse Game World includes short tall chubby skinny curvy athletic disabled or non-disabled and characters of different ethnicity Professor Xavier from X-Men is using a wheelchair but this has never held him back he's one of the most powerful mutants in the world and watch out for those archetypes

they're great at telling stories but they might take you down a beaten path something that they all something that the player has already seen before the Healer doesn't always have to be an older woman the hero can be someone else than a white male and the Savage can be European and remember the supportive characters in the background I don't know if you have seen Game of Thrones uh I don't want to spoil anything but they really have an interesting and often very surprising make of characters there are some principles to guide you decide the character personality traits and narrative first which story do you want to tell and with which characters after this you can decide the gender ethnicity body type and culture and always aim to let the body look and poses of the character reflect the personality and narrative aim for a well balanced group of characters and last but not least

always ask yourself did I recreate The Stereotype and if so why and remember with an original character it's easier to create a strong and recognizable brand so we've developed a test to see how inclusive and diverse a game is and it's called diversity space and this is how the test looks like exciting hey so you start by identifying the norm and here we use the norm for action games developed in the western world the same Norms are almost always applicable for Productions aimed for the Western Market so the culture is Western ethnicity is Caucasian age is like neither young or old women are usually younger than men ability is non-disabled sexual orientation is heterosexual and body type is stereotypical and that is Slim and curvy for women and athletic or bodybuilder types for men and gender ident identity

male is the norm women come second and all others are very very uncommon so the norm is the green area here so that's a really really tiny diversity space and now we're going to test some characters from the game OverWatch from blizzard and this is sya she is an unusual character her design actually emerged from a demand from players to Blizzard for a greater diversity of gender body type and ethnicity and let's take a look at her diversity space culture she is Russian so that's not very common ethnicity she's Caucasian so she's on the norm age she's 28 so neither young or old an ability she is non-disabled so she's on the norm there sexuality you can't see this on the outside and there is no information on this but she does have some queer Vibes and there's been some Rumors in the community that we need to put her on the norm and body type she is a bodybuilder and all those muscles are unusual for

female characters so let's put that quite a bit from the norm and gender she is a woman so she is in the middle of the gender scale all in all she's got quite big diversity SP diversity space breaking the norm with gender culture and body type and this is Lucio starting off with culture he is a DJ living in Brazil so he is a little bit out from the norm ethnicity he's black so I put this quite far out it's not that common and it's not the scale from white to black but Caucasian people are most common and Asians are more common than let's say Indians age he's 26 so that doesn't stand out from the norm ability he is non-disabled so he's on the norm sexual orientation don't know anything about that so I'll keep him on the norm and body type he is athletic and that's expected of men and gender identity he is a man which is the most common so looking at the diversity

space he has got a sharp Point towards ethnicity and a little stretch in culture but he doesn't stand out from the norm much in any other ways and then we got torban he is a Swedish weapon designer that's not super common but it doesn't stand out from a culture point of view so I'll put him close to the norm and he's white so nothing on ethnicity he is 57 so he is older than the most he is disabled and has got a prosthetic arm so we put this quite far out on the ability scale we don't know anything about his sexuality so I keep it close to the norm and body type he is a person with short stature so that's a bit out from the norm however it's not that uncommon with a body type like that together with a lot of muscles in games and he is a man which is most common looking at the diversity space he does s out a bit from the norm and this is when it gets interesting because by combining the characters in The diversity space you get an overall

picture of your game's inclusion level so for this being only three characters we got quite a good spread in the diversity space so good job blizard and remember that the whole diversity space doesn't need to be covered just avoid having all characters huddle up in the middle and do you think this could be a useful tool hands up if you do that's super because you're going to test this out soon but first over to Kiki and remember even if you have developed characters with a big divers diversity space you can still have stereotypes would you say that these characters are stereotypes in any ways hands up if yes so let's take a look at some pitfalls to keep you on the right track the angry and brutish black men is one of the most common stereotypes in games the let's do something more

original and the representation of women in games are often embarrassingly uniform these are the female characters from Tekken six all of them have very stereotypical body types and clothing that emphasize that and we are doing something similar in our King games this is from Shuffle cats all those Jessa cats looks awesome but don't they look a little similar so let's compare them with the Tom Cats and the Tom Cats are allowed to have a lot of different body types Expressions Etc which is usually the case with ma with male characters so let's compare again it's quite obvious isn't it and we have whiteness that's clearly a default in a lot of games The Witcher is one of them and sexualizing poses is another Pitfall make sure that the character's body look poses Etc reflect the character personality traits and

narrative this is an example from OverWatch that you might have seen before it's made quite a bus as the pose doesn't go along with her personality so be mindful of what you're doing and watch out for those stereotypes and let's end on a more positive note there are games which stay clear from pitfalls and challenge Norms this is an example from Journey who have created a game with the character without the clearly stated gender they have been thinking big and they have crushed a norm some other positive example this is Faith Connors in Mirror's Edge and she is a powerful Asian woman and has the leading role Watch Dogs 2 which takes place here in San Francisco they have been working actively with the representation of diverse ethnicity and touch upon subjects like autism and we have the upcoming game L of us

part two with the story that includes LGBT characters so now we're going to do the workshop you are going to take a closer look by trying out the diversity space method and we will look at four games Clash of Clans from suol Call of Duty infinite Warfare from Infinity Ward and Activision Super Mario run from Nintendo and The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess from Nintendo so to make it easy for you we have decided that the norm is the same Norm we were talking about earlier the Western Market so we want you to look at the characters and discuss and draw the diversity space sections for each character and you use one color per character and you have the workshop material uh towards the walls so if you just uh go to the flip shots and team up

with like four people or so in each team and you start the exercise uh and then one group from each game will present the results I think it went quite well we thought it could be super unorganized but I think you got something out of it was a bit chaotic uh first we're going to look at Clash of Clans uh so we have a team that has uh accepted to present their results we have we have asked uh we have asked the team yeah you you can come up here if you like do you maybe you should uh where is your like sh bring it up yeah maybe that's

good it will be a bit difficult to see but you get at least sorry you found it easy to do the exercise or was it a lot of discussions in the groups it was good it was good and there are no like correct answers we are all different and we assess different FR player hi so uh we did Clash of Clans and what we talked about is that the game is kind of pretty normative um the only characters that really seem to uh diverge are uh the first character um just in terms of gender ident well not idty sorry

corre incorrect one culture and ethnicity and then everything else is pretty normative even coming down to the body uh body type kind of like we all discussed with um male characters and that they tend to have a variety of physiques and uh kind of General buff physique here and then um with the two female characters two and four kind of same almost the same exact body type generally a more narrow waist um but same sort of chest shoulders figure normally what you expect in a lot of the female character designs um all of them were able-bodied and uh and then the only other thing that stood out in terms of uh variety was that there were two female characters and that was pretty much the only point that we gave it for uh the variety of five characters okay and the other teams who were looking at Clash of Clans did you have like similar results or you thought differently about about to say

okay thank you this serves for a round of applause yes then we had sorry I'm just messing up the yeah Super Mario would you like to come up [Music] number uh hi um so uh we discussed Super Mario rum and we found that the game had um some points um in some areas but completely lacked in others so where the

game lacked is uh in ability since they're all uh non-disabled and in sexual orientation as well since they are all presumably straight um where the game was a bit more diverse is in gender identity two of the characters are female which is well you know a little bit outside of the norm um when it comes to culture um Mario and lii are both Italian which is still like Western but it's not the most represented type we presume so we put them just a little bit on the like out there and uh uh age as well uh we like Mario Peach and Luigi are all sort of not neither young nor old but both Toad and Toadette are children so that is you know just a bit outside of the norm we we put them and uh then we had a body types as well uh

so what we noted here is that Mario is short like he's actually shorter than Peach so we gave him quite a high score for that and also that the characters are they're not necessarily um very very muscular they're more like uh you know rounded so yeah we gave it quite high points for that H even though we didn't give it like very high marks because uh we we said that this still like the art style of the game still is is rounded as well so even though like it's not like super muscular it's still not far out from the norm of the game like it's still pretty normative in that context so we give it like yeah pretty high marks for body type um but yeah and also in ethnicity none of them are differ from the norm say they're all whites or and Caucasian so yeah so that's that was our results okay

thank you awesome and then we had Tim looking at Legend of Zelda cool um so our team looked at um Twilight Princess and The Legend of Zelda and there was a bit more variety here maybe than the previous teams um we kind of so Zelda and Link are very kind of traditional um fit into the norm even like despite the maybe kind of mythological influences of the game but especially link is very you know Western kind of feudal where um and they're both very traditional body types and seemingly sexual orientation as well and ability of course um

Ganondorf we kind of gave a Midway in in culture and kind of high in ethnicity cuz I mean he's definitely not traditionally Western um I guess the game he's almost like a feudal Japanese um interesting you know I I don't really know what um what so that's great adds diversity um age he's though he's in the don't really know stage he's still in like the prime of his life at least for for a male character so we kind of rated it a bit off the norm but mostly very very tightly there I guess um it's um midna um it's mid right yeah okay yeah great um she's kind of like an interesting one and kind of um you know enlarged the the sphere a lot I guess because as somebody point out she's you know she only has

sight in one eye which is interesting her um body type is quite different even though somebody pointed out that within the context of her kind of she still has some feminine traits even though it's um but yeah no no she's she was definitely the most kind of diverse character and added a lot to the sphere which was very narrow just after um Link and Zelda so yeah that was our findings thank you thank you and then we have the Call of Duty team we had the same session for Activation Blizzard yesterday we had a studio Summit so that was very [Applause] interesting so we were looking at the Call of Duty game game and we found that

um two out of the five of the characters are really normative they were exactly on the bubble so four and one were on there we also had uh one female character which was it took the gender identity out a little bit and then a black character which took out the uh ethnicity and then we said that having the robot on the team actually expanded the sphere a lot because the culture was unknown and ethnicity was unknown yeah actually having the robot on the team posed uh probably our most difficult decision for determining what to put on this because there was debate cuz not all of us are actually that familiar with this particular Call of Duty game so there was uncertainty as to whether or not it was an emphasis on robotic Prosthetics or just the use of an robot character on the team but it does stand out in terms of uh ethnicity and I guess gender identity because it's sort of abstract and out there does it have a gender um we looked at it and more or less if you take that head off the body there is still fit into a very musular male archetype in terms of its body

design um sexual orientation could be asexual not too sure exactly with that um but otherwise for the most part very boring group of people aside from Mr Robot there I was actually a little disappointed cuz when I was standing further away from our smaller picture I thought number one was a latino female and I was like that's not as bad of a spectrum and then I got closer and it's exactly the same as number four and completely diminished the diversity of gender pools and uh and cultural identifications I mean the one thing I'll say in defense for this game is just considering the context of the play for at least for body types is simply the fact that um it is like a military and oriented game so you do need to have athletic people and people that are fit for service out in the field so I mean they don't really have much leeway there for that so I'd actually challenge that participate in supporting milary within operations that have all body types okay

like I don't I don't think the heroes need to be ripped sounds cool good input my only I guess I was kind of sad oh well the fact that we haven't played the game uh actually made it gave us some hope that there was something different about those characters like the sexual orientation that so we were kind of putting dotted lines there and hoping that um the game designers actually made the right choices and make that game do it diverse but if they didn't then it would be very sad okay thank you thank you uh I also want to mention another in initiative from King we are partnering for the second time with the ver uh to sponsor a scholarship program from 10 European female talented students to come over here to GDC and this initiative gives them an awesome opportunity to network and attend

exciting sessions and further on hopefully a career in the gaming industry they are sitting here uh in front so uh I hope you reach out to them afterwards and maybe give them your best tips and tricks or other opportunities thank you uh so did you find the content in this session meaningful you liked it and did you get any new insights thank you and do you think it will be useful for you to look more into uh how diverse and inclusive your games are good that was our that was what we wanted it to become so uh we have some time left and uh if you some questions we will try to answer them I think we have a microphone

in the test test okay I um I just wanted to know how long you've been focusing on this in King like is this a new initiative you've been doing or how long have you actually had a focus on this and your games have you been looking into this from the design States and all that until you you said you mentioned you had some games that weren't very diverse and you kind of killed those off but I mean when did you start this process in fact we started it was one and a half year ago when we invited Anita's Aras to a King for Market that's like a conference we have for whole King uh and we really liked her talk and started to think that is there something we can do in our games and usually the king games are not very character driven it's more about candies or vegetables or something else so uh but we are going more towards games with characters so we felt that why not like start before it's too late

uh and uh we have been out in all Studios um so far and we have had this session for for them so really trying to to go towards the right direction but as you could see sometimes we fails anyway so but um that's at least our plan and we haven't this is not our this is something we have done ourselves like on the side because we just felt it was a very important topic so um yeah any more questions hello hi hello again um I don't really like taking up space in these kinds of things but I just wanted to say I think the tool is really cool um one of the things I noticed though is that there's so much difference in how people interpret it and there's so much complication in terms of whether you take in the context of the game or not um and I think that that makes a really

big difference in how we look at doing this in different communities and what tools they have and so um I'm I don't have a question S I just kind of like feedback a little bit for folks in the room who might want to use it I guess in terms of I like I'm really happy that you mentioned the context is also important so we were doing Peach and we're like well she's a damsel and so do we want to give gender points for the fact that she's a damsel and she's stereotypical um and so I I kind of think of this a little bit like the beal test which is the test to assess um whether a film has um oh my God this is a thing I know really well if two female characters can about anything else than the men which is a super great starting point for folks to understand that and I think that this tool plays that same kind of role which is a great starting point to get teams talking about it um but then layering on the pieces of like who is the character like you were saying and I'm wondering if there's a way to integrate that which is not a answer now thing but it's it's a really good input and I think that the

diversity space is a tool that is mostly to be used by game developers and narrative and game artists so they are aware of what they are doing uh but as we mentioned you can still you can still have like a really big diversity space but all the characters are stereotypes so you you would need to check that as well yeah absolutely but I think this is awesome thank you thank you [Applause] any more questions yeah so I would like to know your opinion on uh what someone might think about in regards to uh people's reactions to your diverse cast that you create in video games or in whatever so that you're not like just filling in a checkbox kind of thing

because while that's not necessarily what you're doing it might be what it appears to be and so I'm wondering with as long as it makes sense in the story should you just go for as much diversity as you feel like or do you want to kind of watch to make sure that it's not just like here's one of this type and here's one of this type kind of thing like what would you say to that that kind of an idea it depends on how many characters you've got in a game of course and it would be really strange if you ticked all the boxes in in only one character to have it have it done with so it's more about getting a greater variety and yeah you don't need to do it in all characters all the time but just if you recreate The Stereotype you should be aware of why you're doing it does that answer your question most it's a very comp question yeah it is uh okay hi um so you mentioned that you know at King you you've all been kind of thinking about this more and trying to focus on this more um I'm

curious if you've gotten generally gotten like a lot of a lot of Buy in from everyone on the team about trying to pay more attention to this trying to improve inclusion and diversity or if you've gotten kind of some push back some resistance and if so how you've how you've dealt with that how you tried to bring those team members um on board with supporting this mostly we've got a lot of buying both from games team and from our brand Team but I think we're taking it baby steps it's we haven't like overhauled the whole company yet but yeah it's a good start at least and we're just uh we're just looking at a midcore game that we're developing right now and they like oh check check this out we have so many like strong female characters and just at the first look I like but they all have the same body type still you know why maybe this big gorilla could be a a female instead and Etc so it's even if they really try it's easy to like fall back into some kind of safe area that you have to challenge

yourself yeah it's really an on ongoing discussion and learning process for for everyone we are not perfect at all King so my question is kind of you might have exactly the same answer because it's it's very similar um but I've heard of some companies where there is push back regarding like hey we designed all these cool you know diverse characters and then someone will come in and say yes but we have you know AB testing and data that says like these generic characters perform way better with our audience because whatever you know like sort of when people are planting a steak in the ground and saying we have like this particular reason that we want to keep things within the norm how would you push back against that absolutely we have that challenge as well especially if you do character testing one by one you don't see the whole character setup you only see one character and then people people tend to go for something they know they

go for a stereotype because they like it but if you have a whole stere whole character setup and that's what you test uh there's usually much less reactions and things that falls outside of the norm so I think that's the way to go and it needs to be a will uh in the company or in the team that does it as well a drive for it that you are willing to take some risks maybe because if you just go by all the tests um you will never like challenge what we have and sometimes I I think sometimes the players they don't know what they want to have uh they are so used to to those stereotypes so they like want it um but if we present them other options maybe they start to reflect more them themselves and and find it more fun to have a wider a character base yeah and there is an urge for more diverse characters players are actually asking for it actively and now it's the right time to start thinking about it

actively thank you thank you hi there uh I thought this was a really interesting tool and could possibly be used in educational spaces um I work at a university that focuses on game design um and I was wondering if there's a resource where Educators could access both your set of cultural norms and the graph for the diversity space you can email any of us and we can send and we hopefully we can do it as a digital tool as well so you can add in like 50 characters and you can get a heat map where you actually see where you got most uh diversity yeah I think it be a really great way to start conversations about diversity in our program so thanks for that sounds great hi um so this exercise that we used uh there were a lot of different metrics for diversity uh there was gender ability body type uh have you do you focus on all of them systemically

king or are you finding some more difficult to expand than others I think we're not that story driven yet at King so sexuality has never come up as a point uh mental health hasn't or or religion so there's a few points lacking but we wanted to do this as as covering as as possible so it's if you've got a really strong story line and it's clear here for players I think you can actually check in on all the points in the diversity space all right thank you thank you any more questions okay great thank you for your time it's been awesome to have you here