Empowerment Playbook: Making and Measuring Change in the Games Industry

[Music] thank you so much for coming out at 9 in the morning to our presentation empowerment Playbook making and measuring change in the games industry uh my name is Stephanie Fischer this is Allison Harvey and we've been conducting research on inclusivity focused organizations since 2011 and we're thrilled to be speaking about our most re recent work with you uh at GDC um in this presentation we'll be talking about the different kinds of impact that Community Based groups are making and how to communicate this impact in a way that is driven and informed by consent safety and privacy so uh we've divided our presentation into four parts uh first I will be providing some context and information on who pixels is and how we came to be

next Allison will talk about our research project on measuring pixel's impact then she will describe a visualization tool that was developed by Soft chaos to show how we can visualize change and impact in an interactive way and then I will end with sharing with some uh sharing some of pixel's strategies that guides the work that we do okay so first who is pixels um pixels is a small montreal-based nonprofit organization uh that works to improve gender diversity in the games industry our mission is to provide game makers with space and support to reach their game making goals whether that's honing their craft improving their higher ability or increasing their confidence but to really understand the impact that pixels has made you have to understand the history of how pixels came to be and why we exist in the first place so to that end let me take you back a decade to 2013 which is the year that pixels was was

born so in 2013 the games industry was 40 years young and like its player base it was overwhelmingly white male and straight um in addition to this homogeneity of the industry equity and diversity was not considered a priority so for example in the 2014 idga developer satisfaction survey when asked do you feel there's equal treatment and opportunity for all in the game industry 47% of respondents said yes sorry no 28% said yes and 25 answered not sure not applicable so nearly half the workforce understood that there was an EDI problem that's good after all you can't change what you don't know but a quarter of the workforce was unsure or unaware of the problem or kind of worse knew that there was a problem but didn't see it as their problem this was not a new issue by any

means um women have always been here making games these kind of blurry Clips are from a 1983 article from the now defunct video game magazine uh from an article that interviews Six Women in different roles at different companies and throughout this article the women are talking about how they love games and how they came to the industry but the exclusionary culture of games can make working in this industry uncomfortable or even unwelcoming and it's both fascinating and a little depressing to read this article and know that what they're saying rang true 30 even 40 years later okay so back to 2013 we have an EDI problem but thanks to social media people are actually starting to talk about it discussions like # one reason why we're bringing awareness to the challenges women game developers faced and for those of you who are unfamiliar with one reason why basically what happened is this one tweet set off one of the most personal and and widespread

conversations about women's experiences in the games industry today and the Tweet was why are there so few lady game creators over the next 24 hours after that tweet thousands of women shared their personal stories of sexism and exclusion they were basically tweeting their one reason why there were so few women leaders in a massive and rapidly expanding industry women reported experiences ranging from you know just everyday sexism of working in a male-dominated industry to inappropriate sexual misconduct where perpetrators are protected by a culture of Silence the one reason why discussion was quickly followed by a second hashtag one reason to be and that discussion was where women talked about why they stayed in the industry despite all these one reasons why and simply put they stayed because they love making games they love their job and then rounding out this discussion was the hasht one reason mentor

and that's where game developers volunteered to provide support to others interested into getting into the games industry and so the unspoken understanding running through all these reasons conversations um was that sexism in games was a universally acknowledged truth and something needed to change and maybe instead of focusing solely on how we can get more women into the industry the question we should be asking is what needs to change to keep women in this industry and you know my personal opinion this would be a good place to start um if anything needs to change to keep more women in games it should be eradicating misogyny however because the worm feminism seems to scare the B Jesus out of people we've come to refer to the fight for gender equality in a more palatable way as women's empowerment also in 2013 the women's

empowerment movement was a Hot Topic in and out of tech that was the Year Cheryl Samberg published her little book called leanin you might have heard of it um in leanin it's a part Memoir part Manifesto part self-help book Samberg offers his path for women looking to achieve professional success oh Cheryl Samberg is also a Facebook executive for anyone who didn't know that um leanin was at the time lotted as the very inspirational modern feminist call to action and in it she encourages women not to hold back you know she encourages women to be assertive at work to speak up Empower themselves so they can achieve their full potential in all aspects of their life both personal and professional but what Cheryl Samberg offers is actually an individual solution to a systemic problem in her opinion what needed to change was not the work environment but the women M themselves and this rallying cry that

she has puts the onus on women as individuals to empower themselves and it actually also assumes that the environment will be receptive to changes that they want to make okay so game culture is known for a lot of things but being opening and welcoming to change is not really one of them at least at this time uh as those one reason why tweets remind us women in this industry face a level of scrutiny that's not applicable to their male counterparts in this industry expressing a woman expressing a woman my God expressing an opinion as a woman can actually be kind of dangerous um note that the next slide does contain some ugly language so if you want to look away you can so example also in 2013 Gamespot reviewer Carolyn Pettit for example wrote a review of Grand Theft Auto 5 is one of the most anticipated games of the year Carolyn's a huge fan of the franchise herself she rated the game a glowing n out of 10 it

was mostly a glowing review however she knocked off a point because of the and criticized the games portrayal of women this sparked a very intense and angry backlash from Angry fans her review attracted more than 20,000 comments many of them hostile and transphobic that have since been removed from the Gamespot website and you know this is what's left and it's still pretty bad uh there was even a petition that aimed to get her fired All For You Know doing her job expressing an opinion let's also not forget that just a year before in 2012 angry Gamers also lost their over the chopes versus women in video games Kickstarter campaign and so while lean in's advice to put yourself out there and take risks sounds great in theory and doable if you like Cheryl Samberg are cloaked in white heterosexual cisgendered upper middle class privilege the reality is that the sexism and misog that permeates game

culture can actually make it feel like it's impossible for us as individuals to change the status quo and in many ways it is if we try to do it alone and by ourselves so that's what it was like to be a woman in games in 2013 it's now 10 years later eii initiatives are everywhere and they're still as important as ever one only has to walk around GDC to see how large multinational companies are eager and showing up and eager to show how they are creating an inclusive games industry but before those big players got onto the inclusivity train indie game communities had actually been laying the groundwork to Foster change through action for a couple of years and they were doing this by building community and now we're going to get into the pixel's origin story after that bummer of an intro so in late 2011 a chob based video game organization called The Hand Eye Society decided they would run a small women in games incubator program and

they called it the Difference Engine initiative which I'm going to refer to as Dei because Difference Engine initiatives kind of a mouthful so the Dei had a modest goal teach 10 women how to make their first game in six weeks the response to Dei was overwhelming um it showed there was really high demand for women's o women's only programming and community space in Toronto um shortly after the end of the program the organization Dames making games now simply known as DMG was formed and dmg's purpose was to take up this work started by the handy Society to create a space where women game makers could gather and meet others to form Community DMG actively addressed um issues of systemic marginalization and exclusion of women in game development in their city and they did this through running womenonly incubator programs workshops game jams um they invited

mentors from the broader Community both men and women to Come Share their skills and uh provide game making support to firsttime designers and within a year DMG changed the face of tono's indie game development scene forever um more importantly for the purpose of this story DMG really provided a model that other game development communities could use and adopt for their own local context this is how pixels came to B so in January 2013 armed with some seed funding from a local University the program curriculum developed by the Difference Engine initiative and the community model developed by DMG pixel's co-founders Rebecca Cohen palasio and Tanya short ran the first pixels game incubator program in Montreal and just like in Toronto same thing happened there is a demand for women focused program programming in space in Montreal it was very high the

PGI received 64 applications for 10 spots and that really inspired Rebecca and Tanya to create an online follow belong program that allowed anyone in the world to also make their first game alongside the incubator participants and so the pixels game incubator program was met with this you know influx of excitement enthusiasm and Goodwill from the Montreal Community everyone was really happy it was happening and you had so many people coming out to serve as mentors or offer types other types of assistance everyone really wanted to support pixels um and I guess inspired by this generosity of the community as well as the participants from that first cohort of game makers Rebecca and Tanya decided hey let's run a second game incubator program Rebecca and Tanya also created a mentorship program that matched volunteer mentors all the people that

were coming out asking you know how can I help they matched those people with folks who were looking to break into the industry and with those two programs the incubator and this mentorship matching program pixels officially moved from being a one-off program to a a Grassroots group and eventually pixels would incorporate in 2015 as an official nonprofit organization and so the original pixels gaming inor actually continues to run today just celebrated our 10th anniversary last year as our Flagship program it's uh supported over 200 game makers over the last decade many of whom have gone on to work in the industry and continue to give back to games Community either through participating in pixels or involvement with another Community organization and over the last decade pixels has grown and has steadily added new programming and tried other things

these new initiatives are usually driven by members of the pixel's community by usually I mean always actually um what happens is somebody comes in with an idea what they want to do and we try to make it happen and here are some of the programs that we're best known for so uh we have monthly workshops these are talks Hands-On skill workshops and master classes led by game developers in our community they are a source of free education and an opportunity for new leaders to practice their teaching and presentation skills in a friendly environment we have a writing portfolio program this program helps participants create written pieces through guided assignments and theme discussions it gives them access to mentors and to critique groups and with the intention to build a professional portfolio that they can use to apply for a game writing position we have a career accelerator

programs these are peer mentorship co-development groups that help women who feel stuck overwhelmed or burned out in their careers these are Guided by a third-party expert and this program creates space to speak openly about career challenges it it facilitates group problem solving and strategizing and provides a vital peer Network GDC Ensemble is my personal favorite it's a scholar ship program that offers free all access passes to GDC to mid-career game developers from all over the world we offer uh pure support and financial assistance uh so participants of Ensemble can navigate this massive convention confidently and safely one of our newest initiatives are Creator funds these are grants and mentorship um opportunities to marginalize creators in Canada it's really just money um there's no recoup

no publishing or platform requirements the past focus of our creator fund programs have included um prototyping funds finishing funds supporting black indigenous and racialized creators as well as creators from marginalized genders and finally we organize a lot of social events like too many to list here but uh we organize social events so members of our community can gather and be inspired by games and each other um our alcohol free and familyfriendly tea parties are maybe what we're best known for and these are opportunities for everybody young and old to learn and play games made by create uh Canadian creators and so pixels we've expanded our offering significantly over the last 10 years but we are still very much the same Grassroots organization from 2013 um we're self-organized we operate at the local level um and we encourage other members of our Community to come help us make change this sometimes blows

people's minds we are completely volunteer run this is nobody's full-time gig we are run by a small army of directors coordinators and mentors who do this work for free and in our spare time we strive to be maximally accessible our programs are free and they will always be free and we develop programming with marginalized members of our community not for them and so our mission statement is pixels is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering more women developers and improving gender diversity in the games industry but what do exactly do we mean by Empower here whereas you know Cheryl samberg's feminist empowerment was about women changing themselves to thrive in a broken system that normalizes the oppression of marginalized people we view empowerment as a collective community building activity and so broadly speaking pixel's fulfill its Mission by providing support for women

and other marginalized genders um who want to make games and we do this by creating spaces of belonging in games that's what we do and this is where you don't have to worry about how you're going to be treated in a gaming space because you're not a white cisgendered straight man and while we refer to ourselves as a women in games organization because that's those are Our Roots and that's where we started we pay a lot of attention to how gender race class sexual identity indigeneity and differences in ability and socioeconomic status and other identities play a role in how we experience the World We Believe gender Equity can't be achieved without attending to all those intersecting identities basically intersectionality guides Us in creating the kinds of support systems that are not readily accessible to many game developers in this industry in addition addition to what we do um we do what we can to create

Equitable fair and safe working environments for game makers outside of our own programs and to that end we are also pro-union and support workers right to collectively organize and so we know we're making a difference the heartwarming messages we've received over the last 10 years have been truly humbling and although advocacy work can be mentally and physically exhausting sometimes it's also rewarding and renewing you know I draw my strength from this community and I'm honored to serve it it might be a good time to actually say what I do for pixels um my role is to I'm a co-director and my role is to handle our finances in our sponsorships I'm the paperwork and spreadshirt spreadshirt spreadsheet nerd who keeps track of our numbers actually love numbers um and a couple of years ago is pulling together an impact report for a sponsor doing those things where you like pulling the engagement analytics I'm counting up how many games have been made and how many

people applied to our programs how many people have attended our workshops and it was just sort of overcome with irritation and annoyance very randomly about how pixel's impact had been reduced to these numbers because pixel's impact is just so so much more than those types of metrics as impressive as they are um you know in our early years we had actually created these things called Ripple Maps to visualize the impact of a program and so this is an example of a ripple map visualization of the very first pixels game incubator program and it tracks the activities of each participant over a one-year period so the Inner Circle are the games that were made as part of the incubator the peach nodes just outside of it are games that participants made after the incubator and the pink nodes at the end are um community activities that they all participated in and the lines between the nodes are the relationships between participants

demonstrating how they continue to collaborate and support each other even after the end of the program and this is just one year um but Alison will talk a little bit more about that um as an organization with limited resources you know pixels we not able to do this kind of tracking and followup for every program uh as as a static visual that also just does not lend itself to long-term tracking either so so as the 10th year anniversary of the incubator approached in my annoyance with writing numbers-based impact reports running at an alltime high I reached out to Allison to complain and then I asked her for help to solve this problem you know Allison had actually been I'm going to embarrass you now um been very instrumental in securing the first seed fund the seed funding for the first incubator and it was actually her idea to bring the Dei and DMG incubator model from Toronto to Montreal um and because of this you know

she knows the history she knows the organization I thought she would be the perfect collaborator for this project Al this is a picture of us a long time ago we're very serious researchers and for that I'm GNA hand it off to Allison all right everybody ready for some research morning research time so as we saw there's obviously been a sense that this kind of activity this kind of inclusivity organizing has had an impact on the people who' participated and there's been this desire to kind of visualize what that impact look like looks like and so uh this is actually the first Ripple map that I think ever existed this is from the Difference Engine initiative that Steph reviewed um again just from those two incubators of less than 10 or 10 people making games um trying to think of what did these games the creation of these games enable beyond that that incubator into uh further networking or further events attended and organized um and there's a

reason why people want to do this kind of tracking initially it was because there was a sense that maybe there was no point to this kind of organizing I know it's hard to believe now but 10 years ago there was some push back against uh women in games groups so initially that was kind of the impetus behind this But as time has gone on there has been other needs for visualizing um to kind of communicate the value of sponsorship for instance and funding and to show stakeholders in the community and in the industry that there is a benefit to doing this kind of work um uh so people like visuals to do that kind of thing however that that is actually a really difficult thing to do it's really complex um for example if you look at this other Ripple Mac that's on the screen here that was created by Rebecca Co and Palos this is just one year of impact from one incubator it's beautiful but also can you imagine it's like a mess right it's a mess to try to to try to do this how unwieldy would a visualization look in two years five years 10 years right this is where

we are right now it's 10 years so we're trying to avoid this kind of visual noise really and the static Ripple mapping kind of enables that visual noise so we were started to think about well we didn't un who was pictured in a previous slide who was part of the different sension initiative started to think about could we create a dynamic Ripple mapping tool so just for some context un is a game designer but also uh is part of the design Justice uh Network and no one would be better positioned to make such a thing uh than her but actually the project didn't end up progressing right it it got into data collection it got into some testing but in the process of doing that testing un and her team kind of discovered that these kinds of tools can be used for other purposes than what we're talking about not just to celebrate the value of this kind of work but also you know for instance to document conspiracies of some sort right so there's other ways to use information about networks and influence and outputs and um we did see that with gamergate so um in the end

that project was put aside because the question arose like how do how do we ensure that people who are participating want their data to be used in this way and is there a way to easily withdraw your consent for participating and this is where un Le went um in doing this project the building consent full Tech project which I highly recommend you can find the Zen anywhere on your favorite social search engine tools uh and also check out her website uh in the Zen Lee and her collaborator dant however proposed that you know we use an internet that's built on really coercive and skimpy forms of consent like terms of service terms of use what might it look like to build technology from a p a perspective of consent that is actually as it says here freely given uh reversible informed enthusiastic and specific um where consent would drive everything um development data storage data access and user interactions um so this is like a quite a tall order actually it's a big big task we don't have great models for it

and with the in this moment of 10 years of pixels organizing we were like this is a great time to turn to the community and ask these questions like how do we collect this kind of data how would we communicate this kind of data outwardly who are our audiences how can we do it with consent right at the kind of core of how we're doing it and that's why we did a research project that is a community-led research project so where it's not centering the perspectives or hypotheses of a researcher but all about where the community says we need to do so here's the research um we turned to the community and we did 16 interviews uh asking them you know what has the impact of pixels been in your life and um just a little bit of background about who these participants are they are all uh people who have been through pixels programming and the vast majority of them are uh not one-off kind of programming uh attendees but people who attended something and then contined to participate in the community doing uh their own organizing the majority of the people partic uh who participated work

in the games uh from Triple A to Indie and they do a range of roles they're Founders their Community managers programmers artists designers only one person who participated never worked in games didn't want to work in games just thought this was like a really fun thing to do and didn't have any professional objectives but most people are quite invested in games and oops what's kind of interesting to me is where do these people come from to get into games they have like really diverse educational and career backgrounds so some some of them had technical forms of Education as you might expect but others were coming from the social sciences and Humanities yay we have value some had more nonlinear kind of roots into games you know they were working in other fields completely before they got there and what's interesting is that participating in pixels isn't some sort of instrumental thing it's not about like I have a career goal necessarily but it can change people's ideas of what their career can be I always think of this as a key takeaway when we're talking about diverse people they don't necessarily follow a very straight line into games and it's really useful to look at where they're coming from to understand how do

we include them more so in these interviews we heard about the importance of probably things that are not going to surprise you internship opportunities mentorship opportunities game jams these all scaffold people's goals and uh create opportunities especially in Indie Games kind of trajectories and uh of course unsurprisingly we heard a lot about how important pixels has been in those Journeys as well as you can see from this quote on the screen these stories of the origins of participants were really important to us because they indicated to us how people found out about pixels um why they wanted to participate in it and why they want to stay involved as well so there's 16 unique stories but there are some commonalities across these as well uh quite a few people come to pixels right out of school um while they're La navigating Life Changes like career Transitions and when you move to Montreal because there's something about pixels in Montreal like you can miss it once you're there and so you find out about pixels via social media via Word of Mouth um but overall it's kind of the

sense that pixels is always going to find you if you're interested in games and in terms of motivations people came to pixels for a variety of reasons this includes wanting to connect with a community and some social support seeking skills development professional networking mentorship opportunities and also for fun let's not forget game making games is fun for people also we heard from a lot of people that they were looking for opportunities to build their confidence that's kind of a key theme actually confidence building um because people talk about things like imposter syndrome we all we all use this term barriers to entry as well so those are things that Al that Drew people but something I want to underline is also the the word that Steph mentioned earlier the feminist ethos of pixels is something that attracts people to the organization and that's because it's a women only space and it's driven by a a kind of goal of inclusivity and people have had past experiences that weren't informed by the those kinds of uh values a lot of spaces

for gaming resemble the kind of historical ethos of the games industry um it's built on the same kind of demographics and attitudes that that Steph mentioned and those kinds of norms expectations as well pixels offer something that doesn't really bear any resemblance to that uh one participant said it's not a bro kind of space to be in and these activities are seen as valuable for creating a space where you feel comfortable also talking openly about sexism that you've experienced and a lot of people talked about how yeah it started from a women you know women in games perspective but it has shifted to emphasizing marginalized genders in games right so that it is constantly working towards a more inclusive kind of um space people also come to pixels because it's positive and beginner friendly which makes it really easy for people to ask questions and ask for help it's also not about forcing those outcomes of like making games even though that's what we see a lot in the Ripple Maps uh you don't have to complete a game you don't have to bring it to Market it's not for that it's a welcoming space that isn't

intimidating um it's it's open to people who don't have coding backgrounds and also to people who have more back experience or self-taught skills all you need to join is a shared interest and that makes you appear and that makes you feel like you you can belong in that space another attraction is that pixels demystifies what it is to work in games it opens up the idea of what a career in games can be um and makes it more accessible as one participant said it made me realize that people like me make games and something that is really attractive to people is that pixel's participants stay involved in the community there's not like a a oneandone kind of mentality when when you're there and that's because pixels is nonjudgment non-judgmental and open to trying and failure and that includes proposing events proposing activities proposing to lead something new and so if it doesn't work out that's not a big deal and that kind of is an overarching ethos within pixels you can take on a leadership role you can try to make a game it does doesn't really matter what if you you know achieve that goal or not in the end

and that enables buyin from community members to be open to failure and that there's no rigid definitions of success so you have a little sense of who uh participants were and why they want to come to pixels and now I'm going to talk to you about what impacts they describe from being in pixels right so beyond the I made a game what else did they get out of being there and I mentioned that it's really challenging to visualize right like it gets really messy really fast also what we realized was like what is impact as we were doing this like I think sometimes of a meteor hitting the Earth that's impact but what does impact actually mean well it can mean a lot of different things actually so we kind of have grouped impact into five categories um that you can see here only some of this can be captured in the Raw numbers that Steph was talking about like games made or numbers of jobs uh you know One Secured um those things happen but as we saw with the previous Ripple Maps there's often other things that are going on there's collaborations formed there's there's impacts that don't have a kind of number

that can possibly be associated with it so I'm going to give you a sense of how each of these break down but of course they're a little bit overlapping too so kind of maybe the most obvious one would be a very personal form of impact which is what an individual gets out of being in that in pixels sometimes it is getting a job sometimes it is making a game but also there is a lot of stories about personal growth and learning especially learning new skill sets overcoming learning curves and competing feelings of isolation when you're struggling to reach a goal so these are things that I don't really know how you could express in raw numbers but they're really really important as well um oops sorry so just a couple of achievements that people mentioned here would be successfully completing a career transition developing new skill sets in game development in community organizing and Leadership and also please tell me

how you can visualize this sustained healing from toxicity and harm that's been experienced in education and workspaces and these personal impacts do lead to um more professional forms of impact as well and Community forms of impact that I'll talk to you about now so beyond the individual there's also impacts that that lead to this kind of sustained community that Steph talked about and this is where people are supporting other people people are mentoring other people people are finding opportunities and sharing them people are looking out for the goals of their their collaborators and their friends so most people who have participated in pixels stay in pixels and this creates this environment of a shared kind of value system for sharing and supporting each other so this is not a singular individual kind of impact it's something about an environment of mutual support and communal Aid and the kinds of words that people use to describe pixels are as follows supportive judgment free validating respectful mindful intentional positive protective trustworthy action-oriented

and reciprocal I think reciprocal is like a really important one we heard that one quite a lot we also heard like nice things like it's cozy and it's comfy um but overall what's really important is this kind of feeling that the collective matters here that it's not just about coming in getting in getting something for yourself and leaving and helping to sustain a transfer communal knowledge across people and over time and that's why it helps combat against isolation as well of course this does translate to professional impacts right so there's a couple I can group them into kind of four categories pixels enables people to form connections with peers and also with experts in the workplace and that leads to all kinds of those opportunities I mentioned the internship the mentorship but you know friendship as well it's also sharing material resources right so pixel shares learning materials for free it shares um you know funding for things like getting to GDC and covering Transit costs another kind of benefit profession professionally that people talked about was it allows them because there's this kind of uh

solidarity and commun communal space to mobilize those values from the pixels Community into their workplace they feel like they can you know stand up against Injustice in the spaces that they work in because they know that there's kind of this Collective Mass behind them and another kind of impact uh professionally is that you know it creates this space where if you're struggling at work you can come back to this community and and like ask those questions you don't have to just like flounder in the workspace and the kind of fourth one that is like a little bit um more more in line with the feminism thing is that there's also this feeling that it allows for the creation of like the resistance and this is with the capital T capital r and this is how you know the community members feel that they can collectively act against um you know Norms that may be dark Norms that may be problematic and that it enables them to kind of understand the value of you know these kind of maybe academic Concepts like intersectional feminism and the value of that for their actual working practices this is of course deeply tied to

Industry which is that these maybe more individual kinds of impact then translate into something a bit more structural too so obviously if you feel that like you're empowered to you know take a a place a position of resistance in the workplace this means that you feel that you are able to claim space in the industry and maybe hold it accountable for for problems so it means it's not just about raising awareness but it's actually thinking about how to mobilize and how to like share um you know the power across people in the industry too so in many ways pixels raises expectations about what we we should have when we work in the industry um and it connects to this other kind of of way of being which is paying it forward not just you know pulling that benefit from yourself but paying it forward to other people in the industry as well and that all translates to people you know organizing these kinds of EDI initiatives in the workplace like women and games and lgbtq plus groups too overall people didn't talk about this

but they've described this this creates a cultural impact this this creates an impact that goes beyond pixels in some ways it goes even Beyond games right it's this idea that seeing is believing I don't know if you've ever heard that term Gina Davis likes to say it about girls in the media but this idea that like an organization being around for 10 years doing all this kind of work has changed the kind of the entire structure someone said that to me yesterday at the women and games international party things do look different 10 years later not saying it's all pixels we'd love to take not no we don't need to take all the credit but that there is a shift in the culture as well um that we can you know actually have higher expectations of of what inclusion looks like in this space so great yeah lots of impacts actually I have Reams and reams of pages of people telling me all of these kinds of impacts and many of them are overlapping and it's great but then I suddenly felt that I was not actually helping as much as I thought I was because I'm like what do I do now yeah I've heard a lot about from these interviews about what inclusivity

organizing can do what a community organization based on volunteer labor can do and I also heard from participants that they do want to visualize this they do want people to know outwardly what's going on and and the value of of making this kind of effort as you can see from the screen here so we have this project and we know all we have to work with kind of in a rigorous way but not rigorous at all is these quotes of that people say on social media and some stats about you know engagement for instance so like how do we turn that into something else uh but this is community-led research so I don't have to struggle by myself instead we we organize some co-design workshops like who better to struggle with the problems of you know data and presentation than a bunch of game designers you know I believe game designers can fix a lot of things actually so we did a kind communicate Community consultation and codesign workshops with the community and and and ask them what do we do next like this is what we heard from you where where do we go like first of all

does this check and also where do we go next and so we had this nice codesign Workshop in August in Montreal um where we generated lots of interesting pieces of paper we were working really low Tech at this point we got we had some poster board we had some stickers we had some markers and people sat down and answered this question how can or should we collect information about impact and in many ways this was really useful because it generated ideas like maybe we don't associate it with people at all that would help with the problem of would data be useful for people to get harassed but like link it to programming instead um you know that could also be anonymous uh we talked about could you do like an opt-in system of consenting to participate or an opt out system of participation we also talked a lot about like is there a different visualization for different audiences right like is there just like a funer package where they're like I don't care about the resistance or the culture like just what are the numbers and then you know for other kinds of Stak holders um and people brainstorm some like really interesting and beautiful things and

also asked us some really difficult questions about how do we ensure the safety of data over long periods of time too and they came up with some like visual ideas too like do we think of this as chemistry as about the formation of bonds uh because you know we are often using that metaphor of the Ripple but are there other kinds of metaphors that are more useful for visualizing so again we got a lot of good ideas but again I was like now I have more reams of paper what do I do and this is where our partnership with soft chaos came in so soft chaos is a video game cooperative made up of pixels community members in Montreal so these are the game designers Allison Cole Squinky and Jess marot and thanks to some funding that we got from the digital Justice research cluster at York we were able to commission them thank goodness to help us you know start to make sense of this there's like a visualization piece but there's also a kind of data sorting piece right how could we on the back end input data and how could other people pixels participants the over I don't know many many hundreds of people input

the data and then how could that you know be translated into a visualization tool that is dynamic um so we gave them the problem um and uh asked them to help us and they share with us you know first of all they're involved in the community they care about the community and they also like agree with you know the importance of consent full technology too so what I want to do now is show you some of the stuff that came out of their prototype and the way that they took this away and envisioned something um quite beautiful and this is what informed our second codesign Workshop we actually showed this we did another Community consultation and had people respond to it so I'm going to give you a little bit of um I guess the data sorting and the the UI and if you want to try it out later we we have it with us as well so what they thought about was taking all of this data and grouping it into moments and moments would be documenting specific points in pixel's history uh with its many impact imps but then grouping it um according to those

impacts from the perspective of either an individual or an organization right so you can see the like different icons that they designed to represent it and the idea is that that little um that chain thing that you see you go around and you collect those icons um that represent moments so these moments would then if you click into them contain types of impact and then they would also be tagged with useful information like dates and locations and also created something that wasn't our idea at all which is this um kind of uh continuing contribution piece which asks who gave back to pixels to make that moment happen which is really useful because it kind of gets at that reciprocal thing that I would mentioned before that sometimes thinking about impact doesn't do you know it spreads outward but it doesn't necessarily think about looping back in which is really obviously part of the success of this organization so when you click on the moments you would see the different types of impact that's associated um in this case they've grouped them as Community personal and professional the more kind of individual ones and this

enables you to have like different levels of interaction like you could just see like oh okay there's some moments or you could go in and look at little like more like the stories the data in addition to that they want they thought that there's a difference between those individual impacts and maybe more thinking of achievements and that's how they organize larger scale cultural and Industry impact so in terms of the user interaction what would happen is that a player should be able to collect those moments and when they've collected a critical mass they could get a popup that would give them a summary uh and then allow you to click in further to to read about each individual form of impact as you can see here and this is a yeah what it looks like when you collect five and then you get that achievement so we showed this at the second Co design workshop and um overall the community members were really enthusiastic about it because it gave you a sense of bonds this bonding that is so important in the in the community um and people we

talked about like what kinds of data should we include what kind of categories but we also kind of have this outstanding question about accessibility and that's something that we're still going to be grappling with moving forward so this is a work in progress I hope that's normal at GDC right um but I hope it gives you a sense of I guess the kind of challenge of doing this work right like it's not that there isn't a ton of impact it's like it's it's challenging to kind of actually express it and visualize it in a way that um people can make sense of uh so I'm going to turn it back over to Steph now because she's going to talk to you about how you how do we pull this all together and have some key takeaways uh about empowerment okay okay so guess thank you Alis um the biggest takeaway from this project so far is that numbers are useful um but they only tell one part of the story and we can measure impact in other ways like quality of life Improvement job satisfaction career advancement opportunities just to name a few

although I will say one area where numbers matter is here in compensation and pay equity and transparity this isn't uh ours this is from the 2022 idga survey and as you can see from their infographic women and workers of color continue to work under precarious conditions so I just wanted to say numbers still matter and let's work on closing that wage Gap now moving on okay we've come a long way in 10 years but the reality is there's still a lot of work that remains to be done although more women and minorities are working in the games industry and there is indeed growing awareness of the inequities in the industry as shown here again the idga developer satisfaction survey um equal opportunities are still Out Of Reach for many and you know hiring more developers from underrepresented groups does doesn't really matter it doesn't mean anything if those people don't have opportunities for advancement and they end up

leaving so now I'm not an expert in improving workplace culture um but lucky for you there is somebody who's speaking at GDC tomorrow who can tell you how to do that and it's tomorrow at 2 pm and you should all go check out Anita's talk I will see you there but as promised we promised some sort of empowerment Playbook so here it is uh as we wrap up our presentation I'm going to share some suggestions and strategy that inform how pixels creates inclusive spaces in programs this is really directed at allies who want to help so first and foremost please need to understand that marginalized groups know what they need from allies like don't go in there and assume you know how to make things better for marginalized game developers you know work with your community members and let them Drive the action second understand that these are people's lives and livelihoods that we're talking about here so treat equity and advocacy work with the same respect

and care as you would your Revenue generating activities not like some sort of little side project third inclusivity work requires material supports we can't just build this out of nothing and you know you get what you give so invest time money and resources into it and on that note this is labor this is a lot of work um so either pay the people who are involved and doing it or if you're already paying them them and they're you know it's an internal uh initiative of your company release them from other duties so they have other time they have the time to fully participate in this work and on that note I think we should all be mindful that marginalized game devs are often overburdened with being asked to carry out EDI work and you know many of us are passionate about helping the communities we belong to and we should absolutely be

involved uh obviously but sometimes we don't have the capacity to take on another thing at this time you know there's only so many hours in the day so if you want to work with someone like respect their time and their timelines for doing it fourth your visibility is not a priority in this it's not about you or amplifying yourself it's about amplifying that community that you're trying to work with and you know I guess everything that I'm saying is really about decentering yourself um your EDI activities should benefit and center the needs of that Community if you're looking to partner with a community organization or group listen to what they have to say and how you can help them achieve their goals and if you listen and you think you know that's unreasonable then think about why you're uncomfortable with what they're asking you for you know why are you un comfortable with that suggestion and just sit with it for a while you know sitting in discomfort and being

self-reflexive of why you're not comfortable can provide you with some really useful information um this is hard work and some of the hardest work um is internal it involves recognizing how you're contributing to maintaining the status quo and you know I'm not perfect pixels is not perfect we don't exist in some kind of vacuum or magical space that is you know immune to sexism racism transphobia or classism you know we are just as in mesed in these systems of Oppression as any game studio and you know we just talked for almost 50 minutes about how amazing we are um but for all that praise that we've received we've also received some very much needed criticism you know for example we have been called caky insular and super white and while you know we don't feel like you know I don't feel like I'm Regina George I don't feel like I'm any of these things that's not the point the point is that there are some people who

see us like that and they see us being exclusive and that's the problem and so you know we're all contributing to inequity in some way so just acknowledge that and then commit to changing it okay so when we talk about empowerment we tend to bury the lead which is power you know and to in conclusion I guess to paraphrase a major thread of black feminist thought empowerment is achieved through building community and solidarity across differences and so I guess the secret to making and measuring change lies in Collective and communal power and so the real empowerment Playbook is actually the one that we write together um but that's another talk and probably for a future GDC and in closing I just want to acknowledge the other Community organizations who are also working to change games like

game devs of color Expo latinx and gaming I need diverse games DMG queerness and games con indigenous game devs and these are just a few and you know pixels is so proud to be a part of this ecosystem of inclusivity focused Community organizations we're extremely humbled by the positive feedback we've received over the last 10 years and I am grateful for the opportunity to continue to do this work with and for such a fantastic community and to be able to share our story with all of you today so thank [Applause] you that's a video of the soft chaos prototype it's also a really great cat toy uh so we have time for a couple of questions if anyone has has any and we'll answer them to the best of our

ability come up to the mic oh yeah you have to come up to the mic and while we're doing that have to repeat question huh and you have to repeat and I will repeat the question or Allison will repeat the question depending on who you're asking um so partly through your first section you mentioned a writing portfolio program I just sort of I was caught and engaged by that because I haven't really seen many uh Port ways to implement game writing into a portfolio and I I might check that out I'd like to hear more about it oh yeah so the question was um talk a little bit more about the writing portfolio program thanks for the question that's actually such a really great example of a program that came out of um a perceived need like you said there's not a lot of that um and so it was started by um a a participant of the game incubator program who made a game and they really you know they were an

excellent writer and they wanted to be a narrative designer and they thought um you know they got a job in the games industry and thought I want to help other people get you know get a job in the same way I did so it started as the sort of the same as the game incubator program where people would meet aspiring game writers would meet um I think it was once every two weeks for a couple of months to co-develop and critique each other's work um and it was quite successful it was started local in Montreal um and then there was such a demand two things happened there was such a demand for it um and then the pandemic forced it to really move online and so went from being a local sort of writing incubator program to this portfolio program um where it's basically the same thing um anyone in the world can sign up to be a part of

it and they I think they use slack sorry I don't really run the program so I don't know the actual details but they do use something to get together uh and engage with each other and provide critique um they critique each other's work and they bring in guest mentors and guest speakers um who can also critique your work and the whole point is to build a portfolio that you can then use to apply to a games job that's it in a nutshell um it's actually just ending right now um it runs when the coordinators have time I can't promise when it'll run again a lot of our programs actually run when somebody has the capacity and the time to do so but if you sign up for our newsletter you will be informed of when the next one runs and hopefully uh because it's one of our most popular programs um hopefully we'll it'll run again soon um hi thanks for the talk um I'm

curious um how uh how do you decide where to draw the line of who can participate in this community because you talked about intersectionality there's so many people to support for different reasons and when we're creating a community for a certain group we might be excluding maybe another group um so I'm curious if you've like struggled with that yeah so the question is what question yeah so the question is um where where do you draw the line for participation and so I will say you know pixels in general as an organization um is open to everyone of all genders all game makers um programs are very specific and they're usually tailored towards a specific group so for the incubator for example it's people who have never made a game and we keep that one women only because we recognize that women need their own space

um yeah for events everybody's welcome but they must adhere to our safer space policy for example so you know we don't exclude anybody but if you're behaving badly and you know you're oppressing other people in the space we will you know we we don't tolerate that um but yeah programs are really they're they're really designed to help um I guess a very specific group of people and so it doesn't make the decisions any easier when accepting applicants it's actually really hard um to do so but we try to curate um programs with participants where we can feel like they can actually also help each other out so for example GDC Ensemble it's an international program and it's it's for midcareer developers we do get uh specifically post like this is what we're looking for

you know like um women and people who identify with a Marg as a uh belonging to a marginalized gender with at least three years of experience um are parents of like small humans and come from a country that does not have an existing support system and if we seen the pool of applicants for example you know a couple years ago there were three applicants from the Philippines and we thought that'd be great if we could take all three and they can support each other in the process um you know getting visas when they come here there's you know in their own little group somebody um that understands where they're coming from so they're you know we're trying to build like little support groups within our support group but it is hard it really is hard um I actually dread looking at applications because you know if you take 25 people you feel really bad for 26 and 2 7 everyone absolutely deserves to go and participate in uh these

programs think we have time for one more yeah okay so thank you guys for sharing your knowledge and thank you guys for the efforts of like the making the equity in the game industry I do have a question for Dr Harvey about the interviews you made um for the marginalized people in the pixels um I would love to like would you mind share more um technical details of like the art question for the inter how was the qu qual qualitative analysis down and do you have any like future plans for more interviews about the marginalized people from pixels so oh yeah so this was a research question thank you I'm in a totally different place than I normally am um and the question was about I guess methodology um how the research was conducted and then also future plans so I want to talk about the future plans but I'll answer your question really fast about how the methodology was we recruited this is the easiest study to recruit for ever because it's about the community so people in the pixels were recruited and um well was you did the

recruitment actually um and it was It was kind of targeted to people who had been around for a while but as I mentioned there was one that you know she was like I was just here to make a game because that sounds like an interesting thing to do on the side of doing archery and other things um and the questions were we kind of came up with those categories of personal Community industry and professional so we kind of asked those questions and asked also about of long-term versus shortterm because we thought maybe that would be one way that visualizing would be interesting we asked about you know why would it be important to communicate you know what would be the value of communicating outward and what would be the concerns around it um and then you know this we're still kind of getting into the n-r of analysis so this is kind of quick analysis but what was really really interesting was the cultural impact part was not a question that we asked right so this people that's the kind of stuff that from a research perspective is interesting right like that is definitely emerging from the participants and ALS also the kind of observation that is difficult to parse personal impacts if you're in a

community are Community impacts in a lot of ways so creating those Fine Lines is for the purposes of a presentation here useful but not actually how people live their life future research so many things every single person who participated was like you should do a study on X you know um pixels operates out of Montreal which is in a French Province but you know as English and French and practice in matrial there's lots there about you know language-based inclusion I I think I'm quite I'm quite interested in that um thinking about like the next 10 years of programming we got lots of like those kind of internal criticisms too like how to make pixels more inclusive as well thinking about people who don't participate in pixels and why that is uh there's lots of future research we want to keep going with this and so I know that the like visualization tool stuff was a bit Rough and Ready but um we're really interested in seeing if we can keep progressing with this tool and like make something fully functional that the community can use really easily so um yeah I would say those are the next steps did you have anything to add to that no just that we're over time we're over time we're going to go to breakout room around the

corner Julia's going to help us find it if anybody wants to play around with the tool because we do have a little bit of functional UI that was like brand new as of two days ago so if anybody wants to play with it please do come by thank you so much for [Music] coming