Fostering Diversity in Games

[Music] all right welcome everybody thank you for joining us uh i'm kelly snyder i'm a producer at bungie and one of the co-founding members of the bungie diversity committee and former lead of xbox women in gaming and we're here today to talk to you about how you can foster diversity in games so kind of moving beyond the 101 of what is diversity and moving into kind of the action steps of uh what can we actually do as studios to help uh tangibly foster an inclusive and a diverse environment which isn't to say that any of us here are perfect nobody's got it all figured out i mean even this panel we could be a little more diverse but we wanted to get together and talk to you guys about what we've learned our experiences and so that we can all share and learn and get better together um yeah and so we'll do some quick panel introductions sure um still uh is that on yeah okay um i'm elaine chase i'm the vice

president of global brand strategy and marketing for wizards of the coast um i lead the magic the gathering business there and in addition to my day job i'm also president of the board of child's play um the charity for children's hospitals and domestic shelters i'm mary olsen i'm the executive producer of the internal game development team at 343 uh we make halo i'm leah hoyer i am the vice president of creative at telltale games hi i'm joe lao hi people in the corner i am a test engineer at bungie and also a co-founding member of the bundy diversity committee and before i worked in games i was a professor in the philosophy of race and gender at virginia tech awesome so in terms of format each of our panelists is going to come up and give a short talk talking about what they've done at their studio and then we're going to move into i've got some questions for them and we're going to discuss them as a group and then after the panel's over we'll be available for if you guys want to come up and ask us questions so and elaine is going to come up and

kick it off thank you um so as i just said uh i'm elaine and i work at wizards of the coast and i make magic the gathering um i've had the honor of working at wizards for 19 years we're primarily known in the industry as the titans of tabletop gaming but a few years ago we started investing heavily into building up our digital gaming capabilities so we can bring our brands magic the gathering and dungeons and dragons to life and the way they really deserved and as we started hiring we realized that we didn't really have a good talent pipeline for the new set of skills that we needed to bring into our building or for diversity um because i hope that you all realize that having a diverse set of people brings in greater skill set um so we took a hard look at what that was and we realized that over the 25 plus years we had been a company we had been relying really heavily on the passion of our fan base to fill our applicant pool and that just really wasn't going to get us where we needed to be and so we looked at how we were

presenting ourselves and what we were saying and we realized that on top of that our culture had kind of drifted and we didn't really know what we stood for anymore and if we couldn't clearly articulate what we stood for and why it was awesome to come work at wizards then how could we possibly convince other people to do that so we started a internal effort to define our mission and values and that alone that whole process is worth its own gdc talk which maybe i'll give one day and uh joe's actually going to talk about bungie's mission and vision mission and values process in a little bit so i'll cut to the chase and just say that the number one value as stated by our employees ourselves was diversity and inclusion and so we took a really hard look and said okay well how are we living that and how can we be better and what can we do to make sure that we're doing that to the very best that we can and so the things i want to talk to you today are focusing on the applicant journey so you've probably been in a bunch of talks today already talking about the player journey and the importance of a funnel right and

getting people through the door and making sure they stick and so that's the kind of things that we're going to focus on for my part of the talk so some things we did we revamped our career website to showcase our mission and our values to feature the diversity of our employee base highlight our amazing family friendly benefits and charitable activity just try to be overall more inspirational for people trying to join the company we're doing more targeted recruiting and employment branding at local venues like the grace hopper event and geek girl con in seattle as well as hosting tech lady events at our office we're doing industry talks like this one and we're generally just being louder and prouder about waving our flag as an employer of choice who's actively looking for diverse candidates so once we have people's attention the next step is to craft a really good job description so the critical thing to think of here is that your job description is the first conversation that you're having with the person that you're eventually going to hire okay so when you think of it that way think about showing off to them what the

team they're going to join is like what the culture is like so they can really envision themselves in that environment emphasize how they can contribute to success right the success of the company not just at the individual level try to keep any requirements list to a minimum so studies show that men will apply to a job description where they meet about 60 percent of the requirements on a requirement list women tend to think requirements are requirements and will only apply if they meet 100 of that list so instead of requirements think more of things like skills that will help success or you know things things that are a plus or things like that word it differently than just requirements um avoid loaded words gendered is really obvious but also avoid words like rockstar and ninja and things that can evoke kind of a bro-centric mentality um i guess if you work for rockstar games you can use rockstar but that might be the exception um clearly state a commitment to diversity and actively invite diverse applicants to apply um and then

here's actually the most important point have your job description and show it off to the people in your company to a diverse group of people and have them comment on it and see what they say you'll be really surprised to hear what they might say in terms of things that you seem innocuous to you but to somebody reading it from the outside just kind of turns them off or makes them question if they'd be a good fit or not so you take all that and let's see what that looks like so up on the screen is a portion of a revamped job description for our design manager and our magic r d team so i'm not going to read this to you because really long but you can capture it and of course it'll be up on the vault later um so let's say you've got this great job description now what do you do with it so you've got to go out beyond your normal channels go out beyond your website go out beyond linkedin and go to places where diverse pools of candidates will be go to places like women in gaming and blacks and technology go to diversity groups at your local colleges the point is if you go where they're gathering they're going to know that you have a commitment to looking for them

and they're going to be more eager to apply and see themselves in your in your company so then um make sure you're actually getting them in through you to your interview stage right like you don't want to just leave it out there and leave it to chance you actually want to talk to some of these people um so i have my own kind of personal management rule that i require my hiring managers to at least talk to a woman now you don't need to hire for diversity you don't that's not the point right and the point here is not to say you need to have diversity higher slots or anything like that the point is is if you talk to people you'll find people with skill sets that maybe you never would have found otherwise right so thinking about that applicant journey again thinking about that funnel you want to get as many people into that funnel as you can because then eventually you'll get them more out down the other side okay and then uh when you actually have people in live it in your interview have a diverse group of people interviewing on your panels and that they're talking to you want that for two reasons one is you want to make sure you've got a broad amount of feedback from your own employees to give you a broader sense of what that

candidate is capable of and the second reason is because you've got a greater chance of that candidate seeing someone like them thriving in your company right if you see someone like you thriving you're more likely to think that oh hey maybe this is a place that i can be successful to so uh shout out here by the way to um ken true on our r d team he's a design designer there who crafted this job description he's a great ally and that leads me to my last point which is allies and the importance of allies in your company so uh we've got our head of magic r d design group is uh mark rosewater and just last week he answered this question on tumblr that i'm going to pop up in a minute and this one i am going to read out loud to you i get that you're trying to mock diversity and inclusion but i think it comes from an ignorance of what it means to feel excluded when you've lived your life in the majority it's easy to take it for granted when you see yourself represented in the

products and entertainment that you use but every time we branch out and i'm not exaggerating i mean every time and represent a new group of people i get heartfelt messages from them about how much it means to them to see themselves in the game the reason wonder woman and black panther have been such cultural touchstones is because they're allowing new groups of people to experience something they've never experienced before i get that it's easy to mock that when it's something so basic to your experience that you don't even recognize that it's a thing you'd miss if you didn't have it but i beg for you to try to see life through other people's perspectives just as i always talk about how good designers see their game through different players perspectives try to take actions that build up the world and make it a better place for everyone than to tear it down for others to make your world better in comparison so thank you to ken and to mark and to all the great allies i have at wizards and here in this room and everywhere else in the industry because this helps

thanks hi i'm mary olson um as i mentioned i'm the executive producer for the internal development team at 343 industries um and we make the we create the halo franchise games so i'm happy to be here today diversity in our beloved industry is a loaded and complex and extremely important topic i will attempt to draw lessons that relate to fostering diversity of thought gender background culture perspective abilities and skill but i want to be upfront with that i'm coming to you as a cisgendered female and will be sharing some of my personal experiences to illustrate lessons we're learning we need to be fostering diversity at all levels this conference is a good example if anyone this is this conference is a good example of the industry side so if anyone has been to gdc 10 years ago

versus today it's a completely different conference and with a lot more focus on inclusivity and it shows then as studios and organizations we also need to be looking at diversity and some of my colleagues on this panel are going to go more deeply into that and then there's what we can do as individuals and that individual learning and influence is the piece that i'm going to focus on today before i do that here are a few of the tactical efforts we do across 343 xbox and microsoft microsoft's mission statement is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more so that's our foundation xbox has diversity focused initiatives that provide community advocacy and a strong presence across the company and in the industry like women in gaming and other organizations like that gaming for everyone focuses on diversity in our fans and we have inclusivity we have inclusivity focused core values

and at 343 we have a diverse leader senior leadership team and that has made a tangible difference for our in our ability to attract and retain diverse employees we've changed our approach to hiring and recruiting and the language we use in job descriptions as well some of the stuff that elaine was mentioning and some ideas from her that i plan to steal and microsoft has a number of valuable trainings required for managers for example around unconscious bias and dialoguing across differences which i personally found really valuable beyond initiatives and practices i believe that fostering diversity lies in the attitudes and actions of individuals as well as teams and companies each of us has a responsibility to challenge our assumption our assumptions daily and grow in our understanding of the issues we face when it comes to making needed change here are a few antidotes from myself and drawing from other people on our team to illustrate the need for ongoing growth and change

because we have a long way to go so i've spent most of my 23-year career in audio production and leadership for games thinking it was enough to just be a woman and show up i'm really results-focused and i've always been heads down and really immersed in the game that i'm making at the time outside of that my time goes to my family i have two afab kids that's assigned female at birth they taught me that they teach me a lot every day beyond just staying heads down and focused on the job this is hard to admit i have spent a lot of my career being part of the problem and fueling the problem um i've sometimes what i mean by that i've sometimes been really hard on women that i've encountered along the way and i really have had this expectation of all of them to be really high performing superstars representing womankind is like its highest caliber at all times

and i've since realized that a really big problem part of this problem is that there's only room for high performers for any minority group in this industry and one of the signs of progress that i hope we see and that we do start to see is when there is room for solid average performers and the whole spectrum um as there is with the with the kind of majority so i think that will be good progress microsoft hosted a dialogue across differences training and we were asked how inclusive we thought our respective teams would be to someone coming out as trans or queer in our environment on a scale of one to five and the first thing that popped in my head was well five if they're high performing and so that really uncovered that was enlightening for me and it really uncovered this bias that i that i've been carrying around and it's not until more recent years honestly from trainings like that from long conversations with colleagues keeping the conversation going long conversations with my now young adult kids who are trying to work out

their place in the world as well wrestle through some of this and more than anything the process of building and growing and fostering a team and strengthening a team that i've really started to challenge my biases and assumptions in a meaningful way and have transformed my personal thinking about what it means to really be inclusive i still put the game first that's still a value that i have the difference is that i now realize that building a diverse team and having a diverse team is putting the game first that's what we need to make the best game that we can make and this is a worthwhile journey a colleague of mine who is in a leadership position at our studio had feedback from a former manager that she's aggressive she's a self-aware person and it didn't fit feedback she'd gotten in the past so she dug in further with him wanting to understand if the feedback was his opinion or it had come from

other people on the team he admitted that it was just his perception so she took the time to talk to him about how common this perception is of women in leadership positions and she sent him some articles to help give him more awareness of this specific type of bias this was a situation where he lacked awareness and once brought to his attention he was extremely receptive and eagerly read the information she sent and asked her for more that was the start of a conversation and a real change in their relationship so she was willing to educate and teach the behavior she wanted to see and he was willing to learn and it transformed his management style i had a person on my team raise concerns and give some critical feedback about a peer and he came back to me later with really different feedback he had he hadn't realized that this person had a disability which explained the issues he was having and most importantly once he was aware and he changed how he was interacting his concerns were alleviated and his

feedback actually took a total about-face and he and other people on the team have now called out how her disability beca is a strength on our team not a weakness she brings a unique perspective some highly developed skills um as a result and she ha that no one else on our team has and she's a strong advocate we have to be um yeah so i want to call out too that it was really impressive that he came back and actually admitted that and took the time to change his feedback but also say hey look like i just wasn't aware i think it's so important we have to be willing to stumble and learn as we go this is not a perfect journey because we're all kind of figuring it out and there's a lot to learn we recently had someone on our team leave and this wasn't the reason she left but in her exit interview she noted the locker room talk that she experienced day to day among the people around her and it really and she didn't want to she didn't want to stop it she didn't want to be the fun killer

so instead she just remained uncomfortable and just dealt with it it made us realize that we need to proactively create safe opportunities to discuss unique challenges of different groups of people like this and we need to train and educate managers and people on the teams in such a way that we're creating advocates on our team sometimes it's just helpful to have someone else be speaking up for you and here's the final story that i'll tell i was wrestling through what to share for this presentation with a few of the leads on my team sharing with them that i find it really hard because it's so important for us to keep this conversation going but there's also a sense like you're never doing enough the next morning one of the them shared this story with me on a friday night he and his daughter were talking about their day as he tucked her in he told her that he had lunch with his boss and she asked what's his name and he said um well her my boss's name

is mary and she's a woman this is apparent this apparently blew her mind and she lit up and started asking a bunch of questions about how i got into this position and how at several points throughout the weekend she let him know that she wanted to be his boss one day like mary i think she's probably already the boss um he was hard on himself because her world view up to this point hadn't shown her that she could do something else like that and that was a world view he felt responsible for i'll also mention that she's three so good news there's still time for her to develop a broader worldview he thanked me for helping teach his daughter that she can be anything she wants to be and they're now having very different conversations it's also a reminder that showing up sometimes really is it's not enough but it can help make a big difference so if you feel like an outsider don't stay in isolation find mentors others to understand advocates

and support and if you love making games stick around and do what you can do to affect change and develop our industry to everyone no matter what your background make room you can be part of this ongoing conversation and part of change in your individual day-to-day life thank you [Applause] hi i'm leah and like i said before i'm at telltale um i am here in part to share all of this and also i'm going to tell you a couple stories because i work at telltale um the uh i think every person in this room is here because you maybe are encountering a problem you've seen issues there are certain things that you're looking to change and solve while you're working in this industry maybe you're hiring people and it's of course

very important for you to figure out exactly specifically what is that problem that you might be trying to solve it might be some existing culture it might be problems of recruiting but once you identify that the thing that i really want to encourage everyone in this room to be thinking about is truly the power of why like why is that thing something that you are looking to change something that you are looking to solve you have to be really honest about the various factors that might go into that and to illustrate this what i actually want to say is i'm going to tell you a pretty great story that i actually think can be a good illustration of sort of the power of why um before i came to telltale i actually worked at a company called arenanet known for their guild wars franchise and about six months into my tenure there the entire company got an email from our hr department that said a colleague of ours who we used to know as a man wanted to be referred to by the

pronouns of she her was going to be using a different name um she was going to be fine if you asked her any questions she knew we were going to slip up and maybe make mistakes but also if there was anything that um people didn't maybe feel comfortable asking her talking to her about the hr department was going to be there and be open to discussion i was so um kind of taken by the fact that this person who i was actually good friends with um you know hadn't talked to me even directly but had felt like you know what i know this is going to be a problem i want to rip the band-aid off honestly just once so i don't have to go around to 320 people and went to the hr department looking for guidance and help and they really stepped up and said look if it would be easier we will send something out and we can make that announcement and know that this is some place that not only are you saying it but that we are saying that this is absolutely

something that shouldn't be an issue for the company it should be something that everyone should be very accepting of um and it i never once and the entire time that i was there heard a negative comment any kind of like rude question anything along the way because the other thing about the culture of this company was that i knew it was never going to be tolerated and i think the other people working there also knew that this person it was legitimately not even an issue for the entire company because this person was still our friend and still our colleague the thing that i was most kind of taken with was also over the next six months two other people had the same transition and went through the same process with very much the same results and i will say first off huge props to these three women for going through what was obviously going to be a

difficult personal transition and being honest with who they really were but i also know from having talked to them that it was easier for that second and third person like somewhat easier to know that they were going to go through this process make this announcement because they were going to be accepted at least at their workplace um there was that like strength there that i think was something that was just built into the culture of the company and so i look at that as when i think of the why the why was that possible as i look at what arenanet sort of developed a culture over time first off they make guild wars and in guild wars 2 this right here is five of the um core cast members of the story of guild wars two of them are a same-sex couple one of them is a young girl with physical limitations and what i

love about the stories that are in guild wars is that's never what the story is about you know the story is absolutely about dealing with the struggles of video game stuff you know i mean there's there's big villains and there's big problems and there's dragons and there's world things to solve and we just have great representation in the characters and in the story of that game and that is i feel really interesting because i think what happens at arenanet is first off any company starts off saying things like we value diversity we think inclusivity is important well actually not every company does every company should and make sure at the baseline that's what you're doing in your workplace whether you're an individual person whether you're a person who's hiring and managing people whether you run a company um it is important to say it and and people talk about how talk is cheap talk is a good start right from there though they also were very much backing it up with their

actions the actions that clearly as we all know speak louder than words and what i think is great about the game company that is making entertainment they made stuff that backed up their idea of inclusivity and diversity and we have an ability in this industry to do all of that to change the dialogue not just in our companies but in society and i think that's amazing and here it's actually tough for us to even look back at the history of arena net and say well where did it start there's kind of a chicken and egg thing here the truth is it doesn't matter where you start you can start by making something it can start by saying something you can start by putting your actions out there but as you start to go through that cycle and build on it all of a sudden you turn that like question of why is this a problem to like why is that company doing such great stuff why is it feeling that like there's because they say they act and they make

i also now when i talk about a slightly different issue when i moved over to telltale i showed up as the head of the creative department which is writing design creative directors voice over and we had a really bizarrely huge for my perspective number of open spaces for narrative designers and i was having discussions with people and they were saying things like well it's such a strange thing that we do here at telltale we'll go down to hollywood and those people don't understand interactive or we'll go to game studios and most game studios just don't care about story the way we do so getting a person who really is a good writer or narrative designer is like almost impossible it's like finding a unicorn and i was like okay um that's that's an interesting conundrum and i do understand what they're talking about because hey we are looking for folks that are definitely different than what's going on in the industry and to be honest it also we're looking

as we're filling these things with diverse voices that's super important because you know we tell stories and stories are universal and stories need to represent all of us right so what the suggestion i had is like hey could we could we see about making unicorns and i kind of got some blank stares and the whole point was to me if you are just looking to people in say the video games industry who are already working in the video games industry you're never going to make the video games industry more diverse you might borrow or steal some diversity from one company but now they have the same problem or you might get certain talent out there regardless of however they identify you're going to be pulling it from different places and we're not going to change it up what if we went out to people and gave them a mechanism that if they just understood at their core what it is that we do could we be their first job and really

find something that was awesome so what we actually did is something we called internally our unicorn summit and it is our creative workshop that we actually did this time last year we towards the end of 2016 put out an open call and what we asked was people submit a statement about why they would like to work at telltale and why they would like to be part of this creative workshop that we put on and they had to make a twine and twine is a quick easy to understand you can all pick it up way to do a simple interactive story around a prompt they sent those two things in and we just said look we don't really even care about your resume we don't want to know any of that we took all the names off of it looked at those two things and we invited 22 people to come be part of our day-long creative workshop the device the diversity that we got in this thing was actually really astounding it was about 40 women we had age ranges from 19 to 57 um which also absolutely age

in the games industry is also something we really need to be looking at you know there it's not okay to say that people sort of age out of being able to make great content or that you know you have to get a certain amount of experience before you can make great content um and we had a wide variety of racial diversity um from this um at the end of the day what we did after getting this is ask people to redo the thing that they submitted to us and we looked at that we got a chance to actually see their soft skills how they worked how they were part of it how much they took feedback all those things and we actually made two offers both of them happen to be women but it was because they came they showed up it was their first jobs in the games industry and they are amazing at what they do that we are so happy to have them on our team but i don't think we would have filled out what we what we needed to do at the time with the right kind of candidates nearly as quickly if we

hadn't actually opened up the pool and i know that was brought up earlier you've got to think about how do you go out to different groups of people so really in summary though with all of this i would like to encourage you to think about say act make all around your why and i think if we're all doing that like why is it the way it is how can we do these things to make it better we are going to see greater diversity in our industry in the very near future thank you hi in the interest of accessibility i want to give a shout out to the av guys for giving me this box to stand on because i couldn't see over the lectern cool so um hi i'm joe i am a test engineer at bungie and i was also one of the founding members of the bungie diversity committee and in my talk i'm going to look at our

studio and our values and how we live our values through our game development so let's start by talking about where this all came about for bungie um so our studio has been around for a little over 25 years and early on our culture was very informal however we are now a considerably larger company and we recognize the need to foster diversity intentionally proactively and i think most importantly with structure and so in late 2016 our leadership recognized that our organizational growth required us to basically evaluate and write down and codify our company values so just a little bit about values um values aren't meant to be a kind of checklist you just go through and you're like yeah achievement unlocked yay like it's a thing that you live and our values are intended to remind us of how we work and how we treat each other

so these are things that you embody and so what i have here is our first draft and this was shown to the company and after we did that we realized something was missing so we didn't have anything that captured our commitment to diversity and inclusion and like sure there's a sense in which you can kind of imply it from the other values but we also felt like it was important enough to stand on its own so we went back and we redrafted a seventh value and this is what it looks like and you can also see all these values on our website so don't feel like you need to read them all it was important in the elements of this value here like the wording and the imagery really needed to reflect the value itself so it shows a broad range of people from our studio and our community and the reason that we wanted to do this is because just talking about values without the action behind it was just really meaningless and we wanted to have this genuinely

represent who we were i will also say at bungie we are we encourage employees to self-organize and engage with diversity values i mean diversity issues so we have the studio lgbtqia club we have bungee ladies we have bungie people of color for example so with leadership supporting more diverse practices and employees driving these kind of grassroots organizations it was just this really perfect opportunity to focus on diversity and that's basically what we did so we focused on diversity we formed literally focus groups that talked about diversity under three sub-pillars of the studio our game community and the industry as a whole and so we had over 120 people in the studio participate in these discussions and so what i'm going to do for the rest of the talk is kind of just cover a couple of things that we've done under those three pillars

and i just want to point out this is not an exhaustive list or anything by any means it's things that we're all learning and things that we're planning to do so yeah um so here's our first pillar which is our studio and here are a couple of things that we've done so we formed a bungee diversity committee with 10 members and we have clearly defined roles and goals and this sets a clear expectation for our involvement with the studio because we are a volunteer committee we operate as an advisory and an advocacy group for the studio so people can bring questions to us and consult us and we facilitate discussions internally to make sure that diversity is a topic that is at the forefront of people's minds and that people can openly ask questions and that they have a space to do that we also work with leadership in improving things like transparency and communication and helping to empower leaders and managers in becoming better allies through providing training and studio

resources and i know like elaine and leah have already talked about this a little but um we also work with recruiting in nature and we do a lot of the things that they've mentioned so i won't talk a lot about that but we we are also moving to um look at blind like we're helping recruiting with like blind reviews of applications for example so we have made progress there okay so our second pillar is that of the community and the opening line from our diversity value is we want everyone to feel their identity is welcome in our studio and in the world we create and this is kind of really the centerpiece of the community pillar and so i know i've talked a lot about pillars and there's pillars everywhere but this is where it gets weird because there are two sub-pillars so it's like you have diversity and then you've got your three types of diversity pillars and now there's like pillars all the way down with these two sub-pillars um so the two sub-pillars uh people at

our studio have a place in our community and people in our community have a place in our games so on the first side of that subhillar um last year we had a presence at several events that we felt embodied our values so this picture is actually one of us doing a let's play um at gigocon which is a it's a convention that happens every year in seattle and it celebrates women and girls that work in stem and games and comics and yeah so we we had just like shipped d2 at this point so we were just kind of showing a group of girls what our game was like and this is really important because these are events that we staff with bungie employees and it gives people a chance to see people who look like them and have them think i could do that like i can i can be a game dev like that's cool um and yeah on the other side of the

pillow here we have our community and our community team makes a really strong effort to highlight and celebrate a cross-section of our members so we feature a lot of diverse streamers and artists and cosplayers and the face of our community is diverse and we want to send that message to everyone so i know i mean a titan so i have my titan shirt on right now but um even if you made a warlock like this person um you still have a space okay cool um finally um our last pillar is that of the industry as a whole so as we move towards a like an increasingly global studio we really want to make games that embody our values and so we tried to do this through a game you might know i've called destiny um the characters in our universe are

representatives of humanity and they cover different axes of representation so we have race and gender and ability in the lgbt spectrum for example and we want these to reflect that the world is diverse and that our player base is diverse but it's not just that we want to celebrate and normalize these facts because that's just how it is um outside of our game it's also important for us and our values to support our employees and people in our industry so for example one thing we did last year was we joined with other companies in entertainment and tech in submitting an amicus brief and basically the point of this the idea is just to acknowledge each other and to show that we have each other's backs and this is really important for people who are from underrepresented groups so it's really simple and effective it's just a way that you can say i see you and i support you and for someone that doesn't hear that a lot that really goes a long way

and finally we also want to continue driving these discussions with our colleagues and peers so all of you so we're all learning together and we're all going to be working towards a common goal so i really encourage all of you to like continue these conversations and share information and share ideas about this and just keep those dialogues going because no one is perfect but we can all get closer to being better together and that's all thanks all right thanks so much to our panelists uh so we're gonna go into a little bit of moderated uh questions uh and to kick it off um one thing we wanted to talk about was a little bit on microaggressions so often the pain of being a minority is often felt by a lot of little things adding up over

time kind of the the death by a thousand cuts um and joe did you want to give some extra context if anybody's not super familiar with uh um yeah i just like without like giving specific examples of microaggressions i guess one way to understand it is like suppose you're in a small studio and there's only like you know you're one of 10 people and you're the only member of an underrepresented group at your studio and let's say every single day someone like each one of your colleagues comes up to you and like makes and like a passing microaggressive comment and you're just like okay like you know i don't know how people react to microaggressions um but what that means is for each of those interactions the person that's doing that action has experienced one micro aggression in that they you know directed one at you but for you you've received nine of them and now multiply that by the number of days that you work there and scale up the studio and that is what

the death by a thousand cuts is really like it's like you get tired of this stuff so yeah yeah and so one thing that makes sense is that if a lot of negative things can add up to make a big difference i think it's also possible for a lot of positive things uh micro affirmations if you will uh to add up to make a big difference uh what are things that you guys have found in your studios that the little things that make it different okay so i'm excited okay so um one of the first tangible achievement that i did when i got onto the executive team at wizards of the coast was um i got better feminine hygiene products in the bathrooms [Applause] seriously i went into the bathroom right after i got promoted and looked and went and went wait who am i going to complain to me [Laughter] right so um seriously like little things make a difference like that um and then the the second one i wanted to mention is um so at the child's play auction uh this past december

uh one of our speakers that we had who's very active um in the hospital community she uses a wheelchair um and she let child's play know that and they built her a ramp to come up onto the podium right like if you were in a wheelchair you wouldn't be able to get up here where we are right now um and uh she came up to do her speech and the first thing she said is she gushed over the fact that she has done speeches tons of times and this is the first time someone had provided her a ramp um and that made her feel normal right and it's just those kinds of things can really make a difference to make people feel like it's normal right i also think allyship is a really important point and i know some of you mentioned that as well but um so there's a study that um shows that people are more likely to believe other people that look like them which i don't know it's like but even on diversity topics yeah so it's like white what this means is white men are more likely to believe other white men even on issues of diversity

so take from that what you will um but what this means is if you have that it's like if you are in that position to be able to speak about something and to support someone that is underrepresented then like do that because and it doesn't have to just and i'm not just like saying this to the white men in the audience but like you know if you're white or if you're straight if you're able-bodied if you're cisgender like you know take your like use your voice to help everyone else that isn't in that position and i think that's really i think that's one of the things that helps is just acknowledging that there are other people that are not like you that exist and normalize the fact that they are there and recognize them so yeah yeah thanks thank you for those two claps [Laughter] so in general um what have you guys like what are some of the biggest challenges that you've faced and what are some of the biggest lessons that you've learned along the way yeah um i will say when i first moved

into the games industry i used to actually make cartoons for disney for a living and that's what i wound up doing and then transitioned through my work there into working at xbox actually and in gaming and i was when i first came there honestly i got a lot of comments about the fact that i wasn't a big halo player sorry um and and the fact that maybe i wasn't a real gamer in a lot of ways even though i will tell you like i play all sorts of games i play a lot of d i play a lot of some of and i play a lot of mobile games and i play a lot of actual video games but just because i wasn't mainly a first person shooter player somehow i was sort of like you know my cred wasn't that great and um i would say that when i started to be then brought into sort of leadership teams and got promoted and i will say in three times in my career i've been the first

woman to come into say a senior leadership team or running a group of of things i definitely in the first several years of my career in the games industry i wanted to fit in and i think i was then trying to because a lot of that was you know kind of hitting at me in in sort of microaggression kind of ways that sense of like oh oh maybe they don't think i belong here and all that stuff to a point where i started to believe it and then after a while i was like no you know what i got this um but it once you realize that too what it also made me realize is that it is actually my job to speak up it is my job to be like i think that we're thinking about this from a very narrow point of view and so over time that's really the thing that i learned it was a challenge that then became something that i i know that and each one of you can do that sort of in the idea of like the ally but it is literally my job and while it shouldn't be necessarily put on me as

the only woman in some of those rooms you know what i if it's not me who else is going to do it and and sometimes it's a lot of pressure but i take that on you know and and in a way that that's the way that i've started to see change and you actually get a lot of people acknowledging it and giving you more respect i think one thing um one thing that i've kind of realized and try to say to a lot of people on my team is kind of this concept of really really well-intentioned people um and how outdated the kind of colorblind well-intentioned colorblindness kind of concept is it outdated feels like the right word like it's just not where we are anymore and it's not valuable and so the the kind of well-intentioned comments that that i mean are like i no no i i love ever like i treat everybody the same i treat everybody equally i don't i don't even just think about who they are i just like you know i just think they're all awesome like and stuff like that and we can't afford that because then you're managing everyone as the same person or they're

interacting with everybody as the same person that's actually not appropriate um we need to recognize where people are coming from we need to recognize who they are see them for who they are not be colorblind not be like oh we have love in our hearts and we see everyone's name that's i mean that's a that's a i see that so much with people who are just really want to do the right thing and then have no idea that that's the wrong thing and so i think that's something that um i try to we try to bring awareness to you but that's something i think that is something that you know we're just we just there's just not anymore yeah i think as an industry also we are very competitive and we're also conditioned to avoid failure but this is the thing about being an ally you will fail at some point but it's okay it's like you will make mistakes like like in the examples mary and leo were talking about like you won't get everything perfect all the time because if you did we wouldn't need to be here um

yeah like you'll get called out by people you've inadvertently hurt but use this i think what the important point from this is is take that as a like moment to learn from that and just acknowledge that you've done something that's not awesome apologize take it as a teaching moment and move on and that's what it and i feel like part of allyship is to do that and not like you know and like to continue supporting the people that you've hurt instead of just like you know doubling down on it which i don't believe any of you would do but yeah it's but what we need to do is assume good intent on both sides so just make sure that you know if you are hurt someone you know let someone know that you've hurt them but then also don't assume that they did that because they were you know being an ass necessarily like maybe they just need to know so um i actually wanted to riff a little bit on the the colorblindness kind of comment um so uh it's important to treat

people as individuals um but then it's also important to kind of pull back and look at the macro trends that you see because sometimes when you just focus on individuals you miss the larger trends that are happening so a really good example for this is um in the past when we've decided to send people to gdc here um as training opportunities um it's been a conversation between an employee and their manager right and they kind of decide hey is this the right place for you to go is this the right opportunity um this year for the first time the executive team looked at the list of the couple dozen people that were on the list to attend utc and i noticed that there were two women out of the couple dozen of people on the list myself and one person from my team and i said to all the other dudes hey there's only two women and it's me and someone on my team what's up with that and and we identified a thing that we just didn't realize that was there right and because of that now there are a bunch more people who are here um at least one is sitting in this room

right now yay marissa [Applause] oh and alison's over there [Music] awesome so switching gears a little bit while many of us are working on increasing diversity within our studios sometimes we can have members of our own communities who are uh less than enthused about the topic of diversity to put it generously um have you guys kind of tackled that issue uh wait you mean people in our community might not might not be it might not be like 100 so i kind of feel like right now i should just pull out my phone and look at the most recent notification i have from twitter right now because that would be fun um um so uh so the thing about uh magic i'll talk about magic specifically for a minute thing about magic is that our community is interesting um in the way that uh it's a face-to-face based community right which is a little bit different than um the communities that most of you guys manage

and with because of that um there's a lot of really good positive stuff that goes on that community i love my community so much they are the best really the best people in the world um but there's also people there um who decide that for them it's more fun to annoy those people right um and the the issue is that i can't just like block their account i can't just you know keep them out of the game right because the community for magic is beyond kind of a platform like that right like the community for magic is the world right so i can't ban people from the world right and if only at least at least not in an ethical or legal way um and and i can't make them stop being mean right like i can't do that either um so the question is kind of what do you what do you do there right how how can you try to make sure that your community the the wonderful goodness of the community that's out there knows that

you as a company have their back um especially recognizing the limitations that you have as a company right like it's it's a it's a really kind of hard thing to balance um so um i wish i could say i had it all figured out um unfortunately i don't um i like to think that we make decisions that move us in the right direction um and i'll say that we've gone through some really tough times lately with some things that have been going on um with people even pulling people from outside of our community coming and attacking our community members um to to be mean and round people up and uh it's nice because sometimes i get things like i actually came to work one day when we were having this tough time and there was a handwritten letter that someone from our community had sent me just a hey i just wanted to say i appreciate what you do and i keep that pinned up but from my desk any other thoughts on that um yeah so i guess like you know we so like destiny is an online game so our community is slightly different but

um we also build mechanisms into the game to minimize toxicity and encourage fair play so um when you play if you're running around in the world you don't automatically start voice chatting with people you like we don't have open voice chat we have guided games which allows people to like you know find other people like they enjoy the place like if they enjoy the same play style and you know over time that helps to make friends and i think one of the things about our community is also making sure that we elevate the positive voices there as well and you know amplify those ones because those are the ones that we want like we we value them and we and we also have and so like you know just to get back to elaine's point um like you know there are things that are going to happen and we ha and so one of the things we want to do is just make sure that we can mitigate for those situations so you know for example we have a player support team we have a security team and we will investigate these sorts of

things like you know if people are being toxic members of the community we will investigate and we will ban them because if you want to have a place where people feel safe and welcome you sometimes you have to do that yeah it's letting letting your players know that you have their backs yeah it's going back to that backswing yeah so some quick uh closing thoughts so if someone in the audience right now uh if they want to start something at their studio at their company around diversity to help increase inclusion what are some immediate next steps that you think that they can take um i will talk about another story from arenanet when i showed up uh there was a women in games chapter but i will say you could do this with any kind of diversity in games group there was a small group of about five women who would get together for lunch every once in a while but they even came to me as the first member of the senior staff that was a woman and were like you know we'd love to make this bigger and not just us having lunch and talking about some things and what we wound up doing

was just putting out an open invitation um we did it around the beginning of the year but you know what any day's a good day to start something and said let's have a brunch um let's start off with a breakfast meeting and it's the games industry so it was like 10 a.m um but we brought people in we served mimosas and we had pastries and it was an hour and a half of us whiteboarding about what are some of the things that we would love to do as a group that was a concrete thing we would produce like an event or um items or a giveaway or a video we could share with the community there were all sorts of things that we put up there and then asked everyone that was on that showed up who by the way out of a company of about 300 people 75 showed up and it certainly wasn't all women um it was a really lovely group of folk who not only started that first one but stuck through it the whole time and as we had these ideas then we just asked everybody to vote with their

initials go up and say okay what are the one or two that you would put your time behind that you would actually be excited about which allowed us to winnow it down to maybe three ideas that then teams went away and then we picked one the next month that we did the same thing with mimosas and more pastries um and said uh you know okay we are going to make an event what we wound up doing and actually some of these ladies also came to it because arenanet's also in the seattle area and um we did a regional event that was um about it was sponsored by our chapter of women in gaming but it was about producing your own career and we brought people in from all sorts of different disciplines to talk about their experiences it was open it was very candid we were you know but it was also with the idea of hey you know what there are things that sometimes you don't always think about if you're a person who feels maybe like you can't ask for a raise you can't ask for a promotion you can't do those things and we just came together and said this is a problem

we see but it's also an event that we produced together that really galvanized our studio around hey this is a cause we believe in this is something that's important to us and it also was honestly great recruiting message to put out there to be like yeah we value this we're given you know we're spending money and giving people's time to do it so i would really encourage you regardless of how small it is or do you work in a shared workspace or are you doing some other things like get people around the idea of how can we not just work with ourselves but share outward and that'll help that's the act make say act make kind of thing by doing that you're going to make a better culture internally because you're putting it out there for people yeah i would also say that just as far as a next step just something you can do um take stock like i've you know even being part of this panel i've i'm gonna go do more things um i'm gonna steal you should the next thing you should do is

hit sorry um the next thing you should do is go and take stock and and ask yourself if as companies and as individuals if you're doing everything we mentioned which should be a minimum bar a minimum bar at this point in our industry and then we have so much further to go so then what am i doing all those things you know and and even if you're not in a place that you're necessarily in charge of these of certain things go talk to the person who is so what can you do there's something probably you can do that you aren't doing i know we aren't doing even even the things that were brought up here and so that's a next step that you can go back and do and just whatever that whatever that one piece is that you can go take action and then and then we're a little bit further videos sorry i almost hit you all right well and with one minute to go we're gonna go ahead and wrap up some quick housekeeping reminders don't forget to fill out your surveys

and also we're the last panel in here for the day so we'll be up here at the front if you guys want to come and talk to us and ask questions so thank you all for attending you