GDC 2023 Main Stage: The Future of Play

[Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to the 2023 main stage at the game developers conference here in San Francisco California I am your host Liz Ryerson and I hope you've been enjoying your week thus far I hope we've all become masters of waiting in line we've all become masters of navigating torrential rainstorms so I think we're good we're ready for this so now it's time to settle in because we're here to talk about the future of games and play um so I I have a serious thing to talk about for one second before we begin so uh so I am a trans woman I identify as

trans woman uh she her is are my pronouns and there are a lot of trans people who I know who work in the games industry in various capacities some who are here some who are you know many who are elsewhere and there's a lot of stuff going on in this country uh in terms of major newspapers uh uh politicians Etc that are trying to make life as a trans person hard so I just to to get everyone here who I know it comes to this event is involved with the game industry I'd like to to ask I'm gonna so I'm gonna count down I'm gonna say three two one and if you all can say trans rights with me uh then uh we'll do that I'll do it twice um does that sound good that sound good okay all right all right all right let's get ready three two one trans rights all right let's let's try to get it louder this time let's try it let's try to let's try to really hit it this time

okay three two one trans rights nice okay I think we're ready now all right um so throughout its history many out there have made big promises about the future of games and play there's never any shortage of talk about new directions new technologies new markets which many will often say are poised to transform the industry forever but as I'm sure many of you know many of these big promises don't end up coming to pass and so it can be hard to separate the hype and the speculation from the reality which affects the day-to-day livelihood of most people who work in the game industry and that's what it today we're here to talk about some practical developer driven efforts to expand the industry to incorporate New Perspectives and also to get ready for the challenges we'll all be collectively facing in the future

okay so work by fans and hobbyists have had a massive impact on the culture and history of video games from Doom wads which by the way sidebar shout out to the website doomworld.com by the way I'm a big Doom fan and it's a good website um to Gary's Mod to Minecraft and Beyond so our first speaker is the co-founder of control Z and he runs a user generated content or ugc platform called dot big bang and he's here to talk about how to run a successful ugc platform that benefits both players and developers so let's please welcome to the stage Robert anderberg [Music] [Applause] [Music] thanks Liz my name is Robert anderberg and for the last 10 years

I've been building a platform that lets people play and make games together the playing part allows people to jump straight in and then people can build together in a multiplayer game editor initially it was just a hobby project but then we've grown to a studio of over 25 people today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the technology behind off platform some challenges that we had building it and the solutions that we found to overcome those challenges but first of all I'd like to talk a little bit about the history of this phrase usage generated content in the recent years ugc for games has been in the news frequently especially when people are talking about metaverse and that can lead us to believe that it's a new thing but in fact user generated content has

been part of computing since computers were very first in our homes many 8-bit computers shipped with the basic programming language this meant that everybody could be a Creator without needing to build or install anything the decision to include the basic programming language in these computers set thousands of kids off on a journey of Discovery and wonder with many of them becoming game developers myself included the first game that I made was a version of atari's breakout written in BBC basic on the BBC microcomputer with a whopping 32k of RAM in the 90s Tim Sweeney's zzt and ID software's Doom ship tools that allowed their players to modify the game and distribute those modifications by giving users the ability to build on top of an already successful game they solved the blank canvas problem and

kicked off the PC modding scene which is still going strong over 30 years later in the 2000s Linden lab made Second Life arguably the first metaverse they included all the tools people needed to create art game logic and worlds right in their client and as long as you had the client installed you could bring somebody to you with just a link many of the things people are most excited about today about metaverse such as digital land sales user to user marketplaces and cash out were present in Second Life over 20 years ago today platforms like Minecraft and Roblox are giving a new generation of game developers their chance to build games and give them to players but what will the future of user generated content look like

well to answer that question I think we can look to a platform like YouTube and what it did for video creators YouTube Gave video creators a way to start simple with a very low barrier to entry to earn a modest income to grow from there to grow a big viewership then to go full time with Equitable pay I believe that something similar will happen for game developers about the history let's talk about the technology behind our platform so when we think about technology we think about two broad categories tech for creators and Tech for players creators we want to provide tools that allow them to build everything they need for a game in one place just like Second Life did we also want them to be able to remix and kick bash together things from other players so to solve a blank canvas problem players we want to get them in a game incredibly quickly in a few seconds we

also want to run on as many devices as possible and ideally new devices as they come out I'll talk about two things that we did for creators and one for players when building art tools for creators in traditional games you use a 3D modeling package to create a triangle mesh and to do that you know artists require a lot of skills in terms of building the mesh topology UV mapping materials but because we want to do Target a very broad range of creators triangle meshes were not a great choice especially when you think about remixing and recombining things if you take a triangle mesh and chop it in half for example there's nothing inside of it and that is actually unintuitive for new creators they would expect it to be full of something like it is in the real world so we decided not to use triangle meshes we could have used 2D Sprites they're

very easy to understand easy to animate and easy to remix but we find that users want to build the kind of games that they play themselves so 3D games so what if we took these picture cells and turn them into volume cells I think you've guessed where I'm going we're going to use voxels so we decided to pick voxels as the first primary asset type for what we're building and as you can see here our community have remixed and recombined people's Assets in multiple different ways everything here is a remix of the orange guy in the bottom right if we add scale to the equation we can give beginners the ability to work at a lower resolution like you can see on the right an intermediate an intermediate resolution all the way up to really highly detailed models on the left scale also gives us something else that's really interesting as you can see here we've got some beautiful green trees but if we zoom out

you can see that they're actually four leaf clovers giving people the ability to scale objects up and down actually provides many opportunities to reuse things and get started quickly we did find one problem with voxel models though and that is that our users found it very difficult to fill large spaces and create Landscapes purely from those models so we did some experimentation and we discovered that a different volumetric modeling technique that uses sine distance Fields gave us the other part of this equation as you can see here I've got a really nice desk ornament bouncing up and down on my desk this is modeled using sign distance fields and if we run out through these doors the landscape here is the same model let's show you that again because I think it's cool uh we did have one concern which was that perhaps the voxel models and the

fan distance field models wouldn't look nice together wouldn't work well visually but once we applied a flat shaded material to the Landscapes I think it works out pretty well okay now let's talk about code let's see if I can drive onto this correctly when thinking about code for a traditional game most game logic is defined in a single project and it's not common to have two classes with the name player or NPC or camera but we want to allow users to recombine and remix code from lots of different places into one game and so we want to solve this problem where many users will use those names and they will Clash one solution to this is to isolate each script in its own namespace and while that solves the problem it means that it makes it difficult for those scripts and game objects to communicate between each other to solve this problem we look back over

50 years to the Small Talk programming language which was created by Alan K and his team small talk is a purely object-oriented programming language where objects communicate through message passing one object can send a message to another and if the receiving object implements that message they can Implement and execute the code for the message to run we added something additional because many Platforms in the past have had message passing and the addition was to allow users to broadcast to a tag by doing that we gave users a way to create their own custom message buses and also hook into events and messages that were defined in other games that they were remixing as a quick example the rocket here is the only thing currently in this scene that has a tag which is called launchable when I jump on this button the rocket fires off and explodes if I jump on the green button then the

tag is added to Alan K in his beautiful hot air balloon and when I jump on the button he flies away into the sunset well done Alan K EPT okay the next thing I'm going to talk about is for Players let's see if we can catch Alan on the way past let's see if he's going to go through the slide yeah there he is good job Val okay so for players the main thing we think about is distribution having users generate games is one thing makes a lot of sense it's good good fun but if people can't play the games that you're creating then there's really not much point to doing it and we find that creatives on our platform are super motivated to actually share their games get people in and get them playing in a traditional game development pipeline you make a build of your game you upload it to a store and then you try and encourage somebody to find it and download it hopefully there's a build for the platform that they have etc etc but for user generated content platform

that doesn't really work um we've all struggled to get our friends to install new games install new platforms and there's a lot of friction there so ideally what we would want is a runtime that was really small that maybe even if we could dream it up magically already was installed on everybody's devices installed on new devices as they came out that could stream user generated content assets and code and could start those games up super quickly you might have guessed what I'm talking about now but yes it's a web browser so I know what you're thinking web browsers are terrible and JavaScript is a language for noobs and well there are definitely challenges in building games for a web browser our team's background is in PC and console development and at least every console that I've developed for has its own strengths and weaknesses has its own foibles things that you need to work around and by taking the approach of treating a

web browser as a game console working to its strengths and avoiding its weaknesses we really have been able to achieve something that I think is pretty good anyway rather than talking about all of this stuff I think it would be good to put all the things we've covered into practice so now I'm going to put a QR code on the screen and as you might have also guessed my slide deck today is actually a live game and you can jump into this game and the only way you're going to get out of this talk and get me out of the stage is if we make it to the uh to the end here so we can see a few people joining in here I'm going to go and reveal that this is actually a game by enabling the UI oh man it's getting a bit busy okay but there is one slight problem which is that there's a gap here how are we going to fill the Gap that's right we're going to edit the game I'm sure that doing a live demo in a GDC keynote

is the best idea and it will not go wrong so everybody send me your good demo Vibes please okay let's do it okay so the first thing I'm going to do is add a little bit more danger to this scenario because I think it's a bit too easy so far I'm going to bring this lava across and using the message passing system that we talked about earlier when people touch the lava it sends a message to their character decrementing their health and unfortunately killing them in the process so that is a sad time next what I'm going to do is grab a voxel object place it over here scale it up let me just make that slightly bigger okay this person has managed to find their way to the end without me doing this I'm going to build a path for you cross to the last slide and hopefully

now oh somebody died again sad times let's see if anybody can get across I'm going to remove my QR code go back here get rid of my UI I'm gonna meet you at the final slide and here we are at the end okay well all that's left for me to do today is to say thank you very much for watching my presentation I will be hanging around GDC if you're interested in talking to me about any of this stuff but otherwise thanks very much and I hope you have a great GDC [Applause] [Music] thank you Robert that was a fascinating presentation and I'm interested to see where it all leads in the future so even as many workplaces in the world

are now increasingly requiring their employees to return to in-person work many in the game industry continue to work remotely some find that remote work is much better for their own health and both physical and mental and it helps them continue to operate effectively at their jobs so here to talk about how to build workplace cultures around remote work which support the mental health and well-being of an entire team I'm very pleased to announce or to introduce co-founder and CEO head chef of Magic Soup games Jen O'Neill [Music] [Music] all right it's been three years since we started working from home and we are great at it right I mean we're total

Pros we figured this out as an industry uh well not so fast actually there are challenges and employee well-being is the main issue mental health is on the decline we saw 17 percent increase in cases of anxiety and depression during the pandemic we're sad we're lonely and we're more disconnected than ever engagement is falling and worse active disengagement is on the rise which means people are quitting they're opting out in a variety of ways I think you've heard the term quiet quitting right quiet quitting is when people do the bare minimum to get by it used to be called phoning it in but since uh we're literally phoning it in and zooming it in we needed a new word quiet quitting you know quiet quitters are not necessarily lazy people it's just maybe

they don't have the motivation or maybe there's not clear goals or they're feeling demoralized sometimes a job just doesn't provide the purpose that it needs to have you ever heard of ghost quitting ghost quitting is like ghosting a relationship except it's your job please don't do this when you do that we worry about you don't make us call your parents okay and then there's loud quitting have you ever heard of loud quitting no loud quitting is when you uh send your resignation in and then somehow the Press gets a hold of it I wouldn't recommend it I I think I might have invented that anyway there's something uh we need to do about all of this quitting so why is this so hard well because there are things that we really miss about working together it's difficult to ad hoc problem solve

without being in the same space when you're sitting right next to someone you can peer over their shoulder and easily see what you need to discuss it's a lot more natural and less scheduled the water cooler and the weak ties aren't there have you ever had a really rushed meeting with somebody you're you know just having a rough discussion and at the end of it you feel like maybe your relationship is on the rocks and then you run into each other in the kitchen and you have some random conversation about the latest show you've been binge watching or bacon something random well this is not just idle chit chat this is a signal that says we're cool and you don't schedule a bacon conversation that would be really strange you're not like on slack going hey can we huddle for seven minutes here and talk about the last of us or something it's not something that actually happens it's hard to set those boundaries

between work and personal life sometimes you feel like you're just on this never-ending treadmill and it just goes on and on remember when the pandemic first started we said every day was blur's day we need those boundaries to help us establish a rhythm isolation and loneliness also weighs on our mental health and motivation there are days when you feel like you've been talking to yourself all day just spinning around in your chair just hoping to have a good conversation and what makes it worse is that days can go by and no one can see your silent suffering I might you know at work actually pass by a person and see their sad little face and at least say hey are you all right but there are benefits that make it well worth the trouble to try to solve these these challenges of course the number one benefit is getting all of that commute time back I

mean it's it's really nice to have those hours of your life back especially if you live in LA or one of those big metropolitans second is that working from home has really opened up what the meaning of flexibility is women disproportionately are the main caregivers of their children and being able to work from home could mean the difference in even working at all also introverts love this no one is popping by their desk coffee in hand asking for a TPS report interrupting their flow everyone gets more focused time to work with less distractions and zoom is a great equalizer my Brady Bunch box is just as big on the screen as yours there's no executive bro and good leaders should and are able to be more available if you miss brainstorming on a whiteboard there is research that shows

there are benefits to remote work brainwriting this is where people have time to add their own thoughts before the group comes back together everyone gets a chance to participate equally it doesn't matter how senior you are or how extroverted you are everyone gets to participate and if you are working remotely that doesn't limit you to your house you could take a road trip with your laptop it opens up all kinds of geographical boundaries for me as somebody who's starting a company I love that because that means big Talent diversification and it allows people to live closer to aging parents and in more affordable local locations so what do we do at Magic Soup We Believe great culture is co-created just like great games leaders of course have an important role but we are all chefs in our kitchen

building our company together when it comes to culture we don't think of it as a bear that you have to wrestle that's going to end up eating your strategy for lunch we think of it as an important partner culture as a strategic asset and being intentional with it will not only result in Greater success and happier people but it'll also allow you to build what you want to build so I'll give you a few tips you want to create virtual past for connection in order to work better together you have to build a relationship that's based on more than just the day-to-day tactics of work as I mentioned earlier when you are fully remote the weak ties aren't there there aren't natural ways to connect and so you have to invent ways to have this informal conversation so first you want to create virtual water coolers we have a plug-in on slack called donut

it asks random questions to start a water cooler conversation like how do you like your eggs or what was your first job we have a channel called the wake up songs channel where anyone can post a song they like and want the team to know about so my team has had their fill of my 90s house music think about employee-led experiences everyone on the team can volunteer ideas for virtual get-togethers at my last Studio we had a lunch and learn series that wasn't just dedicated to work one session was stated was about the art of whiskey tasting another was on corn snakes true story make time for small talk allow time for casual chit chat at the start of meetings research shows that small talk leads to more productive meetings the ice is broken and people can move through the

meeting with ease and if small talk is not your thing well I created a list of Corning questions for my team I bet you could too it includes things like what is my go-to karaoke song it's Umbrella by Rihanna in case you're wondering these are great ways to get to know one another but you'll need to be even more rigorous about those in those formal Communications so I think most teams are really good with one-on-ones and stand-ups but there's generally tend to be status updates how good are you at really digging in and trying to identify the problems and barriers to communication that might be affecting the morale of the team it takes a brave person to stand up and talk about how that could be happening make that easier by making it a part of the process and add a regular relationship check into your list of rituals now with all of these virtual ways of

connecting not everyone might be present so some important stuff might get missed so it's really important to get into the habit of documenting and sharing broadly you want to immortalize it in a single source of Truth like Confluence Wiki git lab whatever it is that you use working remotely means a greater amount of flexibility and an integration of work and life but these are all new muscles for us there can be a lost sense of leaving work or turning it off that's not healthy for you it's not healthy for your mental health or your physical health and honestly it's really not that productive so now I'm going to say a few things that maybe your mom would tell you and by the way she's right first you want to define a schedule and commit to your off times that means saying no and resisting the urge to respond to emails that may be coming in

at 10 o'clock at night ask yourself is it really urgent just because other people do it doesn't mean you have to take some breaks away from the screens go for a walk play with your dog taking a break break can be a nice mental reset and get good sleep I don't have data but what I know about us Gamers is that we have pretty terrible sleep hygiene myself included so when you don't get enough sleep your brain doesn't function and it's not at its best your your patience is low and you're a little cranky right and if you want that high emotional intelligence then you need to have that sleep So speaking of emotional intelligence it is an absolute necessity and if you were good at it in an in-person world you're going to have to amplify it significantly when you're going remote now this talk is much too short to give

a crash course on EQ but there's a ton of great books on building your emotional intelligence and being a better leader and a team member as a result so for now I'll give a few pointers be kind and compassionate kindness is a learnable habit you can build compassion muscle through basic practices listen actively with undivided attention ask people how they're doing let them know you are here for them say thank you it's free and it can mean a lot don't be afraid to be vulnerable brene Brown has an excellent Ted Talk on the power of vulnerability it's required watching for anyone in our in our company this doesn't mean you have to tell your deepest and darkest Secrets it does mean not being afraid to admit your ignorance admitting when you've made a mistake asking for forgiveness

this is especially important as a leader if you act like you're the smartest person in the room well you're not going to get the benefit of all the great talent around you don't let things Fester have the courage to reveal what's bothering you and have the courage to ask others what's bothering them even if you know that you're probably the source of their frustrations and when you know you're about to have one of those difficult conversations make it safe you want to open the door for it tell people that it's a safe and judgment-free space commend people for their bravery if you do all of these things you'll build trust and people will open up to you this is a competitive and hard charging business you know this and we don't say it enough it's okay not to be okay normalizing conversations around mental

health is the best way to minimize the stigma and create this the space for support when people are more open about their mental health Journey it can help create a more inclusive and supportive environment now I know at times this can feel really awkward but if you see somebody and you see that they're a bit off take the time and ask them how they're doing sometimes your instinct is wrong and maybe they really just didn't get enough sleep but sometimes they have real problems and they need a friend to lean on when someone is vulnerable with you it's incredibly brave and you have a responsibility to not judge they've given you a gift and you must treat that with care now I realize even if you are educated about mental health you're not a professional be supportive but know your limits and be a conduit for a person to seek

professional help we have a workaholic and aggressive culture in this industry and some people succeed despite their unhealthy behaviors not because of them realize that this is not the only path to success and surround yourself with people who have the best interest in your mental health isolation is definitely something I experience working from home and it can be draining what I recommend is to be proactive in forming those connections inside and outside of work did you know that if you have a good friend at work you'll be happier and more engaged it's true this is there's actual research on this like you will want to stick around at your place of work if you have a good friend that you can get support from if some of you are local you might want to meet for lunch from time to time go bowling or have a board game night me and my team we have a weekly game

night together it's awesome and some of us chefs we like to cook together you might consider forming huddles meet up with people outside of your organization even there was a time when I would meet over Zoom with a group of women leaders in the industry that and that friendship and that support was incredibly valuable and healthy to me you could form your own huddle built around your own interests GDC is a fantastic place to network consider really following up with people that you meet here and find ways to continue to connect and if you're underrepresented in this industry it can be awfully lonely can be lonely to be the only woman or trans person or black person in the room if you belong to a bigger company consider joining an employee Resource Group that's a great support system for you and if you're at a smaller company that maybe doesn't have those kinds of resources connect with the many

organizations that have been created exactly for the purpose of supporting you many of them are listed here they partner with GDC already and I bet there's a number of networking events happening here and lastly consider volunteering volunteer work can be some of the most rewarding heart-led Investments of your time it's a great way to feel connected to a community of like-minded people with a shared passion and purpose I really enjoy the time that I spend working with women in Gaming International Wiggy provides high quality mentorship and Leadership training experiences for women coming up in the business for myself I find it equally rewarding to participate as a mentor I get to work with women who are motivated to learn to advance their careers and I get to expand my network both with the mentees and the mentors

so some final thoughts here a fully remote environment is not for everyone maybe your team works better in person maybe in person is better at different phases of production I've seen teams meet in the office during periods of creative collaboration only return returning back to the office or back home fully remote when it's time to implement and be heads down but at Magic Soup we're just we've decided that the benefits are worth solving the challenges so if you want to make it work remember find better ways to connect virtually set some boundaries and take some time for self-care raise the bar on emotional intelligence be okay about talking about Mental Health combat isolation for yourself and your teams and guess what even if you do decide to go back into the office all of this is going to make you even stronger

thank you for your time today thanks [Applause] thank you Jen that was very enlightening I hope we can continue to openly discuss how we can prioritize the mental health and well-being of people working in this industry so our final talk today is about an issue that is very very often talked about in in these industry circles and larger society but were a very long way from reaching a fair and Equitable reality on there are numerous barriers that people of color face when it comes to seeing an industry which represents them both in terms of who gets to work on the games we make and also what kind of games get made so here to talk about how to capture underrepresented cultural experiences in a way that nonetheless is still appealing broadly to larger audiences I'd like to welcome

to the stage creative director of outer loop games chendana ikanayaka [Music] [Applause] how's everybody doing awesome awesome I gotta tell my mom who showed up because she's going to ask later um so I've been in the game industry for about 25 years this will be over 26 years one of the most common questions I get asked whether it's at GDC or dice or in a cab coming to go to the airport is where are you from and it's a you know it's a fine question it's like breaking the ice and want to get into somebody but usually my reaction to this is usually this and I'm like I understand what you're really asking um it's like when someone in a dominant culture is asking that for someone that they think is an outsider or someone

that's from somewhere else this is this is what they mean I mean it's not intentional and people are just trying to ask but like strangers asking that of other strangers it doesn't really make a lot of sense because I'm never going to see you I'm buying toothpaste man I don't you know we're not gonna have a conversation or where I grew up it doesn't really matter right so if you get to know me you'll you'll find out where I'm from so we're going to talk about what dominant culture in games means and there's different ways to frame this for today's discussion I'm going to frame it as this the structural power patterns that broadly organizes companies and resources along lines of race class gender sexuality ability and religion and there are lots of different ways to frame this and this is a whole talk in itself but I'm going to talk about some donut cultural traits in organizations in games and Publishers in developing houses and things like that so just kind of cover some of them the sense of urgency the need for projects to just

continue to you know work to be worked on to make progress uh Power hoarding the idea that power is is finite and only few can have it um that's a dominant culture idea uh progress is bigger and more you know a game has to be bigger game has to sell more has to make more revenue and the idea of right to comfort right to comfort um over the right for Humanity you know being black at a Starbucks for example or shoveling snow has just happened last month the idea that Comfort supersedes uh you know minorities need to live and survive so like this it's you know this is where we are in 2023. the idea of what's happening right now with certain uh books being banned and critical Race 3 being trying to be erased from America's racist history if we look at games specifically we look at who is in positions of hiring and firing and green lighting projects and

funding and it's predominantly white men and mostly white folks and this is fine for a lot of folks but it's it is it is changing over time but people tend to invest in people that look like them or they that they can relate to and you know someone like me when I'm pitching a project I have to do a lot of extra work try to convince someone to fund the project or they you know it's really enough about the project as as they are they're really wondering do I believe this person that is pitching this thing do I believe they can do it so that's a big concern so 2017 I've been had been in the industry for about 20 years by then and I wanted to you know I'd worked at different companies at different positions big and small companies uh and art design game Direction a couple things happened that year because I was been thinking about trying to go on my own as well and this man came into power and it wasn't really the best situation for immigrants that are in this country and folks that want to come to the country and I was like am I going to get

deported is that a thing that could happen um I'm a U.S citizen but that was certainly a real thought that crossed my mind and and you know my friends and family later that year Hassan minhaj did a stand-up special called homecoming King where he talked about growing up as a second generation Indian in a small town in California and sort of all the uh the pressures and the generational trauma and dealing you know dealing with stuff with his dad and his parents in post 911 what that was like and but it wasn't just the trauma there was also joy and great stories and love and breakup and it got me thinking like why aren't we seeing this more in games we certainly see it in movies and TV shows but why are we doing that in games so which led me to um start a company in in later that year called outer loop games uh we focused about games about underrepresented cultures and themes with gameplay that I think is trying to be more accessible and with lesson depth

so that was later in the year our first game that we spent a couple years after that it came out in 2019 was called Falcon age it's a game about a baby falcon a cute baby falcon um that you get to train and pet but also takes place in a world that is influenced by British imperialism in South Asia so it's a very anti-colonial game so we're trying to mix like this gameplay and this cute bird and also these you know heavy topics and you know we were trying to build a studio uh fully remote and also trying to build this game so you know we learned a lot and really it led us to the next game which is thirsty suitors we're working on it now it's been about three years it'll be out later this year it's a game about uh it's about queer black and brown culture game about a woman returning to home in a small town in Washington state her name is Jala the woman on the left and she has has had just a terrible time with all her

relationships broke up with all her six X's that you'll face in the course of the game um and then just had just haven't had the best relationship with their parents either and that's our summer of our exes you'll face and the way the game plays is like how do we tackle idea of love and breakup and you know who you know what what one person's memory was versus others the way to that is through return based combat they're not actually physically fighting but it's the idea of these two folks these two people that had a relationship um you know they're having an argument and we we personify that through the surreal turn-based combat in their own inner world and there's moods and a lot of conversation the conversations are as important as the moves you do uh against your ex and it's from a very specific point of view it's from a specific point of view of the experience of people on the team oh yeah they're skateboarding and cooking and cooking is used to build a relationship with your parents um and we do a lot of things in this game where there's things in the game where I would never say to my mom ever but we

let the player uh try to say that too jealous parents um in the game so I really feel like the idea of focusing on a specific point of view um can be Universal because we're dealing with love and breakup and generational pressure immigrant trauma and things like that but for everyone else that's not in the culture we are inviting you into our home we're cooking a meal for you well I mean in this case you're the one in cooking the meal but um telling you stories and really giving you an idea what it's like to be in this culture from an immigrant perspective so one big thing we believe is that playfulness and seriousness are not opposites that they can be exist in the same space and it really adds to the storytelling and complexity of it this is our team currently we're at 16 people we started at about three or four and we go to about nine during Falcon age

and we've been fully remote since 2017 we're spread across four continents and Seven Cities great group of people uh it's been really a joy for me to work with them so one of the things you know we really strive for is intentionality like the purpose we were the reason we worked on um wanted to start remote was to be able to work with folks outside the U.S and some of the ways to kind of fight this dominant culture traits are some of these elements that we're trying to do you know building a cultural appreciation or you know being having humility and being vulnerable you know we all make a lot of mistakes I've been in the street a long time I still make plenty of mistakes and all the time but just being able to have an environment where that is okay and you know definitely about making mistakes whether you're older or younger part of the group and then um really about having a space where constructive feedback can be used to make make the game better but it's really really about the team and then long-term thinking for us the pro the team is more important than the

whatever project we're working on because the idea is we want to try to keep the same team as long as they want to stay with us for multiple projects so this is the thing I've been thinking about a lot recently you know in 2020 after George Floyd murder there was a lot of push in games too where folks are really trying to invest in black and brown creators and a lot of a lot of companies promised a lot of black Creator initiatives and then there was a lot of big push to Dei and trying to bring in more diversity uh to a studio or to a publisher and what we're seeing now is a lot of those folks are either leaving those positions or are getting laid off because they're brought in too late into the process they don't really have a lot of say in the structure of a company and that's really what needs to happen for for minorities to thrive in your business or in your studio really need to think that from the start of the studio and who's in power and who makes who gets to make the decisions

so what are some ways that we can fight dominant culture ideals I mean even folks like me you know we are swimming in the same pool and we are also influenced by some of these dominant culture traits so as I mentioned something you know like constructive feedback and long-term inclusive thinking uh acceptance of discomfort we're discomfortable we're I'm comfortable all the time that's okay we can get through it um urgent patience being transparent about identity and values and then progress is really about sustainability sustainability not really short-term thinking so I've been coming to gdc's for a long time and uh this was a conversation I had a couple years ago someone walk up to me that I didn't know they were like I really love your games and I was you know I'm always happy when someone at least understands what we're making or have played our games I was like thank you that's really nice of you looking forward to your next game awesome that's really nice of you I said super

giant is my favorite Studio I was like wait a minute that's not me oh oh I get it I get it I get it you think I'm him you think I'm a mural Who is younger more handsome and more and and you know a lot more Talent than I am so I get it I want to be a mirror too but like we're short and brown other than that we're two different people um so you know it's like don't assume you know folks like it's really like I'm not trying to be invisible obviously like the reason I have red hair and a lot of clothes like you know I want you to not think I'm somebody else so this happens so often uh over a number of years and it's not really one-time isn't it I'm not I'm not alone though so my friend mitu we made sure it's one year at GDC where like essentially yeah we're not these people right like we are all different people we are individuals we're not a monolith and please don't try to guess our names

a month ago I was a dice I got to do something really fun just Tim Schaefer was getting a lifetime award and uh he wanted to do a stage on like a fireside chat and he asked me to host it so it's just a one-on-one chat it's like a 10 30 in the morning I brought out some whiskey just to kind of lighten the mood and we sat on stage and we chatted Tim's great um big fan of his work uh Full Throttle was the one of his earlier games that got me really into making games and so I was like really honored to do this and it was really fun and I'd have to do anything I just have to just kind of direct the conversation and Tim did the rest but two hours prior to this as we're rehearsing I was going backstage and then you know they were introducing as I was like with the stage crew one of the folks came up to me was like Pocky or Hindu and I was like what that doesn't even make any sense like those two things are not or um and then I was like okay and I was

pissed obviously but you know I can't I can't really say how I feel all the time right like it's just not gonna be go well so I said neither and they said Tamil I'm like no and I said this is why you shouldn't make assumptions like there's no point in doing this right and we had never met before hey I'm well traveled they said doesn't matter there's no prize for guessing um did he ask the other way folks around me the same question no I dropped it but it was like it kind of soured my whole week for that even though I had a good time so I mean you know games 25 years now um I love this industry there are these are little things that happen enough are annoying and I'm not special this happens to all other sort of minorities and folks that are and not in the dominant culture you know but I'm really hopeful that those things that make us different are

the things that also are make us unique and interesting and those are kind of things I want to like the people to lean on for their games and stories and I really believe like through joy and hope and some of our unique stories um we can really have an interesting games and Industry hold on hello sorry the clicker um so back to this question where are you from uh now that we're friends I'll tell you um I grew up in Sri Lanka lived in Maryland lived in La Orange County Seattle I am all these things and none of these things you know we're not a representative of one place we're a collection of uh our experiences and the folks that we hang out with and love and grow with so thank you thank you so much chandana

um I hope to see much more from you and anybody else who's operating in this space in the future and thanks to all of our speakers today let's hear it let's have one more round of applause for everyone awesome so I hope to see all of you for the independent game festival and game developers Choice Awards those ceremonies take place here on the main stage and will be streamed online tonight on Twitch and on the swap card app starting at 6 30 p.m Pacific Time a lot of great games will be there some industry Legends are being awarded at least in my humble opinion as a doom fan um so it'll be a good time please come through if you're here in San Francisco and do attend the awards I also encourage you to donate any unused hygiene products to Compass Family Services there's a donation box stationed outside the award entrance and if you have an all-access or core

conference badge I encourage you to come check out the experimental game Workshop which I am co-hosting on Friday at 1 30 p.m we've had sort of like a soft reboot and we're showing a lot of great games I'm honestly really excited about it uh because a lot of these games no one's seen before in any sort of presentation so I think it'll be great and finally GDC will be hosting a fully event a virtual event this summer called GDC showcase so look out for details about the event around Moscone and on the GDC website so now it's time to go forward for the rest of this week let's instill ourselves with the the spirit of the Future Okay uh one more round of applause and everyone have a great rest of your week [Music]

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