In the Long Run

[Music] our business is joy the hard work we do goes into building tiny machines of joy we build package and ship joy our ultimate goal regardless of how much we argue stress and struggle and God knows we do is to bring joy into the world we are all part of the joy industrial complex as game developers the fruit of us our labor is joy if an industry can have a soul ours is joy so how can it be so hard how can it be so hard sometimes to get up in the morning how can it be so hard to keep a studio running to find job security personal health or even a

decent wage how can it be so hard and how can we make the struggle easier we are fragile and frail people sometimes we fall sometimes we fail but we are also capable of deep compassion and sublime empathy and we always aim for joy my name is Henrik Johnson and I will be your moderator today the questions asked here are what we will discuss during the panel but first I need to address why the panel looks very different than planned Tom Hall the co-founder of its software and Nicole Lewis head of publishing for League of Legends were supposed to be here they have to suddenly they both have to sudden cancel suddenly yesterday life comes at us hard thankfully through friends and friends of friends we have lined up a new set of

panelists and now now like the panel to introduce themselves I'm pre-code I'm the CEO and creative director of a tiny do do based in Toronto called true love before that I was a lead programmer at Ubisoft Montreal on child of light and three Assassin's Creed projects and before that I wrote AI for a Company of Heroes at relic hi I'm dr. JC Lau I am currently a tech producer at Harebrained Schemes working on battle tech before that I was at Bungie as a test engineer working on destiny 2 and its DLCs and before I entered games I was a professor in the philosophy of race and gender at Virginia Tech hello my name is Osama dorias I'm a game designer at Warner Brothers games in Montreal I'm also the coordinator of the video game programs at Dawson College and I'm the co-founder of the Montreal independent Game Awards hi I'm Ralph

coaster and I'm a game designer best known for mmo's Ultima Online Star Wars Galaxies meta place and I think this might be my 20th or 21st consecutive GDC it's a long run so the first topic I'd like to bring up is my first job in games finding a job in games can be hard but I also like to talk about how do we leave a job I've seen too many developers leave a trail of burnt bridges behind them and I would like us to talk a little bit of how to leave could the plot panel please talk a little bit about how you got in but also how you got out if your switch job since then how did you leave any advice at all sure um so I got in through friends and I think that's not unusual a friend of mine got lucky and landed a

contracting job doing video games and from there ended up hired full-time and when they needed designers on Ultima Online he recommended me and there I ended up just ridiculously lucky and on the right project at the right time I think a lot of what I'd say about that is that luck needs preparation right if you I hadn't been doing the right kind of thing beforehand I probably couldn't have gotten a job as far as leaving gosh most of the times I've left have been very very stressful and unpleasant I once left a job over the fact that I was asked to fire a group of people that I had been mentoring for two years for example and I wasn't allowed to tell them that's why that was not fun so I actually had a completely different career path I studied political science

and I worked as a shipping agent I had a love-hate relationship with a job meeting people was fun the captains and the crew and doing the paperwork is boring so I went to another love that I had before which was graphic and web design and I just completely self-taught I became freelancer all the wrong things didn't make a lot of money but at least that allowed me to learn flash and flash allowed me to make games and my games were terrible but they were good enough for a portfolio that's how I landed my first job in the industry I left that job because basically I was too nice and I don't mean that in a good way I didn't fight for my rights I didn't fight for a salary and I realized after years and years of just waiting patiently for people to acknowledge what I deserved and to give it to me that people that were much more junior than me were actually making higher salaries and when I asked for to fix that to mend that I was given answers and excuses so after

six years of the same company finally enough was enough and by leaving I almost made double what I made before so it's basically that okay so the games industry is my third industry I would say um so I'm Australian and in Australia you can do a law degree as an undergrad so I actually started um my college with an ox law degree and I went on to become a lawyer I worked in family law for several years working on child representation in divorce cases which is as you can imagine not a super fun place to be when you're in 22 years old yeah and then after that I decided I wanted to be in academics so then I did a dissertation in moral and political philosophy so I ended up with a PhD in philosophy and what do you do with that you become a philosophy professor because either that or there's like joke about going to McDonald's and asking

people if they think they want fries with something so when I was an academic I was like well I have these skills but I want to make games how do i leverage my background into a games job and so I actually applied at Bungie as a tester and I'm like I have a PhD I would like to be a tester and so that was a really interesting conversation but I guess they gave me the job so that's cool and a lot of it was talking about how those skills transferred so I talked a lot about like how I have particular communication skills and organizational skills and how I could apply them to a particular role and I can't say I've left a lot of game shows because I on this panel I'm the baby on this panel I've been in the industry for about four years but although statistically I'm one year away from the average career length for a woman in games so let that sink in but

yeah so one of the reasons I did leave was it was a combination of studio culture and also wanting to make an impact and depending on your studio size and its composition it can feel hard to make it in fact and so I wanted to go somewhere where I could feel like I was making a difference and being effective and seeing change that I wanted so yeah that was pretty much my story I got into the games industry by accident and I want to go all the way back to high school I grew up in the country and I hated living in the country and I figured out by like looking at what's possible in my high school that I could finish high school in four years instead of five if I had moved some classes around in a way that my teachers didn't approve of and took summer school and the courses that supposed to be remedial but just take it and they couldn't stop me and so I finished high school when I was 16 and

went to university with absolutely no savings because I never had a summer job and hadn't thought that far ahead so I had to put myself through university by working two jobs and keeping my scholarship and again I kind of like figured out how to make it work and I thought if I do computer science I can get a degree and know I can keep my scholarship because it's not subjective like you just stay in the lab until your program works and you know you have an A and then you know you have your scholarship and you know you have a degree I graduated when I was 20 and the dot-com crash just happened and there were no jobs and I realized I didn't want to be a programmer and I hadn't thought that far ahead either and I kept my student job for awhile and then I got a credit card and I went to Europe I thought that like moving from the country to Vancouver had been so expensive and interesting that like going to another continent would be interesting too and I thought I would figure out what I wanted from life and

how like what what like should I go back to school and study because I felt like I wanted to do it do-over and then what I discovered was that I ran out of money and went back to Vancouver with $8 left and needed a job and started applying for every programming job I could find and I was very very very very very very very lucky to get a job at relic entertainment in Vancouver which was an amazing experience um I loved it from the first few weeks and I knew that I would stay in the games industry forever so I wrote AI code there I worked there for a while but then I was like I did want to like try to live overseas for a while so I went to Australia for a bit I came back to Canada and then I started my own studio and a couple of the times that I left Studios not all of them one of those jobs was really amazing though all those jobs were amazing but being a

woman in works place dominated by men is not easy and research shows if there's less than 30% I think women then women get sidelined and stereotyped and talked over in meetings and men attribute the woman's ideas to themselves and these kind of things really happen and eventually you kind of reach a point where you are just not able to develop your talents and your aptitudes at the speed that the men around you are and it makes more sense to go somewhere new and so that's why I left a couple of mine I'm coming at you from extreme privilege as a programmer I never been afraid to leave the game industry which is a blessing for that not many others in the specialists in the gaming field have my first job in games was my first real job if we did not count summer jobs and it was as a

programmer for games to be broadcast on TV I failed my college I did not know C++ and I lied to get in I was asked to start in three weeks and that's when I got my first book on C++ it worked out it worked out it was a different time so if we talk about this this first topic and then if we try to think of one time where we realize that this is so bad or so you know so good an opportunity on the outside sorry for making that sentence a complete mess have we had such a good situation and good offer from the outside that you need to leave or was there ever a situation so bad

that you felt you had to leave and I can when my boss was screaming at me that she would kill me that's when I left my first job so who would want to go first on that so let's see my first job in games that I left that would have been when I left origin after making Ultima Online I had come on board on Ultima Online when I was 23 24 and after only a couple of years I was actually the lead designer of it by the time I was 25 when it shipped and I knew nothing about the wider industry at all I didn't know anybody I didn't you know I just didn't know anyone I didn't know what I had actually accomplished like I was

oblivious to it and I was highly opinionated highly highly opinionated very sure of myself in terms of what we were doing but that meant that despite having just shipped this game that was a really big deal and some of you are young enough to not even know how big a deal of was at the time it was a really big deal but I didn't realize how big a deal it was EA actually put me on the list of people to be laid off because I was opinionated and thought that they were idiots in terms of what they were doing with online games I got rescued by managers who you know and I owe an enormous debt to people like Gordon Walton and rich Vogel whom entered me through this period but they launched an Ultima Online 2 project and I was very carefully left out of the

team for that so they wouldn't they wouldn't let me lead a new project they tucked me away on the live team which turned out to be a blessing because the live team made the money and the sequels all got cancelled and eventually part of the reason we left is that the follow-on project that I was working on also got cancelled because they just didn't know what to do so that ended up being good we all left and landed new one called Star Wars Galaxies but it basically was a case of wow here's an org that is so dysfunctional that they don't understand where the money is coming from where the value is coming from they don't even understand this whole new category that they just opened up and is theirs for the taking so they just let it wither on the vine yeah I did go on to lose about a billion dollars in online games in the space of the next four years so leaving turned out to be the right thing to do but it

was a really strange experience to not be aware that I'd done something great gradually become aware and then be ignored for it by that company you know it's a good reminder that companies even though they're often made of very smart people companies can be really really stupid things like really really stupid so don't trust companies thankfully so I made the mistake at one point in my career where I started highlighting my soft skills as my strongest skills this is actually true they still are my strongest skills I work really well with people I even earned the reputation that I could work with anyone for the record I don't want to work with anyone but I can at all I had to so I was hired in this one particular company that will go unnamed for that for the soft skills I

have hard skills as well many of them have 12 years in the industry I've shipped different sized games 20 of them I have a track record for delivering however I focused on soft skills because I felt that this was something that was not favored in the industry we don't look at it we don't ask about it and this is a mistake people are promoted to positions of leadership based on their heart skills instead of being given other promotions that doesn't put them interfacing with people so you know like telling someone that you're working with you're gonna kill them and things like that so what happened is at this one particular company I worked for a person who a little bit manipulative and by a little bit I mean completely he realized really quickly that I knew how that my team liked me they trusted me so for the year or so that I was there and don't go on my LinkedIn to find out which company I'm talking about I was not able to change this person's mind once about

anything to the point that everyone has impostor syndrome mine went through the roof and it was gradual well at first it was like okay he's more experienced but than me and he's worked on more games and he's dealt with more people and I started listening and then other points when his whatever he suggested would have a 50/50 track record of working I started making excuses for it while we tried it out and eventually in the end I realized I'm just a mouthpiece for my team I'm a lead designer by name only I'm not doing anything except translating because he had lost all trust or rather the team had lost all trust in him so I was being used as a figurehead and that's when I decided to leave the company that's not my child title is not figurehead it's game designer okay I'm gonna preface this with also please don't go on my LinkedIn because my time in games has been relatively short so it'll be really easy to pinpoint where things are happening

so I'm gonna kind of couch this in very general terms there was a point before I started in games proper when I was leaving academia where I did some work in both games journalism and also in working on consoles so I kind of games adjacent normally in games and one of the things I discovered quite quickly like Asama is I had a particular set of skills that were easily transferable but we're considered soft skills so given my background I've done a lot of advocacy work I do a lot of speaking about diversity inclusion I have written and published on these areas and very quickly on these teams that I was on I became the person that is the one that would take things up to the manager on behalf of the team so I was at one point I was the coordinator or a team of 24 people and they were all

people that when we were based in Seattle but none of them were actually from Seattle and and some of them for something English was not their first language so then I kind of ended up being like some of the mouthpiece for this team and I would bring things up to the manager and he got to the point also for me where I was in this weird role where I had this particular set of coordination and like management skills so I wasn't expendable in that way but it was apparent that I was not included in a lot of the conversations at that leadership level so it came to the point where they kind of just I was getting siloed in a way that was not kind of making me effective for my team and after and I like to say most people don't leave companies they leave managers and I think that is true in some of these cases it's about those interpersonal relationships and whether or not you can sustain them will also

determine what your day-to-day is like and I think that is one of the key things about how you can like why people leave is just you know sometimes it gets too hard to trying to maintain that relationship sometimes there's a lot of labor that you have to do in addition to your day job to maintain that relationship and sometimes it's just not worth it so if you get to that point where it's just basically your daily death by a thousand cuts it's probably time to leave yeah I was like I was an AI programmer Alec and I'm like was a really technical programmer like if someone can't figure out how to do something they can give it to me and I'll figure it out when I started at Ubisoft in Quebec there is a stereotype that women make very good managers so shortly after I started my boss asked me to manage the team and I had applied for a lead programmer position because it had been the only one that was on the

website and I was an intermediate programmer when I did that so that's pretty cool so I said yes because of course I'm going to take a promotion and I was I'm a not a good manager like I it's not what my maybe I'm an okay manager but I'm a better systems programmer but I said yes and for the first two years it was really hard every time I had to speak in front of my team of like eight friends of mine I would get the shakes and the stomachache which I did every morning and you know when I managed that team and then I managed a team that was twice that size and then I managed a team that was three or four times that size and then I became a lead programmer on child of light and near the end of child of light two things happen on that project one was that I had a really incredible boss who knew that I wanted to be a producer because I was like I was so happy with getting the promotion and with feeling useful that I wasn't thinking about what

I was actually good at or what I should be doing I was doing what I was asked to do and I really like during what I was asked to do so he knew I wanted to be a producer and so he showed me his entire job like he would be like oh Bri come over here and see the resource management tool and I was kind of horrified at what a producers job was and I realized I definitely like it I can't do that's not my path and what path if I've been on for five years seven years seven years and near the end of that project also like well we were shipping like we were crunching and I discovered I had a life-threatening illness and I couldn't tell them because they needed to stay focused I blurted it out to my boss as he was putting a lot of pressure on me one day and I his eyes almost fell out of his head I learned not to tell people that way and then I went into surgery the day that we put

the thing in the box and it was out and the reviews came out that day when I came out of surgery the reviews were starting to appear on the internet and it turned out that I was absolutely fine the surgery worked and I'm fine and I'm completely fine and but my life sure came in to like crystal clear focus and I experienced something called post-traumatic growth because I didn't know I was gonna be fine like we worshipping that game I didn't know what was gonna happen and so suddenly everything became really clear and I knew where I wanted the industry to go and I knew what was missing and what I wanted to do and so and I started doing it and I realized that that organization wasn't the right place to be doing what I wanted to do that innovation happens outside of his jobs established structures and that it happens in a start-up and that I have to do a startup to be able to be doing what I want to do so that's why I left we are talking

about a little bit on on skill set and finding out who we are as people when we grow into the industry and I just met a game students at a university who was having issues with or a bit of a problem with choosing if she wants to go to 3d modeling or 3d animation I couldn't help with that because you know I'm a programmer I'm so bad at drawing that I'm banned from using the whiteboard in many of our offices but I did I was able to tell her that the choice were making are very rarely career-defining it may influence her first job but it will not necessarily influence her her full career and I wanted to tell her that you are not your career you are not your job

description but you know I'm I just don't think that quick on my feet so I did it I wish I could but I would like a little bit if we can talk about how we change roles over time brie mentioned kind of a sliding into something because it's expected of you to be good at that because of different reasons or how we move and change because we are curious and want to investigate things so practical ways to broaden our horizons basically if anyone wants to take a stab at that breed so my boss on child of light taught me that in most setbacks there are opportunities and it doesn't mean that the setback is fair it doesn't mean it's how it should work but it means that the game has changed and you can sometimes find new ways to play

from that and I think that you know every so every time that something's gone wrong in my career maybe I haven't known at that moment that it's actually a push forward and it hasn't felt good in the moment but it's always worked out to be a giant leap forward [Music] when I was like doing any programming at the beginning it was because that's what the T needed and then I really liked it and then when I became a manager it was because it was what the team needed and even if it wasn't the best long-term career path for me it taught me like how to be able to do stuff like this speak in front of people and even just like speak to people at all because I was never very social and then when I you

know got sick and figured out what I wanted to do I discovered a theory in the field of stress psychology which kind of explains why about half of people find video games boring and also suggest a framework for how to engage and retain those other half of people which is the basis of my studio now the thing about not being your job though it doesn't work for me we're all different people and we all have different needs and work-life balance has never been something I've needed so I'll throw that out there and it's not popular and don't follow my example because you probably say I think the thing about not being your job or not being your job description is kind of apt okay so given my background and I like to talk about this because my it's just a bit of background I have I come from a really

kind of traditional like Asian parenting stereotyping and I am and I meet that trifecta because I'm a doctor or a lawyer and an engineer my parents love that and then I'm like I'm a game producer and they're like what what is that so one of the things is while I am all those things I also and more things than that but I also I'm not so I'm not just those things but there are skill sets that overlap for all those things and I like to talk about skill sets more than job description so it's your reasons one is job descriptions vary wildly between like studios so this is also true of titles this is true of like you know what your day today looks like and the other thing is skill sets are pliable and you can leverage those for all I've done so like when we were talking about soft skills those are necessary for any kind of like there there's a set of soft skills including like communication and organization and

you know what being able to work in a team and having some sort of initiative that are relevant for basically all games jobs where you work in a collaborative environment so talking about those is I think a more kind of vague but useful way of you know describing yourself and the other thing about what you so this is going back to what Herrick was saying about how you change these roles over time um there are things that you can care deeply about that don't fall within a job descriptions like for me I care really deeply about diversity and inclusion issues and I can't go to a studio and be like hey I care deeply about diversity inclusion give me a games job like in that's changing now because studios are getting DNI managers but like that's not really super common right now so I can't just be like hey I care about this stuff get me a job so um a lot of it is making spaces and carving out those careers for

yourself I think so one of the things I did was I have this particular like interest and when I was at Bungie I found a way to have conversations about diversity and inclusion with initially like my manager and then like the head of my discipline and then it went all the way up to the studio leadership and this is how we founded the Bungie Diversity Committee in 2017 else to do a studio at the time was what kind of having these conversations so it was kind of also lucky that I could just kind of segue into that but it's there are ways to have these conversations about what you care about and to carve out those spaces for yourself I think one of the things that also helps is because our industry is young and and we still have a lot of technology that's developing there Isis spaces to find like you know nothing's being done in this particular area like how can I get into that space or you know there's like this new tech that we haven't really explored how can i leverage my expertise to kind of develop that and we have these opportunities so yeah we should take those

okay so professionally speaking who you are it's what you do and you're able to do whatever you want I approved that myself because I didn't study anything related to game design at all so who I was professionally again was a shipping agent but I was only a shipping agent for a year until I decided to explore other things and then I picked up other skills your skills are malleable and intangible but you can pick them up and then I became a freelance graphic and web designer and that became who I was and that's what I thought at least but that wasn't what was important the title wasn't what was important it was the skills that I carried over however people only interface with you know titles so when I became a game designer it's because I transitioned from the graphic and web design skills I did a few other skills that were unrelated and now all of a sudden I have new skills I mentioned before I was the coordinator of the video game programs at Dawson College before I was a

coordinator I was a teacher I became a teacher of level and video game design when I only had three years of experience how did that happen I was interested and become a teacher but I I knew it was probably gonna be along a faraway Road like I was still very new to the industry but some people saw that I had some potential I I don't have stage fright that's one thing I like spending time with people even if I'm not paid for it so I could spend more time with the students and get them to the level that they are I'd naturally have these skills that I learned when I was a shipping agent before that I carried over again so all I had to do was leverage that when an opportunity came and the opportunity came in the form of a teacher that cancelled three weeks before a class was supposed to start so I had to teach or rather they were looking for someone to teach narrative nonlinear narrative design in the Dragon Age engine 3 weeks away when nobody in Montreal knew that engine and

so I had three weeks to apply and potentially possibly get the job and but I couldn't wait to get the job to learn the engine so I had to start learning the engine beforehand and I didn't have time off to take from work so this was part time so I had a full-time job in the day but I did it because this was an opportunity and I really wanted it and also I you know don't need work life balance and don't follow my example I don't sleep much so I did it and I got that job and I performed fairly well I had pretty good evaluation so when the time came for the coordinator of the level design program because this was a level design program to step down they looked at who had really good evaluations and they offered it to two of us the first person declined and I accepted except with an asterisk I love level design I was a game designer when projects are really small so when you did everything you weren't specialized at all I did AI and UI and level design mission design and name it I did it economy design things that narrative things that on the chart now

people are surprised that the same person can do them this is just that's another problem of the industry that I won't go into but you can do them and you can do all these things basically for me I approached game design no matter what like telling a story whether it's economy designer narrative design so I just Loveridge skills so what happened is I wanted to teach I wanted to have a game design program they didn't have one and they said that they're not willing to hire someone to create the curriculum so I said okay I will but I didn't study education I didn't even know what a curriculum looked like and they said how are you going to do this and I said well I'm gonna approach it the same way I approached game design I look at games I reverse engineer I write my document I proceed we make mistakes we iterate and then we'll have something that works it's easy right no it's not it's hard but I mean the thought process behind it is easy so the director said fine we'll give you an example curriculum this is what it looks like see ya six months later I booked a meeting and he was

surprised to see me I had a curriculum for a game design program because I spent the time to do it he was surprised he thought he would never see me again that was the end of that you know but what happened is he looked at actually put effort I didn't I I'm not at this point I think I had five years of experience an industry so I didn't take it upon myself I got a lot of people to come and consult and we worked on it together and I cried to them for it and technically I had all the language wrong but the work was there he assigned me a technical writer for a week she helped me fix it and we had a program I pitched it to the Ministry of Education I was prepared for weeks I was sweating bullets they asked me the most basic questions you could imagine like what is game so they accepted it because you know this is my expertise and the part that they see as the needed skills they don't know if I have it or not they see end results and all of a sudden I became a coordinator in addition to

become a designer in addition to becoming a teacher in addition to becoming a shipping agent in addition of becoming a graphic web designer and now tomorrow if I wanted to be something else all I have to do is look at the skills that I already have oh did I mention I was also the cordon the co-founder of the material dependent game Awards which is the festival so I'm also an event planner and the skills that I needed to learn that I didn't have as a game designer to become an event planner were actually really small because planning events is very similar to planning a game or you know leading a team so who you are is really who you want to be don't let titles stop you I'm not sure what to say after that I Henry wanted titles for the slide for you know say what you do a few years ago I just started saying just put down game designer just just put that down because

you know I've been a CEO I was a vice president of Disney whatever it's like there's like a hundred of them so it's not as big a deal as it seems I I've done art you can actually go on Spotify right now and stream my folk music album I put out in 1999 like it for real it's out there you know when I was a kid my parents and my family used to say oh you'll grow up and be a writer and a teacher I think I actually did end up doing both those things it the reason why I make games is because it lets me do everything right I make games because it lets me do art it let me lets me play with math I can do some programming I can sometimes write the soundtrack music I get to read about read about and then talk about ethics

and philosophy and try to persuade people in the industry to pay attention to ethics not being so successful on that front but I keep trying you know I get to go I get to work and help manage communities yeah you know the list goes on and on and on and you know in the end to me it all ends up being wrapped up in game designer because you know it's just aspects of the job one way or another I probably you know if I if I made a large enough pile of money I have to admit I'd probably get in a van and go tour the country with an acoustic guitar but I mean literally my degree the thing that I left behind to go or make ultima online was actually a Master of Fine Arts in writing poetry I think you know

the who are you thing is really that all of us are many people we're different people depending on who we're talking to were different people depending on the situations were put in and the key to it is really to not stand still to keep looking for new ways to dig into yourself and new ways to dig into the world around you and find fresh new combinations oh my god I guess people are matched three puzzles yeah I mean see so that's yeah game designer yeah the path we travel is very weird and what I meant with you are not your job description is or your career is that I'm still the little fat kid or rather tall fat kid who just got out of that

jock hole I was living in and making something a lot different than what they could even imagine so you know we're different things we're amazing beings so but we also have friends local and international friends and we meet through a multitude of channels and you know we hang out on Twitter and with me done we like each other's post on Instagram and put bunny ears on each other on different types of snap chattery and many times we prefer the company of others who are not game developers but we all build our own networks to get by and feel safe feel strong and grow as people and I think right Raph I'm sorry I take rafe particularly from non-americans it is a

common nickname actually but I'll try would know you'll see why in just okay so and of course we meet at GDC and we listen to colleagues friends or total strangers opening their hearts to share hard-earned experiences most of us have support networks like this and I know that Raph yeah do any of you know my name like my actual name No Rafael Ricardo Koster Villanueva soy Latino familia Puerto Rican eeeh my family is Puerto Rican on my mom's side nobody has a clue nobody knows that Raph Koster sounds like some kind of you know some Dutch German which is in there and and like

I'm 1/8 Irish too and whatever I grew up in New York Massachusetts Florida Georgia Tennessee Peru Barbados Haiti and Maryland before the age of 18 so I've really hated when somebody says where are you from I there's this thing called third culture kid which is people like me and there's probably a bunch of you here actually we are the people who grow up without living in any one culture long enough to feel as it if it as it is your own like yes I have an American passport but I had lived like in raw time before I was 18 I did not grow up American I went to a British

school system I grew up speaking other languages I completely missed the nests like just skipped it it wasn't a thing right and you know that can leave you feeling Anker 'less sometimes right on the negative side on the positive side it can make you feel like you live everywhere and like all cultures are wine in different bottles right it can leave you feeling like there's profound similarities and that the similarities are far bigger than the differences when I got into games it was and specifically when I got into games it was online games and back then you know not that many people were online and it was a crazy kind of a melting pot right there were all sorts of people one of my friends on one of the early text muds

was one of the world's top experts in grasshoppers right like we'd meet people because it was a text mod another player was blind but he could play a game with a screen reader even back then in the early 90s when I got into the game industry that sense of shared experience of this games and game playing being a common culture was important but not not just the larger game you know the game playing culture but the game making culture turned out to be a family for me the most impactful thing probably in my whole career was not a job it was not a game title it was when one of my bosses at the time Gordon Walton he called me into his office to do a one-on-one

because he'd just become the manager of the team and he said hey so how are things going what are you what are you up to I said I'm working you should know that you're my boss and he said oh well are you happy here was like there are other places ya know there's this whole industry out there are they don't know who I am that's ridiculous he said what are you talking about of course they know who you are now I've never nobody's ever tried to recruit me people here won't promote me I don't think anybody cares of in about anything I say or do honestly you know and he said wow what are you doing next week and I said working you should know this year my boss and he said no you're not and he bought me a plane ticket and he flew the two of us to Oregon where Chris Crawford was holding a game design retreat at his house and he sat me down

in front of this house next to Steve maretskiy Noah falstein Bob Bates Brian Moriarty and said this is your group these are your peers these are the people that think the way you do that love games the way you do and that's why this is my 20th or whatever consecutive GDC because frankly those the execs that whatever they come and go right I still have dinner with those guys every year right because yeah the business people they make their pile of money they leave and it's just as well right but these people right that's you know that's the family that's what actually makes the difference through all the

because there's plenty of there's there is I'm going to have to cut it a little bit short I'm sorry for for cutting in now we're just running a little bit of short on time I'd like to mention that we yesterday I had dinner with my peers my friends from ion storm in Dallas where we made anachronox and it was a beautiful beautiful thing to get five people together after 20 almost 20 years together every year at EDC those are my people that's why I wasn't at the Nordic party sake my I want to I want to touch on organization a little bit because I think it's very important for the long-term health and sanity of our industry I firmly believe we game

developers need to make deeper efforts in order to improve our working conditions we have seen a terrible year of layoffs we have seen studios shut down or decimated by forces seemingly beyond our control our business is very cyclical companies might need to adjust to handle shifting cont circumstances but the effect of those circle justments that are often called layoffs end up on the shoulders of game workers and their families so can we just do a real quick and it's this seems severely disrespectful but a quick panel thought on the recent year what it means for the future and how it can be combatted that was hard to say that was easy to write combat they did how we can fight it ok so like I said I'm the baby on this panel I have not been in the industry for that long but I entered the industry

after I'm not even gonna say but the thing about ethics and game journalism I entered the industry like knowing that they're happening series of layoffs I entered the industry after knowing that this place is an unstable and basically just bananas like how does anything ever even get made in games and so I know that there is this anxiety that comes with making games and I think the thing that keeps us going is that element of solidarity we plan we like we know that these things are going to happen and we plan for them we try to make contingencies and I'm gonna keep this short I am also an elder millennial so I love social media and I think that being able to hear these stories and speak to the people who are directly experienced experiencing these things is really important for it like us being aware of

what's going on in our industry and being able to connect to groups that can help us support each other is really really important so I guess for the future I want to see more of those connections being made I want to see us be able to connect and strengthen those connections as we make them because I think ultimately it's one of those situations where rising tide lifts all boats we need to be able to support each other and know that like when other people are suffering and be able to help them alleviate that and that's what's gonna keep us all together really quickly most of us are good people who care about others that's been my experience every company I've worked at five different companies most of us are good making a concerted effort to identify the people who care about others who are not here only for the Paycheck or the bonus and help them in

any way that you can and build trust between each other and identify the people who are not that our our industry is very finite we cannot have infinite jobs so why are we accommodating people who only care about themselves we have a problem with who we promote to leadership positions most of our directors are actually dictators and we need to stop that who is more powerful one director or everyone under him combined I said him I met them who a director cannot do anything if we're united so identify the good people please form a strong partnership and then we have power otherwise we're complicit thank you so the path forward in our industry of

joy is crooked and winding and we frequently frequently find ourselves in Forks on the path our choices matter and our landscape is ever shifting from my view the business of joy is a magical place but not all magic is good for us empathy curiosity and compassion are our most transferable skills to please let's use them we will close this panel now with a few choice words from our panelists thank you so much those were my choice words innovation happens outside of what we already know and new audiences and new technology are the two kind of places we can look to innovate underrepresented people have a

hard time in our industry there are real problems that we can all work together to solve and be curious about why they're happening and and have clear eyes and look at how they happen and fix them together but there is something else that is true and I'm sorry to everyone who's not underrepresented to break this news to you but if you have a unique perspective that has not been explored by the industry yet and if you manage to build a degree of expertise by going through a lot of your ideas are probably more valuable than those of your peers because you are the one who's gonna do something that is new and opening up a new audience it's not fair it's true though um so as probably one of those people

I've seen so many times where I've been the one but fill in the blank whatever you want to say in the meeting room or in the studio or in my team so and I think that one thing that we're starting to realize now is that those people have always been there and the face of the industry is not your sorry says hat white dudes but it's not just you and so I think it's important to recognize that and to lift those people up because we've always been here and sometimes doing that will mean actually not sometimes basically every time you do that that means you're challenging an existing norm and it can be scary to challenge an existing norm so be brave do those things like you know amplify those people and that's I think what we need to do to make us all collectively better so yeah that's that's what I got for me

games have always been about connecting connecting people connecting ideas they're there the things that I would hand out to my classmates at recess because I didn't speak their language well enough but we could do that together and to me the industry and then the colleagues and the rest are about connecting I think we're always just stronger when we come to understand one another and understand our similarities and differences so that to me is at the heart of this it's at the heart of what we do so you know I guess I just say go out there and go do that I did want to mention something I thought that I had before not an ending statement but as a

clarification I was very privileged throughout my career I was given a lot of opportunities and I was able to fill them and get these jobs I wasn't implying that all you have to do is work hard and things will be showered your way everyone's situation is different what I was implying is that nothing is stopping you from acquiring skills you don't need to have that if so you don't need there are no barriers to acquiring their skills if you know where to look so reach out if you're damned that it's a terrible thing to say because it's absolutely not true can i reset you're not what you studied assuming that you even had the privilege to study you have a lot of potential however it not everyone's privileges equal so be mindful of that and keep just trying to push a little bit more that's it thank you the most inspiring advice anyone

ever gave me in my career was when I said that like because like I was complaining to a friend that you know someone was getting ahead who didn't deserve it and I saw someone else who really deserved it but who was a woman not getting ahead and I said that she will get ahead in the end like in the end it will catch up to him and my friend said to me like no it won't he will fail up and he will fail up and up and up and you need to set different targets to compare and like my life is really easy my life has been really easy my career in the games industry has been pretty easy compared to everyone else who I graduated with so when I compared my opportunities to the guys that I work with I get frustrated and when I compare my opportunities to like many other people I know I realized how easy it has been and it it has to be about something like it's about can I achieve what I want to achieve or what I'm capable of in a realistic framework of what's

possible okay we're coming up on fifty nine point eight on my clock here so I guess we don't have time for questions from the audience even though we would love them I'm trying to see any time if there's any police here okay so let's wrap this up thank you so much for coming if you do want to grade this or give us some kind of feedback on the website I'm not fully sure how that works please remember that Tom Hall and Nicole Lewis who had to be yanked out of here on very short notice will get tagged if you do that give us any bad feedback yeah so please give feedback but be mindful so we don't splash our stuff on other people thank you so much thank you

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