Knights, Fist Fights, Lasers & Catacombs: Subversive Diversity to Improve Our Games

[Music] yay so hey everyone thanks for coming they want us to tell you to please remember to silence your cell phones and also please fill out the feedback form at the end of the session and if you didn't get your bed check so that you can do so so this talk was kind of given a punchy name to kind of mask the diversity part to trick people who wanted to see you know a night fight with leaves or fists in a cave but you know that won't be happening no but congrats you are at an important talk this is perhaps a better name for the talk so who we are i'm shaun alexander Ellen I'm an artist game designer or writer new challenger yeah and I'm as cap small I am a game developer with Brooklyn gay Marie I'm also product designer at SoundCloud and the co-founder of the code liberation foundation so this talk is about

diversity but I diversity we don't just mean slapping some brown people or women in a game and calling it a day diversity is not just some veneer for your games to resign underneath because when you think of it that way it can be easily chipped away at and it has to be something that you you're not ending at the end that you're adding towards the beginning so that you don't end up sacrificing in the end I mean we're not really going for this exactly exactly so this talk is really aimed at thinking wait deeper about the games that you're making right what the content is how that content informs the rest of the game you know like we build systems and we're thinking about systems from the get-go but are we really thinking about the other parts of our game like who's starring in them how would they act and things like that so we we don't really think through a lot of things like we're thinking about like you know our characters shooting but like why are they shooting and you know like what who's in this game and like how does

this uphold you know for example like real world stuff that's going on so what's in it for you we're going to kind of be talking through like lots of different games at various different success levels various different build levels we're going to be kind of be dissecting these games talking about different genres as well just all across the spectrum of what we call indie we're going to be examining what creators have done kind of diversify the landscape like how well they did just kind of critiquing them the goods and the beds and even in the parts in the middle and our goal in this talk is to show concrete examples of thinking and you know like talking a little bit deeper thinking a little bit deeper than the surface level of diversity is and hopefully it leads to you getting to broaden your reach audience wise created a deeper community and you know even possibly changing the

market and like the people that you're accessing but we also acknowledge that this is only a singular part of the equation and like there are other parts to change like making games obviously and you know this is just one part of it and it's kind of not yeah so this is why we're calling it subversive so we're going to discussing a couple of things a couple of specific games here and just to note like this isn't a value judgment on the creators it's really the examination of their games we're kind of trying to examine the impact not the intent per se so let's go so hey yes this is catacomb kids it's a roguelike platformer with random character generation it was a Kickstarter success it earned over thirty thousand dollars on Kickstarter it's currently in early access a Harry Plummer is giving talk here I think leaders today saw a lot of

success from an awesome video about all the different things you could do with a rock which was pretty cool in the video kind of went viral and we've seen a lot of roguelikes that have defined character types skin colors etc but in catacomb kids all of the characters have wildly different skin colors name stats faces hairstyles and the kids are barely recognizable as gendered to if these are some of the kind of randomly generated characters from just a couple of playthroughs of the game and the randomness of the kids supports the idea that lack of set situations where with the player characters and it upholds the idea of random generation in the game's design and players will have to try multiple character looks they won't necessarily get stuck on one main and also they won't get stuck on a gendered choice off of I mean you could you could theoretically really always try to go for the dude with stats but you might be sitting there for like 20 minutes

cycling through them so it's a kind of interesting how it the random choice means that you actually have to experience somebody different every time I also it's because the kids are the kid part of the game is like the fragility of life so the kids die quickly so then you just have to go get someone else and then you don't get stuck on them so you can come and kind of compare this to spelunky which has a interesting multi-ethnic cast but you can but you have to unlock many of those characters and but it's what's really interesting in comparison with lucky as a lot of people get attached to their main I see a lot of turban wearing people picking the turban wearing character which is really awesome because the character like there goes characters don't exist in games generally but it's like I mean it's still filled with you know like random like ethnic stereotypes and you still have to kind of play the game for a while to find like more brown people to use there was something and also then that kind of brings up how because of

the fed characters you can kind of pick like you know a black woman who's like a pirate with like a i patch but you can only ever rescue these three people and kind of it's weird that the diversity here is like the pug is like you have two white people and then a dog and you know the damsel jokes kind of tired in and of itself but what could actually kind of use a little bit of improvement that I just think about is that you know what is the difference between Christina and Thomas right here like nothing right stats or whatever but you mean the effect of the game kind of science gender names to specific gender roles it's kind of actually not super helpful like that the game doesn't really actually gain anything from it so another game we all pretty much know shovel knight right it's probably one of the most mainstream independent games out there I love the game personally it did for over three hundred thousand dollars on Kickstarter and it's been a huge success and I feel like part of

that success is because the whole game has been thought through on an extra level I think more farther than a lot of different games and it's very tight designed without necessarily becoming a suffocating and trying to force players to play through it in its own designed way and but the designers thought through a lot of aspects of the game so one thing that was interesting is that they needed to there was a article on gamma future where they came out and they talked about how they needed to expand the NES alakazoo the NES palette and the NES palette actually doesn't have many Browns in it and so for backhoe rewards and just for other things they needed to expand the palette so this is one of the colors that they added to the game and because they were saying hey look we're going to look at the very basic thing so a lot of people look at you know retro or whatever and they say we need to stick to the NES palette but the NES palette has problems in and of itself and they had figured

out that they could add like five colors to actually add diversity to the game and I they also kind of were using this term gender swap for a while for a new feature and they actually changed the their marketing speak to body swap to make it less harmful and more inclusive to people but then there's the kind of one stumbling brick where it's like but why why are their gender roles very specified as the main characters like why is she all night the damsel who needs rescuing and why is she the defensive person where shovel Knight the guy who's the attacker and really like again what does shovel Knight gain from being a guy great so broken age also probably heard about this game this game is pretty popular um so it's got some really interesting things in it right like firstly it stars a black woman and a

white guy they don't have a romantic encounter which is like also kind of cool because a lot of times when there's people of different genders in a game they're like romantically paired together so that's exciting and the other interesting thing about that though is that a kind of which is a good the bad thing because they could have easily messed this up it avoids the complexity of like those kinds of relationships and some people call it like the squirrel for example there's a lot of complexities in there and so by having not having that there they easily avoided you know what could have been a mess and it was actually funded without even having protagonists so hats off to Tim actually for actually like deciding to make one of the characters a black woman it didn't have to happen but it did and that was really awesome because it showed that you know there were some thinking there it was a very conscious decision and also like thanks for the community for not getting angry that there was a woman who was black you know as the star of the game because there

were other games were even just the hint of the main character being not a man for example mighty number nine people got super angry and the other nice thing about this is that there's actually a black voice actor for the character as well something that they could have thought about a little bit more is who they were marketing to you for so for example they could have actually you know gone to different websites like ebony who also runs a wonderful magazine and there's other traditional forms of media as well that are kind of like focused at black buyers and they could have actually you know had a you know they could have actually been something there and kind of said hey you know our game is kind of you knew unique would you be interested in buying it here's a little bit about the game so they could have pitched that to traditional media and actually possibly open their audience even more so on the negative side there are hair

jokes and we've had enough of those so there aren't a lot of black characters in games in general there are a lot of black characters in this game and yet we're making fun of black hair it's already seen as something that's like weird or like strange or unnatural and so just adding on this joke which is also impossible by the way like it if it's open it doesn't shake clothes like once it's down you don't you have to like comb it or something so like black hair doesn't work like that firstly and so it was really obvious that they had no one to say what are you doing so that was definitely a negative about this game so yeah again another another of very popular game Krypton necrodancer it's a rhythm based roguelike we're trying not to go too deep in the stuff that probably everybody knows but

despite being like it seems like the super nice game it did super well so that's that's really awesome another game that I really loved and I really honestly want to know like where am I crypt like like I just want like when are people going to start copying this idea and start making more stuff with it and it's also really amazing that a star as a girl is the main character and also it's like the the cast of the main like random characters is really cool because it it's variously diverse if they have a gender non-conforming character who's brown in the game also and also their play styles reflect their difference like it's not just everybody as the exact same character paste it over but there is a problem when you get to the same character this is the G of the coop character and there's a problem with you know the second player co-op character being just a palette swap of the main

character and it's like she's black right but she's not really a character like she doesn't have any thought she doesn't have a story behind her she has another name but that doesn't actually matter I mean the color swap as a two player character is kind of an old concept I mean no one really bought Luigi as a main character and Super Mario Brothers like you never wanted to play as him and all he did was he was green instead of red and so it's like when you make her black instead of white it's like your dude looks like there's literally nothing about her that's interesting and I felt like I was just kind of curious why I mean this is what has been done actually traditionally like the top the guy is obviously modeled after Mel Gibson on the gut of bottom the other guys model after nobody at all so like Danny Glover actually who doesn't even make up it doesn't make an appearance and if you actually look really closely at the in-game screenshot they have the same head they put more detail into a suit than they did in

changing his head and his hairstyle and then there's also the sky mean and I'm harping on this a little bit just because this is kind of very important like you can't see her on that background like her hand it's a problem that's in film it's in photography of stockings that come in nude that are peach and it's like the generic like the default for film was white people like that's why I like film looks bad with black people that's why people don't know how to make do makeup for them that's why it's like this whole revolution now but it's funny because when you think about something and you're just like hey we're just going to do that it's like she doesn't pop from the background she's not a main character and there wasn't a whole lot of effort put into even thinking like maybe her skin and her hair won't bc abul she actually kind of got like the real short and the stick like she just is not present so the next game is shante and chante is also super it was really successful on Kickstarter made

over 700 che it's a platformer starring a female belly dancer and so that was really interesting and on the sad side it's been a little hard for way forward to actually secure funds to make Shante Shante games because it was a female character and she also happens to be brown so there have been some interesting up and downs in here now firstly I'm really excited about Sean say because it's like really interesting it's like a very fun game it's very exciting it has a female character she's also brown but things like this happened for example for a little bit of time they lightened her art and the fan base was like whoa whoa whoa slow down that's not cool she was a brown character why is she now like super light skins and so people were obviously getting really attached to the fact that there was this brown person being represented in a game so later they actually fixed the color and

yeah they didn't really like like talk about it very much but they did address and correct it so that was good on them for actually you know coming back and saying okay we're going to change your color back but another issue is that if you've ever played Shantay at least the versions that I have played there are a lot of female characters which is awesome but most if not all of them are like just scantily clad they have like very large breasts they have very large noticeable like butts and they have like their midriff is showing and they're just very sexualized so it's kind of uncomfortable being a woman playing this game and I personally was very frustrated when I played it for the first time because I was really excited for shantae like again like it's really cool to see the kind of person in a game but then when I started playing it I was like oh my god every character is like this they're like all the same you know model the same build and like you know a lot of the guys had like a lot of body diversity and things like that but like

all the women were basically sexualized and so that was really frustrating because it's not like it like every woman has to be wearing like completely covered up things or every woman has to be wearing nothing at all it's really about having a mixture of all of it because you know some women want to wear revealing things and that's fine and some women don't want to be revealing things but by having all of them sexualize it just makes it really uncomfortable for a lot of women and female identified people to display more sexy should make women for everything um so I guess it got a little vain talk about my game for a bit so beat him up with turn-based RPG elements and I kind of started out making the game for my like of beat'em ups and I as I worked on it something kind of happened I just kind of started thinking heavily about the need for representation games and also I needed money so I ran a Kickstarter which kind of ended up making about fifty thousand dollars and my Kickstarter updates highlighted the culture that I was

pulling from like graffitiing and trying not to be too ignorant about my own appropriation of it and it actually kind of got me a couple of articles on rock paper shotgun when Adam Smith found it and he wrote about how it sounded like New York poetry okay and talking about the importance of diversity in the game and how it was implementing it got me a lot of other interviews and a lot of fans also want to note that uh I guess I had like ten be a be like a enemy in the game and five of them were black people who are like yeah I want to really support this game this is a guy that I barely know like he's in my friend circle he works a part-time job he doesn't have money you really like sprite and when he saw this picture like he was like wanting to cry like he was like holy like I'm in a video game like that's really awesome and there's a gentle way to the front seat who I met online through this game because he was

like yeah brown people sure like this game looks dope like and it's like yeah people had this like genre interest but then they were also like wow this guy's like tackling these interesting issues too and I mean so like also like different games and the feminist gaming illuminati logos are in there I'm along other ones because people were like yeah why not like one guy it was a guy who Beck and at the logo thing and he said hey I thought a good thing would be to be the feminist gaming Illuminati and then we analyse and we talked it all out and and so like we were all on like an email chain to get you no permission to even use the logo and then it was like yeah like so you know become friends over this whole thing and kind of just thinking kind of created like weird systems deal dealing with some oppression like this class types like a you've got the main character right there who's fighting a cop and kind of a gentler fire in like

the lower east side which is kind of going through a lot of gentrification and so then the class types like the cop is unbalanced the gencha fire just makes her more powerful which is kind of how the world works but I also ran to a lot of stumbling blocks just in my own thinking because I guess of the way writing and thinking about stuff is like I had this problem where a lot of the brown people were because you know I mean I grew up in the hood now I know a lot of people that are in the hood but I like kind of defined them by the hood whereas i defined all the white people by his like more gentrifying and that is it's actually funny because my mom's white and she was label of a cop by all the Puerto Rican people in our neighborhood growing up because they key was the only white person living there but I I had to actually rethink a lot of people's backgrounds and pull some people down and raise some people up because you can't just define certain people by like where they're from and you can't define people by where they move and what their intentions are and then also there's this character who I specifically had a problem with where

like I defined her kind of by the street harassment that she would get and that was really weird and what I was i sat down one day and I was just like man like this is bad and so I so I kind of actually thought about her as like because I actually modeled her like sprites after like Wolverine and x-men vs streetfighter sound like her playstyle and everything so then I thought about well maybe she like a light comics a lot and that like uh you know kind of like what happens in life of bad thing happens and you get suspended from school and then you're like you know I this tool so then that was more like of an empowering thing like she was super smart person that just kind of got screwed over by everything so because I always want to make the enemies have some sort of some sort of redeeming quality because that's also a problem with games that should just mow down all these people that don't matter great so I'm also going to be Sylvain

so prison shell is actually a game that I created with two friends at Brooklyn gay Marie and so we're actually native new yorkers and we're now all based in Brooklyn which is how the name kind of came about and we actually originally formed a group because this game did really well have a hackathon and we were like yeah let's go with it so it was them it's a mobile space shooter with a node-based mechanic which you can kind of see here you kind of jump around and stuff like that and it was inspired by James like radius but we wanted to do something for mobile and something with lasers so yay the lasers hum but the other thing about this game is that it stars a black woman and she's a pilot who's codenamed beretta her inclusion is incredibly purposeful I did that because I didn't see a lot of black women in space you know like who does that so I wanted to specifically have a black woman who the pilot who's determined but not angry like I specifically also made her face to a confident but not in that

way where it's like traditional angry black woman like she knows her stuff and I also did write about the experience of designing her for offworld so something that was bad that I kind of did was originally the character was way lighter skins and that was because there was like this article that came out that was like oh and the future people are going to be like racially ambiguous and they're going to look kind of like this and then I kept thinking about it and I was like why does whiteness equal the future and so I just really decided to say like it doesn't matter what we think the future is going to look like here's what my version of the future is like here's my example of a black woman in space you know in like 100 200 a thousand years and the sad thing also was that in order to launch the game without eventually hating ourselves we needed to kind of cut a lot of features because the game just grew in scale to a point where it was just basically

impossible to finish with the three of us in the time that we had allotted so we cut the story but we still wanted to actually show the main character so we have around a title screen which is also kind of a throwback to games from like 20 years ago where you know they would have a ship and you might have a person who was like on the box art and they were that main character you knew they were in the ship so you always know that beretta is in there shes black woman she's saving the world we also actually put her in the trailer and this is something we want to add in later as well in the actual game because we want to just underscore again this is the person who's operating the ship and even though we didn't have time to actually include her background she's still there and she's still incredibly important now the other thing that this actually did was it actually invited a lot of people who might not have played this type of game to come over and try it out we had a lot of kids a lot of women and like older people as well who were super interested in just trying out

this game and it was also very interesting to learn how to design like an interaction curve that older people could understand not that all people can understand things obviously but sometimes when people come in and they're like oh I haven't tried a mobile game before how does this work so we wanted to kind of make it as inclusive as possible to people so we did a lot of play testing and we just realized that having this character on the main screen also made it very interesting to a lot of different people so it shows that even if your game isn't necessarily narrative driven just by having certain character choices you can actually you know open your audience and you know kind of exciting draw people into your game so what we're going to do in the future is the next version of prison shell which we're going to work on we actually have already started designing her narrative and expanding upon who beretta is and the game the first version of the game didn't do a hundred percent well like we got a lot of great press and things like that but we weren't working with a marketing team so the main reasons that I didn't do super

well was because we didn't really know how marketing worked yet and so we learned a lot in that regard as well also just add that like a part of the underscoring is that it was like people are like men you know brown woman and for the game that's why I didn't sell but you know it's like people often I need to realize that like white dude first-person shooters often don't tell there's a lot of them that you've never heard of so I guess our conclusions so creating characters from diverse backgrounds can invite include and intrigue people who often don't see themselves represented I can make your work stand out in this industry of where you know it's really hard to actually sell things these days it can and it also helps out in this industry where there's all these defaults right people just think of default and even if you don't see color others do and we all have hand and what you have to we all have to have a hand

in making games more inclusive because it can't just be like the brown people on the women making the brown people in the women games because maybe we also want to make like weird shape things that are like one-dimensional and better installations that aren't about the diverse experience so someone else needs to do that occasionally too and you know we're Indies and that means that you know we're not locked into this triple-a hell where you can't change our work what we do jessica Lee we could be more agile we can create characters that are better and we really should other needs to really be no more games that star all white people we should be thinking deeper about the motives for our characters like how can our characters inform our game design and vice versa and we're urging that when people make games that we think about different settings places and people who star in our games and also avoid accidentally upholding oppressive systems while doing so we but we need everybody to be make thicky differently I mean you can make a game about like dogs and cats that

upholds a systemic racism like it's actually kind of easy yep yeah so the next bit we're just going to kind of shout out some games really quick to check out there you know kind of interesting doing pretty good job moon hunters this actually just launched on steam starts at an ancient Mesopotamian lore and it has a lot of brown people an end but I don't know why but people seem to make games about the cradle of civilization make it all like not anymore not anymore read-only memory is also really interesting awesome and by mid lots of people behind gamer acts which is now GX so this was kick or kick starter supported and it's got a lot of really interesting diverse characters I'm looking forward to seeing how they handle voice acting for them so we know I mean if you don't know this game this game some from Cameroon and Africa and they've actually done a couple of

Kickstarter's the second one was successful thankfully and they I don't know it's a very interesting game and we often don't see game set and uh like African fantasy and it's it's a little sad that it has to be an African team that is doing it but at least people are actually supporting them and undertail which is also another Kickstarter game the reason i like this one was clear choices made regarding gender and skin color so like the main character doesn't really have very much of a gender a lot of people referred to you or like a lot of characters are referred to as they the character has brown skin and it's super interesting although then jen during some of the characters was kind of license but overall it was a really interesting quirky narrative game that definitely made me think a little bit thanks you