Panel: Games as a Cultural Force - The Role of Games in Advocacy

um this is one that's actually near and dear to my heart um if the panel about games is a cultural force the role of games and advocacy and so to moderate this panel we have sophia drake from steel media and she will be joined by amir gaudrati from avidy app addie excuse me uh simedinch from uh re-contact games dan bernardo from plato games and pascal clarice from big karma so i will hand it over to you sophia and thank you thank you no thank you and yeah we'll just uh wait for everyone to join there i can see yeah there's amir we've got dan's there just needs that i think the video and the uh the audio's joining there's

everyone hi so we are just waiting for uh a few others we're waiting for uh pascal and oh there's sime oh pascal says he's there in the chat so i'm sure he's gonna get bumped up momentarily to uh join us all here how are you all this afternoon well it's afternoon here whatever time it is where you are yeah i know things are things are going great here it's uh it's a nice only slightly smoky uh morning in san francisco yeah i can imagine the uh air quality is not amazing there at the moment yeah it's like the last days has been quite quite good here in london so it's a it's a beautiful end of day yeah i mean what's it like here i've got the curtains closed oh it's quite nice here actually i'm up in liverpool in the uk so it's quite nice here as well but anyway getting back to the point at hand thank you so much for joining us as kate said this panel is going to be all about the role of games and advocacy and yeah thank you to everyone watching and uh

you know i think we'll dive straight in but obviously just before we do that i want to let you all uh introduce yourselves you know because the audience might want to know a little bit more about you and what you do uh to give everyone an update on me if they don't know i'm sure they do my name's sophia drake i work at steel media and i lead the big indie pitch and a lot of the indie activities alongside you know moderating presenting and you know things like that so um yeah all things indie and all things are presented but uh we'll go in the order i've got you guys so amir if we start with you jonah just give everyone an introduction of yourself yeah so i'm amir gudrati i'm the director of market insights at app annie so my team gets to spend a lot of time analyzing the uh the data that appiani has about the the mobile app economy and we get to share those insights with with the industry and show people what's going on and what's driving change in the market great and next up we've got dan

yeah my name is dan bernardo and i am the founder and director of plato games uh plato is a quite recent addition to the game industry we're working for two years now we work in our first game called great fight and my my background as an anthropologist and i started creating games to try to understand exactly how you know how this media can can influence culture and can influence um you know how how we create uh the cultural advancement landmarks for the next decades or so fantastic and same i know we know each other but uh yeah just give yourself an introduction to everyone watching hello everyone uh i'm simaiding i'm a co-founder of v-contact games we are producing cinematographic mobile games but when i entered gaming industry i saw lack of in diversity and i'm a founder of women in games turkey to empower more women in this industry fantastic and last but not least pascal hello everyone i've been in the

video games industry for 20 years in various continents mostly marketing and entrepreneur and two years ago through my daughter and through many other things happening i realized that there was a problem of inclusion and representation with the disability in gaming and it's 1 billion people around the world and so i started big karma with a lot of co-founders and we are trying to do our best in that field fantastic and yeah i mean we'll get straight into it but like you allude to obviously gaming is you know massive these days has been for a long time it's an established part of popular culture and so as especially as we've seen this year but us you know in recent years we've seen a growing trend for games to contribute to the common good through their messages or at least attempt to um yeah and i want to put to the panel

why do you think this is important or alternatively you know do you think this is something that we maybe shouldn't be doing um does anyone want to jump in uh well let's go to dan we'll go to dan first since you're you're in the middle i'm picking on you first but don't worry we'll be coming to everyone that's absolutely fine i'm just trying to be polite but um yes i think it's a funny um thing to say about this like we're trying to show more representation uh more diversity in games but what i i keep saying to my team is uh games take a long time to be made so what we think we see right now there are results of uh trends and and changes in society that happened like four or five years ago um and they are just emerging now so yes because like games and cinema and theater and music they reflect what we do and they shape what we do uh so i find very hard to see a

thriving game market without creating something that is you know a reflection of what we are living and the problems that we are going through right now i'm very very curious to see what's going to happen next year with all that happened this like this year last year but i think this is this is part of what games as a mission have you like to reflect and and to influence what a society is going through yeah anyone else want to jump in go ahead to mine okay sure like um as a game producer i always believe that the the gaming industry has a lot of new power and it's enriched by different disciplines and different backgrounds and i always believe that this industry can create many opportunities youth in 21st century and i think they're raising awareness and create communities

strongest points strongest power of the gaming industry so we need to use this power in a good way so we are still working and the co-creation is one of the other key point so i would like to highlight in the of it yeah definitely pascal i think you were going to jump in as well yes first of all i agree with all these sentiments that culture shapes education as much as our parents or peers or professors and we have all been marked by movies and and iconic pieces of music or lyrics and video game as an industry is now like me 43 years old so it's balding and it has kids and it's growing up so it's no longer for kids and for um teenagers and it's no longer just for profits it's 2.3 billion mobile gamers in the world and we are going directly to their pockets

and we have interactive and we have direct engagement and some of the games i played in my youth mocked me as well and wear masterpieces too so i think there is this natural inclination and then there is um i think the timing as well which is the certain thing as a marketing guy there is what consumers want the new generations want purpose and it's undeniable you can see it in all the surveys and how they can get that purpose sometimes they have difficulty to define it themselves but the fact that they want it cannot be overlooked and so it becomes more and more important if you want to be profitable as well and we've seen a lot of that in the last couple of years with cancer and culture which is the negative aspect of this whole thing but because it's a little bit fascistic to

cancel things but then there are the debates and the other brands you have to embrace new values that they didn't have to care for before and trust me they didn't have to i was their marketing guy and they were dismissing these issues like ah this doesn't matter for the bottom line um and now they realize it does so there is that and there is the state of the world where we live through big times of change which means that technology and other advancements are really exciting and we working video games have a chance to see it up close it's like oh the times we live in it's fantastic and then you look at the political side of things and as in all times of change in the history it's turmoil it's trouble you have conservatives conservatives forces who have reasons to resist that

change and so there is an escalation of words and economic struggle first but then it gets violent so a friend of mine who is much brighter than me told me three years ago he it was applied near which is another company that tries to do game for good purpose which is science um they're trying to make science cool and he was telling me you know i'm not a book maker so it's not my job to try and speculate who will win between the forces of right and wrong and good versus evil but i can tell that the fight is back and right now it's a tie my only job is to pick a side yeah and here we are yeah and i just want to let and before we move on into some of those topics like politics i just want to see if amir's got anything to add finally on this this particular topic let's say topic this question it's like i'm not i'm only going to make it so interesting because i

you know i'm going to echo many of the things that yeah i said but you know i think we're all pretty much on point here in the sense that uh you know there is there's multiple sides of this you know one it's just important because it would you know create for a better better like environment right you know just people engaging with this content on kind of a continuous basis you know even if there isn't necessarily a a explicit theme in something that someone is creating frequently even the the lack of a theme or the lack of a message is is you know indirectly supporting some sort of of message right and potentially normalizing people to certain viewpoints or behaviors and a big part of you know things that we we are thinking about with with stuff like this and the industry is just you know again bringing more more balance right bringing more more stories from people who aren't necessarily as as represented and you know viewpoints that aren't necessarily as represented historically speaking that hadn't had a voice in gaming before and seeing that increase now is is is great and you know like like

you're saying games take a while to make frequently you know a little bit faster on mobile but uh you know we should be seeing a lot more of these these things and stories going forward yeah definitely so we're obviously well i say obviously i'm going to try and touch on a variety of topics but firstly because i think it's going to be in a lot of people's minds let's let's touch on politics and political discourse you know there's a i'd like to say that's obviously at the forefront uh right now i think politics and political discourse is always at the forefront of popular culture and commentary but i think we have seen escalations and spikes uh especially this year or let's say in the last um 24 months do you think this is important for video games to to delve into as well just like the previous question but which i'm sure you all agree it kind of is based on the previous question but today delve deeper do you think this is something that should have balance or do you think that creators should be true to their you know their their beliefs or equally do you think that there is

certain sides of the argument that you know we should be putting extra emphasis on for example underrepresented um you know people could yeah it reminds us out because this one for me is quite it's quite close to my heart is that of course i think like i'm i'm 43 so i'm i'm from the time that in uni i also have resort um classes where you you go with your colleagues and you make your argument and you discuss and then in the end somebody is is the winner of the discussion uh we are we live in the world that rhetoric doesn't matter they don't work anymore um where you just isolate yourself in your bubble um and if no matter how much proofs you you show the person can still say but i think is wrong and does it so in my opinion direct messages don't work in 2020. so that's why cinema and and games and music are so important because

they can tell a story they can open up people for different experiences without patronizing without telling their wrong without having whatever it is so when i see games like the rest of us or actually lately lots of small mobile games they're very touching um like um my child libens laban spawn i love the game but when you see games like this they tell a story they put you in in the footsteps you know in the foot uh steps of somebody very different from you it creates a new kind of narrative it creates a bit more understanding so yes we should be talking about politics uh i don't think we should be talking about trump we should not talk about biden i don't think this is a place for uh games to be but i think games can tell the story about why these people act the way they act and and what is their motivations and they get the

player to decide which side they are yeah definitely sorry i was just uh someone in the comment section was asking for the title of my child laban spawn so i just quickly through it yeah no it's a really great uh game and and the studio are just as nice as well um but yeah anyone else uh got some thoughts and opinions on this topic um what dan just said because he said direct messages doesn't work anymore and it's absolutely true something inherently um awesome with gaming which is that the story is interactive and you put down narratives there but the player ultimately creates his own narratives or her own narratives like i was with my star wars toys long before stealing the star wars movies i had created my own stories with the

toys three years before seeing a movie about star wars and that's to impact the video game through play you create your own stories and it's not even about picking a side i would say one thing i repeat all the time in the case of inclusion and representation and why it matters so much i keep saying kids don't listen they imitate and so if you tell them you should do this and you should say that and you should they're not gonna listen to that give them a video game through which they learn it on their own terms by trial and error and failure which is awesome in which we should embrace a lot more in our society um especially at a young age we shouldn't over protect our kids so much and let them fail let them try let them say stupid thing let them do stupid thing and see what happens in the game and learn oh the nuance of this and the sophistication of this

i like also to tell my teams we are not teachers we have a socratic approach which means we cannot teach them anything we can only make them think but to make somebody think video game is the most powerful tool i have come across so far yeah i mean uh is this mirroring a lot of your thoughts as well well so i live in istanbul i live in turkey and when you're talking about politics we have to imagine the lack of freedom of the journalists and look of freedom of the media because they can't talk about politics they can't really tell the story so i would like to share my own experiences like six years ago there was a guessing park uh issues in turkey it starts with 10 people then it reached 3 million people everyone in the streets they start they

were protesting the politics but the media didn't show anything the media was showing the penguin documentary so as you know i was uh i created a team to make a game about that situation to reach people in the world and tell the story about the situation so i was really focused on the create awareness raise awareness and creating the community via games so in turkey we need more games to tell those real stories yeah definitely it makes us it makes me so nervous that when we talking about politics unfortunately in turkey it's hard to talk about that no i can't i can i can fully imagine you know and i think sometimes uh there is obviously difficulties in being as you know forward in the advocacy as possible in different regions in the world and obviously we all have to

bear different level of burden to help people on the other side of that well whatever term you want to use curtin um you know amir is there anything else you would like to uh add to this yeah i mean i i definitely think it's a you know kind of an interesting question kind of you know linking back to to movies and music you know there's there's basically room for kind of all areas of the spectrum right where you can have things that are you know very direct and and maybe even somewhat satirical in terms of things that are going on with with your multiple themes and addressing multiple things then you'll have other ones where it's maybe a little bit a little bit more subtle and the big thing is just for the market you know you don't necessarily want just all of one type of of game right you should be having different types of games that are kind of addressing some of the the you know the stories in in various types of ways depending on you know what the overall goal is of the story that that you're trying to tell uh and from uh from you know creative perspective it's like okay well

are the elements that you're including are they organic to that story you know because if you don't integrate them in the right way you can sometimes do things that are going to feel forced in in inauthentic which which can be really bad uh but at the same time you know there are certain things that we should be looking at for like every game that that comes out you know whether or not we we act on those things where it's even just well what are the you know the demographics of the characters that exist in this game right you know whether it's uh you know any aspect of race or gender or even just size right and and how they're created and those are things that you know frequently you know most games independently of what it's about like that's a very easy one to be able to address just making sure you at least have like a diversity of representation of the stuff that's that's going out there and so that you know wouldn't necessarily go against the the core story that a creator might be be telling uh but that is something that is you know frequently still still lacking especially for just like made playable characters and things like

that yeah definitely pascal i can see you yeah sorry let's differentiate two things there is partisan politics and then there are political issues that can sometimes be very universal and that you can talk without picking a partisan side in a single country so the representation is a good one and amir is absolutely right some things should break the glass this evening and then become adopted wider and broader which is logical when you think about the evolution again historically of the the consumer it was kind of a truth in the 90s that 80 percent of gamers were male and young so the marketeers and business people were catering to that audience and they kind of missed the shifts but

they're catching up now at least at many companies that oh we have 2.3 billion consumers now so we have 53 women or we have old people and if you consider myself and dan old then we really have a lot of old people and we are the ones spending the most money in it thank you i discovered that many games that my target demographic was 37 to 44. these are the ones who subsidize the free-to-play experience for the rest of the kids watching the ads and asking a dollar or two from mom and dad every now and then the ones with the credit cards they have the whole lines paying for their experience so it's really broad and you have cassie social casino games are built on women over 55. this was a demographic we didn't have in the 90s so it's all ethnicities all countries all religions all genders and if you

still play to the male stereotype you alienate the biggest portion of your audience because of that old audience that was historic it's it's the old saying all generals are generals tend to fight the old war you have to catch up now and realize that the war is much different than it used to be and as for parties and politics i personally don't like it at all but i understand that in turkey where i've spent a lot of time and i love istanbul it may be necessary and in colombia i understand where i live now i understand why some people feel it's necessary it's resistant resistance and the other side is doing it as propaganda anyway i will remember that america's army was a recruitment tool for america's army in 2005. that's 15 years ago so i understand if some people feel it's necessary as well the parties

and politics it's way riskier and much more timely i feel it's like uh um i don't know peace in time it's dated it's less universal and in temporal and also more geographically uh limited can i yeah just one little thing um cool sorry no no no please that's the point of the panel chip in whenever you want we'll look in we might we might be talking about this a bit later with more um details but i'm always very um nervous when you talk about representation i mean you just said you know it's something i agree that's supposed to be quick and easy to relatively easy to to add i'm very nervous about representation in games these days because customization is not equal to representation um so you get a elf and then you put an afro head like hair and then okay so the problem we have a black character there um and it's something that i think uh

probably the audiences of games of you know from my childhood would not be that sophisticated audiences today i'm much more sophisticated about you know when it comes from the heart and comes from like i i'm actually creating a game now there's a a black um female character and then people keep asking me are you doing this just to be politically correct and my answer is that i could not tell this story being anybody else um so if you cannot tell story being anybody else i think is is is valid but if you just to check the boxes i i think people like audiences notice that you made a fantastic point that the audiences are going uh getting gradually more sophisticated by the day and it's been true for in human history long before they were media look at the books that they were written century by century regaining

sophistication and nuance and certainty um and i think this is really important it cannot be a checkbox that you take or but i will say this for some games it's a start and as always when you drive towards a utopia you might want the big companies to do it wrong first so that they get some backlash they learn from it and they get more sophisticated the certain time and third time around it's a start that they at least try to take a checkbox that before didn't exist and in some games i would say you could do it in street fighter the first when we played street fighter 2 in the arcades it was kind of irrelevant the backstory in that game so there are some games in which it can just be um adding a few

characters but doing it with the same amount of thought and work as you put in a real and can so if it's just a quick character that you build nine days before release for pr yeah that's gonna show but if you just you know pre-produce it give it the same amount of thought and care give it care uh use your empathy study do your homework and then it can be done and it doesn't have to be done in every story we there was that debate just yesterday with the oscars um it's not that you have to do a content piece in history and you have to put black people in a time and place where they were not just to win an oscar that's not what the new guidelines say it's at your marketing department at your internship department at um for the roles that make sense

and it also can be the vgtq community and it can also be just do what's right for uip but at least open your mind and heart and i think that's that's a good beginning like you then i'm going at my own problem with a lot more sophistication and time and i don't expect all companies to do that but i think we shouldn't further stones at them for trying failing like with kids let them fail a little bit they've been failing me for centuries so i have to do that and they've been failing disabled community for millennia they were cast away they went this in concentration camps around the world uh and it was a shame on the family and sometimes a bad spell religiously so yes we have centuries to fight back but let's go at it step by step and let's take what we can let's take the allies where they are

and then let's educate them on being a bit more sophisticated the next time i have allies that able gamers who have been in the disabled field for 15 years and special effects for i think 10 years believe me every now and then i'm the ignorant one on the call and they teach me something but i need to be allowed to say the stupid thing so that they can correct me that's what alliance thinking can be i guess when we don't take the checkbox but we have the dialogue and listen to one another and learn from one another thing can go pretty quickly then yeah so i mean all of those are great points and just i'm gonna what i'm gonna do is blend a couple of questions together i suppose in because actually just in the discussions we've been having already we've been touching on a lot of other things i wanted to discuss and obviously we want to keep room for the uh questions from the audience in about 10 minutes time

um but um you know obviously we've got politics and and if we say politics is one area we've obviously got you know advocacy comes in a range of different sources you know there's the the core politics then there's i suppose areas that touch on politics but go much deeper than that such as you know um inclusion diversity representation whether that's through ethnicity through race through gender through sexuality all those sorts of areas but we also have massive topics right now i mean as amir alluded to one of the side effects of it you know climate change we obviously have um you know animal welfare as well so looking at these what i want to put to you as a panel is taking all of these into account are there some topics that you think are much easier for developers who may be nervous about these sorts of areas to you know approach um and also at the same time when do you think is the right time to be considering these things it might

seem like an obvious question to all of us but obviously you know it may be something that people on the panel you know are considering uh and it's good to know when is the right time to approach all of these topics so um i think if we come to semai first and and then we'll see how the conversation flows i have to say right now maybe we're too late but um i need um i need to tell the story about like three years ago we have to start uh we have to start work with undp and in women with women in games community so we organized a hacking the feature hackathons so we invited game developers artists scientists and social entrepreneurs in an abundant village to talk about and develop games with reference of sustainable development goals which is the climate change the zero poverty

economical growth and the amazing inequalities yes there are many we have many problems to focus on so we there there are ten teams and teams are true they chose their uh problems and they focus on how they solve this problem and how they raise awareness with games so it it it was so successful and we are still organizing that hacking to future events in abundant villages in different areas to involve to invite their villagers also the the children from 8 to 18 to because we need to involve uh that age we need to start in the that age to create better future i think so i i would like to also mention the 1.5 the game which is developed by undp and it's very very successful the campaign is based around the mobile

game that educates people about climate policy and provides a platform for them to vote on the solutions they want to see happen so it's very important because the votes will then be compiled and analyzed by the researchers of the university of oxford so then they send them to the policy makers so up until now the 1.5 million people voted and they played the game uh we need to see the more games like that we need to see more interactive games like that so yeah so i suppose that's interesting as well because obviously part of the answer is obviously about the holistic research and it and you know being early on but what i take away from it listening to you as well is obviously you know um the educational aspects from us as an industry are just so important as well which i think is spot on you know um does anyone else have any opinions on

on these uh these areas definitely echo that uh you know the the right time to be doing this would be now or you know like 20 years ago right like it's it's you know anything to do to kind of you know correct for for you know the fact that you know we haven't been making as much of a push before and um you know a lot of times you know one of the big things you can do to try and avoid you know having things come off as a check box is to make sure that you know your your own company has people of various types of backgrounds that are that are working for them and that's always gonna you know always historically has been a big issue with with many industries and especially in like leadership positions as well right and again that's one of those things where even just like understanding you know the demographics of people that that you've hired and what you're doing to make sure you're you're reaching out to you know types of town that maybe you're not

having as much success recruiting for for whatever reason just even knowing where you stand right now can frequently be a you know a big eye-opener in terms of how far you know various companies might need to go and you know definitely the larger the company is you know the more of a responsibility i feel like they have towards being able to do this because they're going to be the ones that have the resources uh to be able to make these changes you know relatively easily as compared to maybe maybe some other companies but you know that's just going to create you know better stories better games uh and you know incorporating them like you were saying incorporating elements of this into various games can be in in pure gameplay mechanics right you could very easily imagine a climate change or global warming you know explicit version of like super mario sunshine or or something like that right where they're going around and cleaning things up uh but you know in addition to just the the you know the gameplay elements you know you will have people that are you know

passionate about telling various types of stories of things that are important to them and just you know finding ways of being able to you know get get those stories on the on the world of gaming right you know sometimes like i said it might just require talking to more people and getting more research and and look at what's going on but you know as i think maybe dan mentioned earlier right you know art is a reflection of life you know the more mature the industry goes the more likely it is to be you know focusing on increased art themes you know kind of being in these and you know movies have this as well but like you were saying because you're playing characters in games you know there's a very very strong ability for games to act as kind of like an empathy machine right um you know not only just learning about things that are going on and impacting but you know the fact that you're making these choices and seeing what the outcomes of these these choices are you can you know follow that through a narrative thread and that is you know not only a very very positive experience but can often be a very rewarding experience for

for gamers as well so it's it's like oh this is this is you know good for the world but it's also something you know again that can be good for the quality of the product you're you're creating yeah i think i was just gonna say i think you raised a really good point as well which is one of the questions i was going to ask later on but we're not going to have the time but i just think it is important as you raise the what you're doing externally is obviously represented internally otherwise it kind of defeats the purpose and you know and there's no you know i think you need to have that going on in the background you need to have equal representation and real experiences and stories in order to authentically display that on the other end to the consumer but i'm very sorry i just wanted to say that given i know we won't have time to ask the question but i think i interrupted was it pascal who was talking then yeah i was about to say we play narratives and characters within environments so climate change is the same point you don't have so many people at the moment make games about climate change shout out to will mariacola from

four good games in their others and it's great but you can also have your own game that is not about climate change and just have a little bit of sustainable environment uh mechanics it baked in it same as for representation if you do it with subtlety thoughtfully with care and not just as a checkbox to take it could be awesome and as for the time to start i was about to say like a mere maybe 20 years ago because i wrote a sim city about a sustainable sim city in 2010 and they never act on the game designed up unfortunately and i remember that when i was young midnight oil had opened up burning is a big hit about the planet uh that we were basically burning and it was in 1984 or something like that so it's but the time to start something 20 years

ago is now and again it's about um embracing some new layers of stealth learning because yes we have a very important um role at um as a gateway to education but as a kid and my kids today tend to hate educational games that are in your face and tell you i'm gonna teach you arithmetics i'm gonna teach you with authority something and i want to give us all hope i think it's about us as creators learning more from true science and education and other fields and then casualizing it make simplifying it finding the fun in it to make it in our games in a way that it becomes stealth learning and i think i'm about space did a fantastic job with that and opened my eyes about the possibilities

and robot space was done with nasa and all the science the microgravity in it was done with nasa and then you have the updates about mission mars with the rover that was driving traffic to nasa.com and angry about space was the number one source of traffic for nasa.com for two years in a row and that is recruiting the astronauts of tomorrow because you make them feel in love with space now they're gonna crack the books about physics because they found a motivation and i think that's where gaming can play such an important role for so many things as the gateway yeah and dan sorry my dog that's okay enough come on i love dogs let's just try to be very quick um two uh negative dodo stories just to clarify my opinion about it um when we start creating our game uh somebody said we should

create some like you know um environmental uh game and my my first question was uh who in the team is really passionate about it who in the team really cares about it and and cannot sleep at night because of it and nobody said yes and i said we should not do it um we should we should do things that we really love doing um this is part one uh hiring people in your team who who really cares about it yeah and not not that i don't care about it but i know that other people care much more than i do and the second one is uh i was giving a star um uh um talk on gamescom maybe a year ago two years ago and uh the theme was uh i don't like us as a minority uh that the name of the talk was black gay south america something like that like what am i doing doing games um and the the point was like i i don't want i i don't want you know the white people

in the room to say hey i give space to the new it's not about that is that um there is a little uh joke in the internet that says a frog says i would love to have more stories about frog and then the cat said like you are completely right i will tell those stories um so you should have more frogs in the room it's not like don't get the cats out but it goes back to my idea of representations like you don't understand the story you are telling is very hard to resonate um so as in in climate change as in uh racial politics as in sexual politics you have to have somebody who lives there who lives this in the everyday uh and one final thing is that the game doesn't have to i agree completely with pascal the game doesn't have to be teach anything the most um ecological sound game that told me much much about uh ecology was final fantasy vii um says

nothing about it and tells everything about it so there's amazing ways to explain this and to tell the story yeah i was thinking about final fantasy 7 when i was making my point and that goes back to the fact that games have always been part of the culture not just all of them but some games were already influential on the playstation yeah and you know and just going back because i i think you you you you know you make just the amazing point is that you need to have the people who are passionate but that also means you need to make sure that in the background you are making efforts to you know bring that diversity of opinion of you know representation into your team in order to tell those stories in the most authentic way possible and the truest way possible um yeah thank you all um unfortunately we've got no time for questions i don't think because we've run right over the end of the the conference

but okay actually one more dumb thing i want to say 12 years ago when we started to not just be all men in my marketing departments but started to hire women in it guess what our sales with women increased so to your point about bringing diverse people into your team it's not because you want to be kind and you want to take a checkbox and you want to avoid bad pr it's because they are going to make your team much better much more global much more universal you will make more money yeah is the bottom line yeah great point um so you do have three questions in the q a and if uh if you're you keep your answers concise we may be able to get to all of them because you do have about seven minutes left so fantastic i'm running uh i have got the time fantastic i thought we'd run right over so that is

absolutely perfect then so um shall i ask them kate is that either way it's entirely up to you well i mean i'll i'll i'll jump in with the the the first one but um well i'll go with karen's question first because obviously it came in through the chat and then came into the q a and i think it's obviously uh you know important and it'd be great to get insight is so karen asked following on from the racial injustice and diversity and inclusion programs that are multiplying by the second are there groups um other groups of gaming companies that are working um you know working for for example diversity and inclusion employees based employee-based awareness programs basically are there areas that we can point people to that are helping to to spread this message and really champion these areas within our industry right now um i can i can tell one thing like a few months ago i was part of a panel in sumo uh digital and they

create do a great job um talking about um ltgb um subjects in in the group of employees and i think i thought that this is uh there's uh amazing um initiative the one thing that i point out there is that normally if you can find this in companies very easily especially if they're slightly bigger either organized by the company or by employees uh but the one thing i think is missing is that they are preaching to the convert like normally in these meetings you have just lgb people so like we should have like the idea of of equality and idea of saying how important we are to be in this conversation you have to bring the people annoying the conversation um so one of one thing i love to see more is is events like this they are not just to minorities it's so like get get get the white guys in the room let's

talk to them i think that's that's the more important thing yeah um anyone else or don't worry if you don't have anything because obviously we've got a few questions that will try and squeeze it i gotta tell you that with the dni thing [Music] i often find it to be from a different perspective than that but arriving to the same conclusion it's a bit of a band-aid on on an open wound and it's against the checkbox saying and to go back to some the only thing i disagree with you i mean so far is when you said it's probably easier to do for big companies because they have the resources i would disagree with you on that sorry i didn't say this easier so is it to find happening right now oh no it's me they earlier because of the resources it might be uh easier for them for the big companies i find big companies have a lot of inertia and they need a

lot of buy-in and a lot of politics and a lot of people signing off and there are hundreds of people in various offices around the world at least when it's not working from home and sometimes to pass the message down or to get action sometimes the ceo makes a decision in 2017 and the actual change starts being executed in 2020 after how many meetings and how many documents in small companies if you decide something you can execute it tomorrow so it's in you it might be harder in you to decide it but you can execute it tomorrow and on that dni thing i was like but shouldn't be the head of dni to have real power be the human resources head because that's where the decisions are made not discussed head of the ni is just a

discussion position so the person i thought to hire as head of dni because she has so much experience working with people with disability in the workforce eventually i told her you know what you're going to be a co-founder and you're going to be the head of human resources because that's where the power of your job lies and the fact that she's a black woman is a bonus but you don't want her to end up being a token you want her to be empowered so make the mental shift and just do it and i find that easier at my small startup where i'm the ceo and have just a few partners to call and to uh to agree with than if i was working at a stock exchange listed company and you know it's slower this way so sometimes it's just about opening your heart doing it don't do it how us like then point it out earlier do it do it

with a passion and and be thoughtful if you decided to do it be thoughtful about it how can i do it right yeah and then i just you know thank you to everyone i just wanted to also say thank you kate as well for offering your expertise in this area over in the q a section since we've sadly run out of time i try no thank you so much but yes before i get before i get booted out and i pass over to kate sorry okay i just wanted to personally say thank you to everyone for being a part of the panel thank you so much everyone you know i'm sorry we didn't get to go through all of my questions but i think we got through a good chunk of it all yeah absolutely thank you all that was fantastic this is such an important topic i realize 15 minutes is not even nearly scratching the surface but i think you were able to not only get people to think about the topic but you also touched a lot on a lot of global trends which was actually the whole point of this track today so this is a perfect way to end the track

so with that i will say goodbye and thank you very much and with that i will also thank you once again to our track sponsor app annie for supporting this very important track you