The 2019 Indie Soapbox

[Music] i'm michelle silva i hail from a two person two cat independent studio called sky studios this is my partner James there in the middle husband and partner hello dressed up at the local Ren Faire a few years ago when I had hair and we're most known for dishwasher Charlie murder and most recently cell and sanctuary so how do I tell you who I am and what I do it would be easier to tell you what I don't do but here's a few of the things artists designer designer marketing person biz dev person many many things we mire many hats as any developers so more on that in a minute the first a little story being in a teenager is the worst but what's worse is when a teacher somebody who's supposed to tell you that you can do anything you can be anything tells you no no you can only be good at one thing

I remember when I was a teenager a teacher suddenly quizzed me in front of a bunch of elementary students and I couldn't respond I froze up just that instinct to freeze up and he said uh-huh you know those artsy types because I couldn't answer his math question as a teenager I was absolutely mortified just mortified and now as an adult I think back on this and I has stayed with me and I'm angry because if me and culture was around back then I might have found solace in this tweet hang on I'm not dumb I'm just panicking but hang on I am an artsy type all right we can see this but I was also an IV calculus that's like a pee in the u.s. I still have the hoodie to prove it it still fits me that was in warrior calculus that that means what do we high so I may be artsy but I'm good at other things I have a BA in Fine Arts but I also minored in business

I can I may not be good at reacting on the spot but I can be good at more than one thing so we know this this phrase jack of all trades master of none but I want to introduce to you my idea of master of all trades and as a small studio we are two people you have to be able to do this you have to be good at many things to be able to make a game come together and to ship the game and it's okay to only want to focus on one thing if you want to focus on just art that's great but it's not the only way it doesn't have to be the only way so just like when the teacher assumed I was the artsy type making these kind of assumptions can be really harmful when James and I meet new people they often say oh uh he's the programmer and she's the artist right this is not super fair to us yeah he was the programmer but he

does the bulk of the artwork using musician he has so many more things and I am an artsy type but I also brought enough dang business and I am NOT infallible I have been known to do things like joke about programmer art hahaha but this is a disservice to both of us it's a disservice to assume these things and this starts early this starts young and it's perpetuating to adulthood when I was a kid I was gifted like girly things arts and crafts and such and I do love arts and crafts and such but I also love Legos and building toys and things that are considered boys toys but I would like to ask why not both I can't I like both things like I do so self esteem is a thing I will freely admit that I am NOT a very confident person despite sitting here talking about mastery and we often disparage James and

I will often disparage ourselves and say we're OK enough at each thing to make a game but that's not fair because taking the spark of an idea of the game and developing into a fully fledged game and releasing that game now beginning the hellscape that is release if that is not a mastery of mastery I don't know what is so celebrate your mastery we don't need to separate these things they are integrated maths and Sciences is so important that to put these two things together and especially in video games like this is what this is this is who we are there are jobs that work with knowledge and skills that span multiple fields and these people are very valuable and broadening our horizons so taking like learning something in one field can easily help you in another and

best of all we are in a golden angel learning knowledge is at your fingertips and there are more and more masters every day so I just wanted to have a quick like visual shout out to some people and I know that our bet have multiple things that maybe they started out in one field and like start learning another or just have always done many things and this is a few places you can find me some my Twitter and Facebook and a new Instagram account account that are created called real alternate cat facts it presents very very real cat facts as you can see so you can be good at more than one thing don't have to but your interests can improve each other and build on each other and you can be a master of all trades I am a game creator based out of Osaka Japan I've been making video games since 1996 so this

year is my 26th yeah by the way yeah when you want to drink beer but you don't have a bottle opener what do you do try your teas now don't tell me you give up on video don't tell me yeah there's no need for that there are many ways to open the bottle I recommend this a heart and the squat surface it's super easy and this used chopsticks just like a leer Japanese person hashtag drinking when I talk about drinking I always use this hashtag so when people come to visit my office they always bring me alcohol everyone yes I am a man who knows how to drink now I'm

going to teach you how to enjoy drinking in any situations yeah for example when you don't have a bottle opener no problem everyone has a key right yeah so doing King yeah well yeah you might not to be able to use this in 10 years become this tower something what about this you drove to the praised simple we have over yeah yep doing King and what about this you don't speak the language and have no friends there don't worry drinking that's never problem just drink together and you are already friends right you

forgot your wallet you have you have friends yeah just pay back them next time and you forgot your ID and save us ID as a PDF you phone yeah it doesn't work yeah try winking and it boy growing the kiss it's work but the other most situations for example when the other manipulator has a bend or when someone wants to post everything or when they are crazy fans nearby don't think during King yeah no one can defeat the king but I ordered an IPA and they brought me by the right yeah sorry it's game over that's the one

thing I can't do yeah nevermind drinking switch into a new gear and order a new drink this is three rules getting around with alcohols finally doing that with you wine or beer or whiskey a lot of alcohols in the world learn about types and makers kind of baseball team of double team like that drink expensive alcohol this is important what if we can't even drink a job of it drinking that's ok as long as you have a friends no problem even water can become the best drink with friends yeah yeah don't make alcohol yourself your goal this is

important by the way I have a Guinness World Record and yeah and also I have a master license in Buddhism and I'm living in Temple yeah this is true and sometimes I go spray and sometimes I spray as a pro-wrestler and I've done three sessions at the CDC so far three times and also I have session on this Friday please come if you are interested in that's all I love you all thank you you know I've been a developer for a long time and even when I was a young kid I when I was making games on the zx81 the I would be

very critical about what I was doing and try to polish it and try and get into a really good state so I want to talk a bit about that and how I find that's really important now as well a bit of history about myself so I started programming in 1981 on the jeddak's 81 and then I was programmer on Star Fox at age 19 and which is pretty young and then and it worked the Sony Playstation for six years and worked on like the PlayStation 2 and did the rubber duck demo and all this kind of stuff back in the day and then I found the cue games in 2001 because I always wanted to make a games company and ever since I was like you know 12 finally managed to do that and that's 18 years now and then I launched a pixel junk series in 2007 which was really in the early days really of indie gaming back then there really were only a few games on say PSN or you know on consoles as I was and it

was really kind of like like the wilderness and and I've developed and shipped over about 20 about 20 original games ok so the reasons that be your harshest critic there are tens of thousands of games that are just kind of good enough sort of a.m. they languish you know like on steam and places like that and even after removing the games that have no hope at all are selling like the just the stuff that really no one put any effort into even then the average income on one of these games it's still it's pretty low you know it's about I think there was a talk at GDC maybe last year or the year before about it where someone had calculated it but it was they said the the average income was only about $30,000 so if you spent say two years making a game like you're not really earning much from that and that's the average and it's no different in the none indie world as well I mean you know in in triple-a games as well there's a lot of stuff out there and it not all of

them make money and so what you make I think has to shine very brightly and I mean nowadays because of unity unreal and everything pretty much anyone can knock up a regular game and with unreal you even get like stuff like online multiplayer which used to be very hard to do back in the day and just this kind of stuff this level of ease of entry simply wasn't available just ten years ago even and this means you know before you'd have to make your own engine and develop things in that direction and and I would help you kind of get above the crowd a bit because you make like an original engine you make your stuff look different to everybody else and its really good but nowadays with unity alone you can achieve a level of graphics that would have required rolling your own engine and you know just a few years back and for example when we went to make pixel jump monsters - last year we decided to use unity and we just put a lot of polish into it to

try and make it really stick out and this year one of the really big reasons to be your own harshest critic the Internet and it's quite a horrible place out there sometimes and quite a good place other you know sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad it can be very bad you know I've been on the wrong end of lots of comments and the Internet is your harshest critic and very quickly you know I mean steam reviews can be very harsh they'll focus on the the slightest flaw in your game and it's this will just snowball out of control and totally scupper your game before it even has a chance and people who feel strongly about some slightest problem your game will try and get others to avoid your game so you can self justify their own mistake or so they believe in you know so they believe so they want to make sure that someone else doesn't purchase the game and you need to beat the Internet so you need to be as critical

about your own work as they are and probably more so so you have to criticize your own game as well as the Internet does so I often see problems on teams where devs take things far too personally and it happens all the time you know because you love what you're doing for example a piece of art might come up and it doesn't really match the buy of the game and being poi and trying not to rub people up the wrong way you know you might hint and say that this doesn't quite feel right but it's a bit too vague really and really everybody should be a bit more clear and more frank about what the automat goals are and if things aren't matching you should be very clear and try and be as honest as possible and the way one way to do this is not to focus on the people involved so much and focus on what you're making and I've been in a you know I've been made a lot of games and quite often people get you know they

kind of think that you're talking about them when you say oh this isn't quite good enough but what you're saying is just this particular thing that they're making isn't quite good enough and doesn't quite match the game and the quicker you can get everybody to understand that all the criticism is just about making what you're all making together a better thing that's that's when you start to make a really good thing like a really good game I think so addressing problems before other people do is is important so if you're on a team and you also you want to show things to other people on the team and you want to be very quick at doing that but you also don't want to show it too early so I sort of my suggestion or my advice is the whole things in a little bit have a little review by yourself of what you're making and just make sure that you've kind of filled in all the little gaps that you can by yourself and

then take you to the team take it to all the other your friends or whoever and then get their advice and then feed that back in as well so it's like a multiple step kind of process and because obviously if you make stuff and quickly show it to people then you're gonna get criticism and you're gonna get loved criticism and I might demotivate you and it's always best that I try and make things as best as possible by yourself first and so you also have to criticize the right things so on all teams larger than just one person it gets more and more difficult to maintain like overall vision and some people switch off and stop trying to understand and this leads to an inferior game and everyone needs to understand the vision and if you feel you don't need to discuss it with everyone else until you do grasp it and you know you need to kind of understand like every needs to understand the vision and the sort of fundamental side

of things for example on a game where the goal has always been to create a game where the main character can jump then criticizing the game for not having a jump will mean your opinions kind of quickly rejected and so you have to kind of understand the situation like understand what we're aiming for when you're making a game and make sure you criticize the right things in the game and so the game is your legacy and a good game I mean this is kind of the last slide so it's just a small point from my perspective as an old bloke in games dev if you make a good game you're last forever and I'll define your career and you will always be able to look back on it and people will still remember it for long time forever of a long time even today you know people come up to and say you know I love stuff of Salinas like that was you know for me it's like over 25 years ago so it's kind of a surprise you know the people still remember these sort of old games and stuff that I've

made and and I think every game you make is gonna be you know treat it as though it's gonna be the most important game that you'll ever make because sometimes you might not even get a chance to make another game and you know you need to make sure this one counts and make sure you've made it the best thing you can ever make and and and that's it so thanks for listening and I'm Devin Cuthbert on Twitter you can always follow me or talk to me or whatever and I always restrain respond to absolutely everybody who messages me so yeah just say hello and ask me anything you like so thank you so this is this picture is a representation of me and my work and experiences that I've had at GDC I write stuff but also do game design and music my name is Liz Ryerson

okay so I because of me feeling a kind of deep despair about political realities here in America and abroad I went back to reading some great music some books about how some great music by freaks and Outsiders and people who survived like the 80s and the Reagan and Thatcher era and how they did it so I read this book our band could be your life great book same rip it up and start again about post-punk in the UK by Simon Reynolds so I was gonna talk to and talk about lessons I learned from that and how we could sort of start a punk movement in games but it looks like someone already beat me to it Thank You Amazon you really know what the people want assuming they don't work in your warehouses [Applause] thank you but this underlies my point that Punk has sort of become a cliche it's become

sort of an ironic marketing gimmick or a costume this is from I think Return of the Living Dead movie it's like Hollywood depiction of punks it's and it's the same for words like disruption or resistance they start from a genuine place but gradually sort of become subsumed into this like gimmick idea the context is remove and it becomes yet another sort of image or place to position yourself and sell your stuff so the thing is that it meant something completely different in the 70s in the 80s for many people inside those communities punk was about opening up horizons of possibility for people who would otherwise not have the resources to explore it so it was about sharing resources and it was about in building sort of a solidarity among freaks and Outsiders in an increasingly sort of sanitized and hyper capitalist world that was taking investment and resources away from public spaces and leaving a lot of people basically out of luck but thanks to some stuff that happened here in the u.s. in the nineteen ninety-one the culture shifted in the

meaning of punk music indie music and DIY changed drastically from exploring ideas into sort of finding a business model and a brand this is quote from Ian MacKaye it's sort of relevant because we have a politician here in the u.s. named better--or Roark who says he's a big fan of Ian MacKaye although I'm not sure he would agree with some of his ideals but people who are committed to Punk is a philosophy that carried through to all aspects of the work we're like Ian's makai were very bewildered by this there's also a quote from Steve Albini who's like a producer and musician where he said I saw a lot of friends and acquaintances turn their bands which were previously something they did out of a passion into a small business and over the course of doing it they ended up hating their bands in the way I used to hate my job because it became an obligation if you hadn't guessed the thing in 1991 that happened was Nirvana and grunge music breaking into the mainstream at the same time at the at the time it seemed like this monumental

shifting culture but bands like Nirvana were at a scale of success way larger than like Fugazi or any of those big names in Punk so it's actually kind of a weirdly tragic time for many people it destroyed thriving subcultures by helping sort of create these cults of celebrity and personality around often very young and self-destructive usually male figures who are not in any way equipped to deal with their newfound fame does that sound familiar to you does this sound familiar to you so video games are in the post explosion world Nirvana's happened now what most kids watch video game youtubers and stream more kids watch video game youtubers and streamers then like network TV digital marketplaces have erupted and finding visibility is incredibly difficult here's a bunch of games that I like that many people probably haven't heard of unfortunately a lot of people out there haven't gotten the memo there's a lot of interesting and groundbreaking games

coming out but very little to track any of it or embrace or appreciate it a lot of people doing groundbreaking stuff just burn out and never come back also critics and publications who have attempted to track this new work in the past have often stopped doing it because no one reads their articles here's a few defunct sites basically finding visibility as a critic also means building a business model because it means surviving which means focusing on what's already a known quantity to reach the widest possible audience so oftentimes that means not some new obscure thing that no one knows about so the little guy kind of gets lost in the shuffle yet again it's that never-ending cycle the hand of the marketplace the big moneymakers sort of increasingly congeal around this goal of short-term profit to maintain like a larger overhead and expectations on the product they make and so the power that each individual has compared to like a CEO is extremely small so we don't really have a situation that fosters like

large-scale support of like this kind of innovation or challenging work within the industry so a lot of the light floods sort of gets squeezed out and a lot of people are just fed up like the game industry oftentimes treats as employees is expendable and replaceable by an infant new stream of young eager kids because games are popular and by default like as a woman or another marginalized group in game industry you're sort of automatically expected to be an advocate on behalf of the industry which is something I never really signed up for I mean I'm I love a lot of games like I'm interested in the potential of games but I didn't sign up to get death threats and to be honest I never like really cared about the mainstream industry as an entity and I felt like it was just kind of assumed that I was had to do things in a certain way so last GDC I helped co-found what became game workers unite they're doing a lot of stuff this year I wrote the zine on the right here thank you I don't want to take too much credit cuz I haven't been

involved for a while but to Emma and all the other people who are doing stuff this GDC thank you so much and you should absolutely get involved with them or other unionization efforts and other fields as well if you have the energy to do so but this time I'm coming out with some I'm coming with something a little more existential so what Punk embrace is is is that being oppositional is not necessarily a bad thing and it's something that I think we need a lot more of and a lot less fear of offending X or Y person or X or Y career opportunity we need to be able to say what we believe and by being oppositional to the powers who are oppressing you often times we you find solidarity and you find your voice I love this picture by the way look everything that is worth preserving about the game industry in my opinion does not come from as an entity Nintendo or Sony or valve or Blizzard as a company we have to get outside of this consumer dislike fandom for companies mindset because it's individual people who make that stuff and it doesn't come

from game gods I had this I had this PC gamer issue back in the day by the way or these like boy genius entrepreneurs or big celebrity Rockstar CEOs and creative leads who drive Ferraris that was a big thing for some reason in like the 90s the light foot of the industry like every industry comes from the bottom up it comes from the average worker or average person I'm encouraged when I see stuff like game dev dot world which is I guess happening next week and it has a global focus especially when I think about San Francisco inequality is a huge problem in San Francisco in the US and globally and it's obvious that a lot of people are underrepresented here at GDC because of the ticket price because of travel cost or because they're literally banned from entering the country but often even the most well intentioned stuff is kind of used to create new markets that most people will fail in so I I kind of caution against that sort of aspirational model where it's just about creating a new cult of personality around a new game God or someone like

that who do achieve success while most people don't so international outreach in solidarity has to be followed by sort of a larger and my think more radical projects so there's no reason-- game development should be a miserable process it should be fun and rewarding we should be creating a space we're exploring the boundaries of self-expression beyond the whims of the market is rewarded and it's fun and we might have to start small but we can do this we can help regular people find community and solidarity in the midst of let's face it our pretty hostile and bleak world that doesn't want to give a lot of people anything so we might have to start small but we can do that as well I am like really inspired when I see stuff I don't know this is obviously you're seeing my political beliefs but when it we're in a world where like radical new projects like the green New Deal are widely popular in the US and a political possibility and new paths are open for anyone who put the time to build in the effort for them and I think we can all benefit from that so anyway

if you have any ideas on how to help do any of these things in the context of games please reach out to me I sort of started a little discord about this I'm just like for friends and stuff for sharing ideas and anyway thank you for your time I'm Katz mall I'm a senior product designer at Etsy I'm an independent game developer I also help run the game dose of color Expo that's me on Twitter feel free to tweet me don't DM me I'm here today because we need to talk about ethics in this industry you just heard a person's kind of talk about that a little bit and this really frustrates me to say out loud but I think it's really true look at our problem cousin the tech industry if you're on the internet you know that they've had an array of problems recently so data breaches illegal practices all kinds of misguided efforts in order to learn about their customers so that they can better addict them to their products and this is caused by their participation and what we like to talk about is the attention economy so that's an approach that

treats human attention as a scarce commodity we are we have so much content that's really available that we have to like actually fight for space in people's minds right like we saw a bunch of content that gets created we don't have actual people who can actually consume it so those content that content disappears and these companies are trying to take up space in our lives to this point without consent so that they can actually find a way to profit and we do that a lot in games - we are very guilty of participating in this economy we need and want attention we want money and I get that because we need to survive right but I want to talk about how this actually harms people so who my friend Dennis this is a picture of his hand he plays Pokemon go all the time and I mean actually like all the time this is actually a shot of how he plays Pokemon go at dinner he'll like we'll be sitting together and he'll just like go on his phone at the same time as we're talking and it's really uncomfortable and he actually also even plays when he's driving because of this wristband that you see on the right side and it's

a little it's terrifying honestly but it's I I just have to remember that it's not his fault because he's actually addicted to this game so we are very used to relying in the games industry on whales in some cases where it's either a big spender of time or money so it's people who pay for all the things or spend a lot of time you know in the actual game and they they really want the the feeling of winning and they are willing to pay for it and maybe you think that whaling is a fine practice but it turns a lot of players off so for example my former coworker Ben really wanted to enjoy Harry Potter Hogwarts mystery but he could not just pay for the full game he had to keep spending a small amount of money at a time and he ended up quitting it and I am so like this as well I hate playing games like that uh-huh so if you're like oh it's fine I don't really make games that rely on Wales time is also money it turns out so if you are trying to find a way to get someone to spend more time on your project on your game you're participating in the attention economy

and that is as I said the nature of games we make things to entertain people to engage them but do we need to actually fall into attention economy practices is the question I'd like to bring to all of you I would say that participating in the attention economy without ethical standards often leads to designers using dark patterns this is a common phrase that we use in a design industry to talk about interactions that are designed to trick users into things that they don't consent to actually doing and I am very very guilty of being tempted to do this in my games as well so for example in 2013 I made a game with my friends Chris elgu and Dennis Liao we were faced with a decision do we include microtransactions do we charge for the game upfront do we annoy people into buying our game by like inundating them with ads and we decided that we were not going to go the dark pattern route so we decided to just charge a small amount of money for the game and keep what we felt was our dignity and ever since that happened I have personally felt really uncomfortable playing games that have tried to nickel-and-dime me as I said so

this experience opened my eyes and it made me ask myself how can we be better as people how can I be better as a designer so I'm going to share a couple of ways that I've pushed myself to be more ethical in my practice firstly define your principles by creating standards for yourself upfront you can avoid making evil decisions experience principles are something that I use a lot in design as well as games to express a core value behind my project so what I do is I write down principles so that my work has boundaries and guidelines and then I also make sure to actually do research that I understand through my audience understand how they think and what they actually value and this actually helps me make sure that I'm working within the frame and the space of what they want and need not just what I need as the person who's building this game to make money ideally second method is to question everything so it's not just a good idea because everyone else is doing it I think this is the thing that we're very guilty of as human beings who love

to follow each other but I think it's really important to ask yourself why is this a good idea why does this game need to be so long why does replayability to this point have to be required why are we using this strategy really asked yourself those questions and make sure that you have an answer method number three is be intentional design everything methodically and intentionally this is not just true for your games experiences but also for your goals and your overall strategy so especially your success metrics it's really important to ask yourself what are you measuring and why does it matter do you need to measure monthly active users what actually defines success method number four is stop incentivizing addiction it's not healthy literally unhealthy and it's not ethical to incentivize people for giving your game a massive amount of their mind share game feel or juice is one thing because we need to make games feel good but employing dark patterns is another and your game should not be a drug method number five is get creative instead of

aiming for quick wins can you find another way to be economically sustainable again we've talked a little bit about this today and I personally actually have a patreon that I run and I self fund my work I don't know how to do this otherwise but I think we need to ask ourselves these questions so that we can help improve the industry because rather than playing into old tropes and show there that there have to be ways that we can create new and less evil methods to participate in capitalism I don't know what those are yet capitalism is really terrible but like we need to figure out a way to do this better so overall I am really excited to see us improve and become a more ethical industry because we talk a lot about respecting the player when it comes to things like tutorials we love to consider their intelligence and treat them like adults when it comes to the actual gameplay but how do we do the same when it comes to their time thank you I'm Alan Hazelden and I'm gonna talk about why I think all developers deserve to get royalties I am the co designer of some cool puzzle

games like soccer buns help a good snow and it's hard to build and cosmic Express and I'm working on a new unannounced game but enough about that so I really think that this is a moral issue if you worked on a game then you contributed to making it happen it would not exist without you and if it became profitable that for you to and if it comes very profitable then you deserve to share in that success so when I was starting to say to people I'm I'm thinking about talking about this some people told me this they thought well Alan aren't royalties kind of a scam and surprisingly I don't actually disagree with this if you are given a choice between royalties or cash upfront you should almost always take the money and if you're in a position where you are

offering somebody royalties and you're saying hey we can't really afford to pay you properly but don't worry you're gonna get royalties and it we it'll be great then you are probably asking that person to take on way more risk than they should be but the reason I want to talk about this is because royalties should not replace being paid well you should get royalties on top of whatever you're getting page not instead of and yes sometimes if you're working on indie teams people are not getting paid or getting paid friend rates but that doesn't mean that if that's not the case that you shouldn't get royalties that just means that if you're getting underpaid you should get more royalties so specifically this is what I decided to do for the game I'm working on now your mileage may vary this is just an example of how you can do this so I want people to start earning

royalties from the point the game becomes profit i define profitability pretty simply we look at expenses for the game that's mostly just upfront team payments and some other mostly smaller costs crucially for me I define this only as those costs that haven't been covered by external funding this is a period that my company has been covering costs from the moment we get external funding I'm not counting that as expensive to recoup and then profit is just once the income from the game gets more than what my company has spent on the game and then everyone gets some percentage of the profit and this kind of should go without saying but don't be dick there are a lot of ways of defining expenses if you want to make your game look unprofitable just just don't do it personally my expenses like don't

include my travel costs like I could justify going because I'm going to places I'm meeting people and networking I'm making deals sometimes but it just feels weird and bad and like it's not gonna make that much difference in the grand scheme of things I go a bit extreme my expenses I'm taking out a profit don't include my salary but that's just because I'm weird you shouldn't do that probably but that's what I do so there's lots of considerations you have to take into account when you're working out what percentage any individual should get on a project that's way too complicated for a five-minute talk if you have employees then you should still get people role tees but the percentages could be justifiably lower and the point at which they kick in could be justifiably higher where if you're a team of entirely contractors and after the game ships your move on then the royalties should

be much much higher if you've got a large team then that's a lot of people to split between but that just means that it might take longer before people a little bit before adds up people leaving my project is complex but there are plenty of teams who have successful games who have rev-share systems who have accounted for this who have a system and they've sorted it out obviously some people will have different levels of contribution or different levels of investment but you just got to work out a plan for figuring that stuff out and bouncing all the factors none of these really are reason not to do royalties it's just a reason to know how much royalties everyone should get and work it out in a way that's fair so yeah thanks for your time I'm Alan hesitant and this is I am Kelly Wallach and this is my talk called to get me out

of this hideous box why is this UI so ugly [Laughter] why our beautiful games stuffed into a hideous box with tiny font and convoluted menus what in the world is this why would I think that I can discover something that I love through this experience it honestly feels like no one could be bothered to even try and market to me why am i invisible or worse yet why am i treated like I'm some sort of statistical anomaly I have money I like video games I am desperate for content that speaks to me I'm waiting to be seen why is the mainstream gaming audience still treated as if it's totally homogeneous of course you're going to keep ending up with the same audiences if you're only making the same content over and over it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle and it's leaving

a whole pile of folks out of the picture if a new gamers first experience is complicated ugly and careless why would they think that the games inside of it are going to be any different and even if the content is out there just getting to it feels like it requires a degree to figure it out and it is constantly updating if I don't play the same game every day I'll get stuck in an update hell which means that I need to decide in the afternoon if I want to play in the game a game in the evening which means I need to plan my entire day around the fact that I might want to play a game at some point which forces me into a hardcore gamer category when all I really wanted to do was to chill and play my favorite game when I had a little bit of extra time holy that we sold the switch sold yes of course it sold because it looks like it wants to be your friend it doesn't look like it's gonna be some who wants to quiz you on every member of the band and the first two albums that any real fan would totally know about that

by the way we're not as good categorically get over yourself this is supposed to be fun right oh I'm playing it wrong oh I'm a girl who likes video games seriously I've been hearing this same nonsense for 30 years it's old I'm old I'm tired The Sims sold yes it's old the player base is like 70% women and what do I see when I law when I want to play The Sims FIFA it is not rocket science people will listen to music that is made by people that they identify with they will watch movies with characters that look like them they will play a video game that appeals to them to their interests into their identity they will play a video game they will play a video game that identifies with them it's allowing people to make content for their own audiences created by the people who actually understand what they're representing stop letting men write

female characters and especially stop letting them say well I have a daughter stop letting white people write people of color hire the people who have these actual lived experiences to write their own goddamn characters and start giving money to a diverse set of creators to make these games we will all make more money it is really honestly stupid business sense to do otherwise it makes no sense the amount of effort that we're putting in to keep up keeping people out as a wasted effort imagine if all that effort was just putting into allowing everyone to contribute and participate how much further along we would all be how much cooler all of the video games would be so I don't know about you but this is all making me feel a little bit stressed out so how about we all take a quick wellness break here I'm gonna ask everyone to close your eyes we're all gonna take a deep breath in and a deep breath out let your jaw relax create

some space between your eyes let your shoulders drop and picture a mountain the roots run deep into the earth it's solid and still the clouds move past the wind blows across the peak but the mountain has been here for millions of years calm and still take a deep breath in and a deep breath out all right let's get back into it the thing is is that Indies get this I get this you get this but we all struggle for funding we struggle for attention we create with little support or infrastructure for those of you at the funding fun to this content fund these creators fun stuff that might not

make sense to you or better yet that is not made specifically for you get a cultural and social lens and use it accept that a bunch of it might fail and let that be okay we have to start looking at the long-term and stop reacting to the short-term we have to create conditions for success and for failure you have to stop expecting a handful of diverse people to succeed as a representation of their entire gender race cultural or sexual identity the second that you give them any ounce of opportunity it is an impossible standard it creates confirmation bias and it is not expected of anybody else meet people who aren't you stop doing business a 2:00 a.m. while you're drunk so that more people feel safe doing it work with us here you can't keep leaning on the people at the bottom to fix your problems and you can't keep only paying attention to us when you need content for a new platform think real change real investment real support and real solutions get us out of this hideous box

thank you all the way from Zambia and this is my talk video games and the African identity / culture so Who am I like I said my name is Marvin gala I'm the owner and co-founder of a studio called epic arts I was one of the winners of the digital lab Africa competition last year and I'm currently working on a psychological horror game called Project Loompa which is based on Zambian mythology and lore that's the picture and let's run the picture of the world so why did I pick this topic um in my years of playing video games I rarely saw my country or continent represented well and it really bothered me for such a long time this was the first time I saw Zambia in a game and I wouldn't even mention which game this is but yeah we have guns like that so most games we played in most movies watch growing up were mostly American

British or Japanese and we learned a lot from these more than we learned apart from our own country I remember seeing and learning about Athena and Zeus from God of War the first time I knew about a Ford Mustang or Porsche GT Porsche Carrera GT was the car I wanted to own one day when I played need for speed with my friends most of these things were new to us and was so intriguing because we learned so much from them growing up so my point is this video games have been able to give me an experience I would otherwise have not had as a kid they literally brought other parts of the world to my fingertips God of War had me reading about North Greek mythology Need for Speed had me and my friends arguing about what's better between a tuners and muscle cars and the problem is this my country has 73 different tribes 73 I'm Zambian born and bred and I've never encountered most of these tribes like

not even 20% each of these tribes have their own history their own culture their own stories and this is just one country out of the other 53 countries in the continent that's you yet to carve out it's all narrative in a world that's becoming complacent to retreat to order already established narratives and all because of its accessibility one of the ways to get these stories out is through video games it's one of the ways ambiens Africans you know can bring the world to the fingertips of people in other parts of the world the same way they brought the pots the the same way they brought their stories to our fingertips I want to see kids from other places like Norway or Argentina talk about you know the Malheur rock paintings the dances of the ow each mask each feather telling a different story and not seeing stories of people always shooting Africans force that we've never heard of but it applies

because this game has to happen we need more of these type of stories in African video games we need more of this type of African games to tell stories in order to preserve our culture because right now video games are linked into a world in a way that's irrevocable you just cannot deny how much of an influence they have in our lives which is why I'm very passionate about bringing more studios from Africa from Zambia to the outside world because right now more of these games are focused on bringing African mythology and stories to the outside world and it's a great way to preserve our culture so that kids in our future our future kids our kids kids kids can also keep these stories and tell their friends about what happened in the past rather than focusing only on books you know books movies so we also need video

games to keep our stories intact and yeah that's my talk hi I'm Kara Stone I'll be talking today about mental illness and making games there's three different entrances into this conversation and for each I'll talk about a game or an art piece that I've made the first is representation in the earth is a better person than me we follow Delphine a young femme one who is going through a crisis and runs away from her problems and into a forest she finds that she can talk to the environment around her she talked to the moon about love and not understanding the cycles of her emotion about to dirt about suicide and self-hate into the flower about perfectionism and self-harm I like to think that it shows a specific but dynamic representation of a woman living with mental illness this is an

example of how we represent mental illness in videogames and those who are mentally ill it's also the most common way about thinking about mental illness and video games but just one facet another is process this isn't a game but the first the very first project I ever made where I was open about my experiences with mental illness it's called Polaroid panic I carried a Polaroid camera with me for three months everywhere all the time and took a photo of my face each time I had a panic attack the pictures are material proof of a feeling but a feeling that the viewer may not be able to read on to my face all this process took was to carry a small camera bag and to be in touch with my emotional state of course this is not how we're usually making media we're working in a culture that normalizes and valorizes overwork I'm sure most of you are familiar with the term crunch and you know not to do it but you do it anyway sometimes our

bosses say that we have to sometimes we feel like we have to sometimes it even feels good because we're performing as good productive citizens of capitalism but overwork is bad for all of us and it's worse for some of us those of us with certain mental illnesses psychosocial disability mental and invisible disabilities chronic conditions may not be able to work like that the energy drain happens faster the recovery is slower and the repercussions more detrimental big indie Studios small indie Studios co-ops collectives and even individuals really need to check their expectations of labor and productivity productivity isn't worth the debilitation and that means we need to create new models of game making and I believe that we can create a process that actually benefits us a reparative process like I did here in Polaroid panic where the end result was me being more in touch with my feelings open

about sharing them and not being able to disregard them the last is design this is another piece that took me a long time to make but I didn't mean it - I've been working on ritual of the Moon for over 4 years when I thought it would be one it's finally to really be released on the full moon next month in April the game takes place over 28 days real time days where the player plays for three minutes a day where you arrange objects on an altar receive a mantra for the day and then you make a choice based on your personal emotional state at that moment if you want to destroy or protect the Earth from a comet that's about to hit it the game tracks your choices in a calendar acting like a mood chart for the month I wanted to make space for ritual for short plays that we can integrate into our lives that's slow and meditative that make us reflect on our emotional state and not cause anything

frustrating or panicky many of us rightly are criticizing labor practices that expect us to work 80 hours a week but we want to make games that take 80 hours to play straight with no breaks that's how they're designed many video games actually reinforce overwork we think of a good game as a game that you want to play all the time we designed so there's a constant pull to keep playing this is done most often by activating panic and aggression frustration momentary gratification and then looping this over and over and over we try to emotionally manipulate the players so they play more but these are just a few of the emotional possibilities of games what if we made games that activated melancholy or self-reflection or tenderness I think that these need to be designed differently than the way that we design for panic aggression frustration and gratification it's not as simple as making a game about a

tender and soft person and expecting the player to feel the same but designing mechanics and gameplay and even controllers differently to bring out different feelings of tenderness and care and using a process of cream creation that does the same for us the makers I think games are emotionally powerful and it's time we start channeling that power into a wider emotional landscape we need to make reparative games games that help us heal thank you I wanted to talk a little bit about deadlines and I actually did have a disclaimer already written in here and now I need to make sure that I'm very clear about it this is not an advocate for working yourself into the ground or burnout or chronic systemic mismanagement I just want to reflect on the value of deadlines as something that furthers a creative process and and moving a project forward so I think that

deadlines are generally reviled I've certainly had my share of trouble with them I think we look at them as a villain in the room there's something external that's imposed upon us they can sort of frustrate us especially as creative people because we view them as things that limit us and that box us in that prevent us from doing our best work or constrain us to it to a timeline that's uncomfortable I think part of the problem though is that a deadline or a limitation is really a reflection of our inability or our reluctance to take what is a perfect idea for a game or an illustration or a piece of writing or music and make it imperfect by bringing it into the world it's a messy very very difficult process it's fraught with pitfalls and I think having a timeline put on that inherently makes us uncomfortable I think that we've framed stress and anxiety as purely destructive things and I'm not convinced that that's actually correct I

think that comfort is a pursuit purely for its own sake has become something in our North American culture anyway that's become a focus for us and as as biological entities we're actually not designed to be constantly comfortable it it makes us slow it puts us in this like non-committal procrastination which is almost what happened to me making this talk I'm very happy that Ryan said that Friday I had to get it all done because I'm not sure that I would have had it all done on time if I didn't have a deadline many times when I meet someone who's starting a project or fantasizing about leaving their super cushy job at a large developer publisher I can tell if they're actually going to follow through with it or if their project is ever gonna get done based on how they frame it if they're looking for escape for a wide-open field with no limits constraints nothing to drive them I know that what they're doing is they're fantasizing because they're stressed at work which is a destructive

form of stress this is a I think obi-wan Kenobi said it I'm not sure but it's one of my favorite quotes and it resonates really powerfully with me because certainly I mean this is a bit of a soapbox here ant so I can only really speak about my own experience but I prefer some form structure and this quote has always really resonated with me because I oftentimes consider what a world without limits would look like I I worked at a large North American developer who also makes consoles and I did a stint doing character design there and I had come in from freelance so I was like I had a kid I had like I got laid off of my other triple a job a week before my son was born and I just immediately started freelancing and it's a very valid like a validating experience to like catch and kill your own food like I would start Monday I'm like we got no money and then I have to go out you know find a client do the

work and it makes you feel like you're in shape in a way like you know you kind of been fighting for him so I walked in my first day and it was like these people were in molasses they had a they had a four they had a four person standing meeting at a guy's desk to discuss the level of specularity on mud for a prototype this game got canceled they were surprised I was there for six months and they were all like oh god guys what are we gonna do they're gonna shut down like what did you the mud still not done you know so imagine a world where you had limitless money you had an army of people that would do whatever you say you had limitless time would it really be your best work I don't know that it would I think a bit of discomfort and again I want to under like really underscore this I am not advocating for death marches they have the opposite effect they ruin people it's a hundred percent

true but a bit of stress a bit of discomfort is important I feel for creative people because there is power there it alerts us it excites our senses and it creates discomfort that forces decisive action sometimes it's important to be put to a decision and because that generates forward momentum on a team stress is really a modern word for an ancient phenomenon that's related to evolved adaptations that detect threat and damage to well-being and it mobilizes us to respond to them if we're never stressed we're never mobilized so I really encourage people to think about how they how they view deadlines and other limitations and learn maybe not to love them I mean Darth Vader it was pretty ugly when you pop the mask off but at least respect them I think momentum on a team especially larger teams is very very difficult to generate and sustain and I think pushing people forward creating responsible ethical

limitations within which creative work can take place is is how we're going to get the very best out of ourselves and and our teams deadlines and limitations create necessity and urgency as I've said they're invaluable tools and I hope that they lead to a lot of great inventions for you but please don't kill your teams and I mean that that's my [Applause]