What is inclusive content and why is it important?

hello we're from a thinking ape we're here to present seeing yourself adds up and my diversity and inclusion is a good business model we will cover our values why they matter inclusive content as a business advantage our LiveOps process now with consulting and then we'll go through a quick story time with a specific experience that we had on our team so hello I am Nicole my pronouns are she her I am a designer on one of our titles party in my dorm I am number one dad in the universe and I am a ravenclaw coupe and I'm didn't Lily I use they/them I'm a creative producer for lab ops team I wrinkle all the things enable our team to get all the stuff done poked with

interesting questions and I'm all Jaco puffs we can do it we can do this together we've got this yeah and at AGA we build communities so I'm going to talk briefly about how those values at our company work into our process so the big one I would argue like our foundational value is ownership so nothing is not my job it's literally just giving a thought like actually owning things doing your best and seeing things through to completion so if ever there's something that comes up you just like I mean they're like do this and it was like yeah yeah let's go I got you got your back so it's you never just go off I'm gonna also take care of it and that's a huge part of everything with this next part is having wonderful arguments and that kind of ties into ownership because you have to like do some self-reflection and looking at your own biases but also to approach good arguments with each other openly you're not just oh well it's my idea and that's this is the only way to do it it's your actively having a good conversation with

your team and you're trying to solve the problem together it's not winner-takes-all kind of thing and that ties in to best idea wins yep so the best idea wins stemming from our wonderful arguments we can argue like adults yes and we won't we won't fight over which ideas the best we'll figure out which one is the best by working together and just you know finding the one that Oh based on our data and based on what we know about our players this is the best idea and we're going to move forward with that one and I think that really helps us to keep growing which is our last value we grow as people at ata we grow as a company we grow products and it's very important that you know we are able to have these wonderful arguments because in each one of those we are learning more about who we are how we work as a team and how our product works and so we just keep keep on growing that works real great with

live ups where it's constantly iterative so inclusive content we have a huge global audience like across the whole world global that's what it means and they had big demands so party in my dorm in particular our audience is generally like under 35s and they actively demand that we're more inclusive and because like in the previous talk which was great live ops and games isn't just oh it's our thing and we own it it's very collaborative with us in our community because we build communities what we do so we work back and forth with their players we listen to what they're talking about you know you can't do everything a player wants but we try best and we actively solicit feedback and have conversations with our communities so with that audience in mind players themselves expect to they expect to see themselves in the media they consume and they demand that we actively give that to them and it tends to pay off so I'm going to talk about our stats so we do the UA we do our UA in a house we also do a bunch of live events and we're kind of bridging the gap between

like okay here's our live events okay you 18 go this seems to be working well go go do it it'll be great and this one we focused on some pride content and we're like hey you know who's who doesn't see themselves ever there's there's almost no trans representation and games at all I bet you people will click on stuff that has them in it maybe so we just tried it we're very data-driven like let's just try out the student experiment let's see how it goes and yeah it has amazing stats it's like one of our top 3 performing ads ever and we just give it a go like a month ago yeah and what we did with this is I'm trans myself I'm non-binary we have another trans person our office and we consulted back and forth the UAT we also asked our community we're like hey looks like lean hard into this like meme that's really popular in the trans community let's like speak that language authentically and like see if that works and it did like I started seeing it organically in other groups I'm in people do like oh they totally get it

it's like hey speaking authentically to someone's experience and doing your research can really pay off anyway and in our content so our in-game content we do like events every two weeks do monthly content we're constantly putting new things at but again that's one of our main areas of where we put inclusive content and yeah these are just some examples of events that have done really well so these two avatars where are secured a themed avatars and art lead really explored like doing super abstract to a little bit more realistic and that whole set of avatars just like took off like two hundred percent revenue compared to our usual stuff same with a kpop New Year's thing and we did an onsen trip to Japan we're gonna talk about a little bit more everything that we do with inclusive content tends to perform better in some way yeah so it's just kind of like hey this is actually a good business case it never actually harms us when we do this so have at it

please do inclusive content it pays off I'm hitting the wrong button there we go so what counts is inclusive content so we're gonna go over I'm gonna talk through our inclusion pillars kind of how we got there what we consider the questions we asked as a team to make sure we're doing it well the coolest gotta talk us through our content channels in-game and incidental versus spotlight inclusion and then we'll talk about our scope and how we scale things like that so inclusion pillars we came about this from having good arguments as a TA so we started off with like we're just kind of throwing random things out there and like not really communicating we're like nobody knows what's going on and like people are angry cuz we do do this rag sort of research so it's like you know ownership and we're trying stuff but weren't communicating so we were just like let's sit together let's talk about like what does inclusion mean to each person on the team let's see like what the common things are and what do we think is the best actual solution so this is what we came up with we feel that all inclusive content needs to be

accessible so all players can actually get to it whether you're brand new or you've been in the game for years that it's also accessible for in terms of pricing so if we're doing like we did Black History Month avatars we had both like a very accessible pricing that anyone can have with like lower stats but we also had the like and here's the awesome like VIP level stats as well with price points so we make sure that they're all viable options it's like oh you see yourself in game finally finally there's an avatar that's me well I can't use it because it's not viable as like a game play strategy we want to make sure that never happens so that's a really important part as well it's positive so whenever we're doing representation that it's accurate its authentic and it's not a harmful stereotype and that's I'll talk a bit more about how we make sure that that's true and then it's argued our most important thing that ties into our whole ownership value is being brave it's like it's better to try the not we're live up so we can learn we can update it's okay to iterate and you know

because we're working with the community it's better to just be transparent we put something up there like hey we heard you guys want this here we did our best let us know if it's good or not so if someone's like hey like this was actually awful like did you even talk to somewhere like we did but thank you for your experience let's do one that addresses yours as well because we're releasing so much content all the time so we just own it if we messed it up if it's really bad we just update it because it's live and yeah so you won't always be able to please everyone but again it's still better to try and to get it out there it's better to have representative content than not yes and the cool you can talk about our content channels so in Part II of my dorm we have several different content channels we have NPCs that the players sort of interact with in a story set of way and this is just a handful of the NPC's we have as you can see they're a decently diverse group of people so we can do a

fairly good representative material by using these characters to represent different groups we have a few others who aren't represented here who we have an app or not an avatar an NPC who is bullish she's there Indian yes so we used them yes when we did when we did our holy content this year we also have avatars which are arguably more important than our NPC diversity because that is how our players express themselves that is how they represent themselves in their in our game they put on an avatar and that avatar is them they're like this is me this is who I am this is how I want people to think of me and we have a we try to put as much diversity into this as possible we try to make sure that there are a diverse set every set of avatars every event every event there's

about I want to say eight avatars so we want to have a good range of you know races and body types and etc the busy routes all the yeah the whole event cool and on top of that we also have your dorm room so you know it's a party in my dorm you can't have a party in your dorm without a dorm you want your dorm to be cool you want your dorm to represent you so we have these full furniture sets this is just a couple of the sets that we have you can mix and match and they're great at you know further representing who you are so maybe I am well I'm a white girl right clearly and I put on my white girl avatar but I am you know like this one looks like me but she doesn't necessarily dress like me so I want my room to be a little bit more Who I am so maybe I'm really really punking I'm gonna fill my room up with all of this

awesome punk stuff but my avatar is wearing a really cute in a flower dress because I think she looks like me cool so through our avatars we try to do two different types of inclusion incidental and spotlight our incidental ones come into play in the middle of an event it's not the main focus there we just put them in there to include these people in the game just like they're included in real life so currently we have a game of thrones styled event going on so we have these couple of avatars here a woman with dwarfism and a guy who is an arm amputee sort of based on some of the characters of Game of Thrones but not actually the characters of Game of Thrones but people have been posting on our forums that they're very excited to see these they're like oh my god thank you so much I've been dying for this

inclusion and they're so happy to see it and it's not something that we're just like we don't want to hit you in the face with it we just want it to be there yeah and then the other one is our spotlight sort of representation where we do want to hit you in the face with it we're like we're doing Black History Month all of the avatars for our monthly content this month they're gonna be black and they're gonna celebrate Black History and black culture and people loved that too they were like thank you for finally doing black avatars in an amazing way wow they were so happy and I was so happy to see the response from our players that they were like feeling actually represented by the content that we were doing and just add to that I'll get into it a little bit more when we talk about consulting but that was specifically because of consulting but it did so well content scoping do you mean to do that or your head okay yeah so with content scoping we can't do every single representation as an event

all the time or it wouldn't be party in my dorm it would be I don't know events in my dorm I guess holidays in my dorm that's like that's fair so we still try to do as many as we can but sometimes it's like okay there's like four overlapping major cultural holidays in this week so let's just try and hit as many as we can but we have to like scope it down because you know there's still scope the other thing to consider is the more that you're speaking someone else's identity on behalf of them like so if you have an avatar then there's a whole story and a character speaking about holy you need to consult because you're essentially telling someone else's story so the more that you're representing someone else the more you need to consult and the more you need to work on it and just get reviewed the smaller it is it's like okay here's a couple other done gifts cool wait it's out there we still check-in we still research but it's not quite as critical as being like hey you're representing a person and all the my new detail that goes into like a note fit and fashion that has cultural significance that's when you need to

really check in with people but it's worth it it pays off for us so so how do we actually do this this is real talk briefly about consulting we went a little long so I'm going to go fast basically it's agile like I said keep trying LiveOps is great for giving it your best being like how did that work hey let's learn and do better next time and that's kind of how we got to this magical secret sauce is constantly iterating and constantly growing so I would argue that live ups is one of the best areas to do this in and yes corporate in a consultant I'll walk you through what we did for Black History Month because that was awesome so prep first we researched you're like okay what do we want to do with this like what is Black History Month mean what does the internet say and we're like it's really big because you're like trying to boil down a whole bunch of things into like one thing so we consulted with Tanika Stotts who's a writer for a Cartoon Network and she's awesome she also is a comic anthology and she was basically just like what do you guys doing this fat Africa thing's

not like hitting your audience at all it is like a really bladder like thank you for telling us that and so she like really pushed us towards like a bit more afropunk and like just really celebrating black excellence so like all of the avatars were like this person's a lawyer and this person's a doctor and this person is an up-and-coming senator and like we just wanted to like really be celebratory about it so we wouldn't have got there if we didn't consult again when we first reach out you give as much contact as possible so it's Anika I had a whole email of like here's what our events look like here's what avatar is and or look like here's what we're trying to do and here's like a direction we're thinking of but please tell us if it's totally wrong we're very open and establishing that psychological safety with your consultants is huge being like hey we have biases that we don't even know please tell us when we're wrong and just saying that makes it okay for people to actually tell you stuff because if you're just like okay well do the thing and if you're like not

actually open of that feedback then they're not gonna feel comfortable to tell you about it so that's a really important part of things finding someone especially if you can find someone that is both the identity you're trying to represent and intersects with your audience so they're like speaking both languages that's really critical Tanika was great for that and focusing on creatives helps because they already know the creative process down pretty good so they can be like oh yes you know this contrasts with this thing they're speaking the creative language so there's less translation and then work with them like I said listen to them actually integrate their feedback so we just throw one extra review stage in at like ref pack wide art and final and we're just like hey you just anything you want to change anything that we think could be different cool and it goes pretty fast because we also do a kick off early with them where we talk the ideation we include them in the ideation brainstorm very early the earlier you include someone the easier life is the better it is again with the Black History Month thing it would have been really bad if we were just like no we're doing this and it's like no

actually listen to people you're paying them for their time so make use of that anyways so that's that in a nutshell Nicole's gonna talk us through a story time so back in September so in late August we were going through the creation of an event where we were taking the player on a trip to Japan and we wanted it to be an authentic trip to Japan we didn't want it to just be an anime thing we've done anime before we know anime goes well with our audience they really like it but we wanted something that would be a little bit more traditional something with Japanese people in Japanese traditional clothing as an avatar ready for it we got this girl I don't know about you guys I think she's pretty white she's like really white like this kind of looks more like me than a Japanese person and thankfully we had someone who was

willing to step up into a very courageous role and be like hey that avatar doesn't look Japanese and that launched our whole content team into what were the first steps of really honing down this process on consulting and working with other people and getting things to look the way that we that they should look to represent the people that we're trying to represent good so we made these changes and she looks a lot less white it was a it was a big big discussion to actually figure out what it was about her that was looking white what we needed to fix how we could fix it if we could fix it in time and we managed to and it went over extremely well people were very happy we had a lot of people posting on the forums being like wow I'm so excited I'm

half Japanese and I'm so glad to see this content and no one thought that they were white yes which is probably the most important part but we were consulting with someone in our office who is Japanese we took into account their perspective and how they felt these avatars were looking and if it felt like they were representative of their actual culture and that's very important is to make sure it's actually representing the people you're trying to represent and if we don't have anyone who can speak to the authenticity of a culture a holiday whatever the case is we reach out that's why we do consulting we want to make sure that our representation is authentic that it is representing the people that we want to represent and every time we do it we improve our process it gets a little bit better every time it just can't be afraid to fail yes

yeah so in short key points lean into hard conversations build that psychological safety and Trust with your team where you can actually be like hey as a weight person I have to say that this is gonna sound terrible but do they look Japanese enough and how do we do stereotypes versus nuance and let's actually dive into this but coming at it with a good argument with a good mindset of being open makes it safe for people to agree and disagree and actually get into the meat of that talk be curious and empathetic so and when you're having good arguments actually be compassionate come in out come in with like good intentions be curious research try your best and really just if you mess up on it and keep growing failure plus reflection equals growth so try things fail learn grow live ops is like the best place to do this so that's pretty much it in a nutshell sorry we're just ran out of time those brake talk and as

a trans align myself it's like one of those things that it's very difficult to have conversations about one things I think it's the biggest difficulty is the unconscious bias yes and particularly they could have learned language which I know that I had I struggle with quite a long time to get my use of pronouns right etc especially the reason I'm asking the question what the question I want to ask rather is how do we extend this kind of mindset to more mainstream games mmm without it becoming that kind of preachy thing that people reject yes yeah I mean I think I know the answer but I'd love to know what you guys think how can people with more mainstream games take lessons from what you guys have talked about what I'm actually wanting to do with this is this is kind of a first run on trying to establish how to even do this for mainstream the video game industry in general so actually want to work with that GDA and just be like hey here's a process that we've kind of figured out from doing live ops how can we help other people absorb that but I do think the absolute biggest takeaway is really just being open again dealing with unconscious bias

being open to learning new things and not being afraid to like fail or to like it's humility really that's the big thing