#game industry

TheUbisoft conference is being streamed in our studio’s largest room, on two giant screens. I’m sitting with a few of my colleagues – about 300 of them – waiting for the segment for our game to start. We’ve all been cheering and celebrating all of the announcements so far, but the most exciting moment for our team is of course going to be when For Honor makes an appearance, first in the form of a new cinematic trailer, then with our creative director Jason VandenBerghe setting the stage for the world of For Honor, followed by game director Roman Campos-Oriola playing through a level.

I’ve excitedly watched E3 – the game industry’s biggest show – from afar for years and years, but this year was special in that it was my first time taking in E3 while having a personal investment in what was going on.

I’m working on a game that was taking part.

As I say each year, I always hope that this will be the one where I actually get to go to E3, but despite not going, it was definitely the most exciting one I’ve experienced so far. I had a great time as always watching all of the keynotes, while getting excited for the big game reveals, but following it all while you have something “in the ring” just makes it that much more special.

And even better, people seem to really like our game. As I write this, the 3rd and final day is coming to an end, and already we’ve received a “Best of E3″ award from GameSpot. I’ve also watched a few videos and read some hands-on write-ups that seem to be really pumped by the gameplay that was experienced. 

So what next? As the fantastically funny Aisha Tyler announced at the end of our segment during the Ubisoft conference, you can go to the For Honor website to register for upcoming Alpha and Beta access. 

The game’s release date was also announced: February 14, 2017 – Valentine’s Day!

Sorry I’ve been not posting much for the past few weeks–they’ve been busy. 

But! The slate of Industry Insiders for this year’s Gen Con just went live, and I want to talk about it, because I think it marks a big step forward for tabletop gaming.

Of the 25 Insiders, 13 (52%) are female. 

I don’t think I can emphasize enough how big of a deal this is. Gen Con last year had over 60,000 attendees. I can’t think of another gaming convention that size that had a featured speaker lineup with actual gender parity. (Five years ago, the ratio of women to men in the Insiders was 1:16 (6.25%). Two years ago, it was 4 out of 25 (16%). So this happened relatively fast.) Gen Con’s record on this is not good, but this looks to me like a good-faith effort to make real change–dramatic change, instead of the teeth-pulling, incremental change characteristic of the industry.

Does this magically fix all of tabletop gaming’s misogyny problems? No. But women being recognized as gaming authorities, our work being highlighted, our input being sought, and just our presence in equal numbers with men helps. It relieves the pressure on us as individuals to Speak For All Women In Games. It allows us to be people first and representatives of a demographic second. It normalizes our presence, our expertise, and our authority.

It’s not going to prevent another Bill Willingham debacle, but it’s a big step toward creating an environment where that sort of thing is less likely to happen. 

It also represents an embrace of new blood, and the present/future of gaming rather than a focus on the past. Historically, a lot of the focus of the Industry Insider slate emphasized long tenure in the industry, and a history of significant contributions. That’s great, and there are still representatives of that group of people present among this year’s Insiders. However, that sort of focus also tended to ensure that the people being featured as Insiders were people everyone already knew about (and exacerbated the problem of newer people getting recognition). 

This year’s slate recognizes people who are doing important things now,and helps raise their profiles. It has indie tabletop publishers, indie LARP designers, event organizers, activists, critics, academics, and community managers in addition to designers, writers, and artists. The Insider selection this year is much more reflective of the spectrum of people who are shaping games right now, and of what’s actually going on in the gaming world. Who gets asked to speak is important, and the Insider program this year is boosting voices that need to be heard.

There’s still a long way to go, however–we’re still a pretty white bunch of people. It’s important to get more people talking about accessibility. It’s important to get more LGBTQIA (especially the BTQIA part of that) people heard. 

People of color are represented, but they’re still massively underrepresented. (Friends, if you are a person of color who works in games, or know someone who’d be a great featured speaker, please send them my way. It’s not too early to start working on who gets invited next year.)

However, and I think this is important:

This year’s Guest of Honor is Mike Pondsmith. He’s a great choice, because in addition to being an expert and an important figure in tabletop gaming, he’s also an example of the presence of people of color in gaming from the old days. He founded a game company in 1985, and has been involved in pretty much every aspect of gaming since then. (He’s currently collaborating with the makers of The Witcher on an RPG video game.)

I also want to highlight a few of my colleagues who are Insiders this year:

• Wes Schneider (@wesschneider): Paizo’s editor-in-chief and general all-around awesome snarky gothic psychopomp. 
  
• Amanda Hamon Kunz: Paizo developer and rising star in tabletop. 
• Crystal Frasier (@amazonchique): Paizo developer, fan-favorite author, and graphic designer/artist. 
• Katherine Cross: journalist, critic, and thinker who’s continually raising the level of discourse in games.
• Anna Kreider (of Go Make Me A Sandwich): one of the most insightful writers about issues of representation in games and someone who regularly brings the juicy data to the discussion.
• Donna Prior: community manager extraordinaire and founder of OrcaCon. 

You can hear all of us speak (and come chat with us one-to-one!) at this year’s Gen Con. 

I really want to compliment Peter Adkison (Gen Con’s owner) and Adrian Swartout (Gen Con’s CEO) on this. It’s great when conventions and companies step up to lead in ensuring that new voices – especially those from underrepresented groups – get heard.

Here’s to a diverse and rewarding Gen Con 2016. :-)

tigerator:

tigerator:

finally blizzard entertainment has boiled diversity down to a calculable amount. i can now figure out exactly how much a dark skinned brazilian man is worth compared against a gorilla from the moon.

i just think this is extremely funny.

think about it. they’ll never have a queer poc because any character that’s a person of colour will score enough diversity points for them to not see the need to also make them queer. they took the entirety of human experience and turned it into a collection of meters in order to hit quotas. lucio can’t be bisexual because he doesn’t needto be, because he does “enough” by not being white. they didn’t even think about making lucio be bisexual even though he’s a rollerskating dj furry from the future because he brings diversity of “ethnicity” and “culture”. this entire system bases the existence of literally every character around how they compare to a cis white straight able bodied male 30 year old.

this is literally default male deviation female taken to its complete extreme. this is THE most performative wokeness i have EVER seen. i almost wish they weren’t undergoing the 780375802 other scandals that are happening right now so i could focus entirely on making fun of this.

shabby-blog:

funnytwittertweets:

Hope you don’t mind @orc-sign-language but I think these tags are very important for people to understand why AAA games and their companies are under a lot of backlash and most games are copy-paste