How I met diversity and liked it
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Oleg Pridiuk, Evangelist, King What’s your take on diversity and inclusion in games industry? There are mixed opinions on what is good and bad. And here’s mine, based on my last year at King and global travels.
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How I met diversity and liked it
- 2. The diversity talk Oleg Pridiuk, Evangelist, King twitter: @iwozik
- 3. • Now King, Evangelist • Ex Unity Technologies • Ex Game Insight • Does the joke make sense? =] Ole Pridiuksson
- 4. • Now King, Evangelist • Ex Unity Technologies • Ex Game Insight • Random facts: • Cares about fabric softener • Used to write code for Siemens SX1 • Been flying over Alps while making this slide Twitter: @iwozik
- 12. A good slide will be hare
- 16. Thank you!Oleg Pridiuk, Evangelist, King twitter: @iwozik #Defold
Editor's Notes
- Also it is important to note, the diversity and inclusion topic has many angles and aspects, but within this talk I will cover only my own experience and my own take here. I’ll share my take on how working with people who are less represented in this industry makes industry better and why I think King is a great place to be and great place to work.
- A\B testing in real time, does the joke make sense? Apologies for my slow Russian, I rarely speak the language nowadays
- Who gets the joke about fabric softener? Got to my twitter. I pinned the correct answer with a link to WSJ Now ok, you might say, what can a white male in his thirties know about diversity and inclusion here? Indeed. Lets see
- So what is diversity? This term is used in many-many ways, lets explore some. Here I am showing Defold to a ballerina from Vilnius school of arts. They have gamedev classes and I’ve taken my community day to explain her Defold. Proofpic on the left – she is a balerina. She’s 11. And she taught me a lot about how she consumes games and how she expects games to be made. E.g. she doesn’t play on the laptop since it cannot work long without a power cord. --> totally different behavioural pattern from mobile
- These are also kids I worked with. A bit older – 22, 23 – Stockholm\s Futuregames school. I’ve assembled a team of King devs, producers, artists, UI, UX and created a 4 week course for these gamedesign students to deliver a f2p game. >>> This was possible because we have community days at King! <<< We guided them throughout the design process and learned a lot about how they design games, what are their expectations on both tools – what is relevant for Defold and also games – art, design, production, gameplay, core loop
- All 16 students came to King office to show their games and delivered talks to our teams. This is the best way to see the world through completely new eyes, understand the player better. And Defold team learned a lot about how game designers see the game engine, what they expect it be used for. Obviously this whole thing was synched with our campus HR people to make sure the best student who are now familiar with the company would pursue internship opportunities at King. And let me remind, we have EA Dice, Avalanche, Paradox, Unity and many more around us competing for young talent.
- Another take on young talent. They perceive the world differently. Think Snapchat and then how FB got grown-up features from it? The way content is consumed is changing/evolving, so it is critical for games business to watch this space. This is a totally crazy case. I was on another business and had a chance to talk creativity and game jams to a huge hall full of 9-10-y.olds. It is like you’re speaking to an audience and the audience is very deep in their iPads and their phones – they all play games. They see nothing bad in it. It was a big deal to drive their attention – but the remuneration was some of the kids went ahead and camped by the scene – here’s why I am sitting down there – to appreciate the campers From this talk I figured out the right language and tone, topics of interests for these people. Common ground. Another learning was that kids are totally ok with ads, mostly struggle to have parents pay for the games unless they can clearly explain how the game is useful. They want to relate with the game, based on what they know and feel for. Now I can guess why it makes sense to reskin popular games with various IPs
- Now you got it that working with younger crowd helps your team and your games to serve better on the market. Good. But there’s more. So here we have an open training going on in Stockholm. We tried different approaches and so far nailed down a full-day Saturday class for beginners. It is quite heavy on coding, and we’re very open on it, but then we also welcome people with all kinds of backgrounds. During the last training we got artists, scientists, school teachers, students and many more. We supplied art, assets, code and our engineers were around to help. By the end of the day 120 people in the audience had a nice running game. This was streamed live, recorded and will be cut into shorter lessons, sorts of tutorials. You can guess how many benefits this has for King from HR, branding, technology and all other perspectives. The diversity angle though is that we provide an opportunity for people outside of the industry to sample game development and maybe pursue a career, ideally within King. But then even if these people take our technology, what is Defold, and take it home, to their school, to their friends – this is already very very good.
- Now here’s a cultural angle for you - Malaysia – I was on a business trip there, and their govt arm responsible for game development took the initiative to organize a training for me. Logic simple: King is cool, King is here, we should take the most of it. I’ve spent abt 2.5 hours with these people – students and teachers from local universities. I know very little about them, this was very stressful for me to manage the class of 40 ppl. But I was amazed and inspired by the group – lots of females, people of different skills. As they saw I am failing to run by every person in a need of help, they took the initiative and started helping each other. No questions, no “hey it is boring, I am fast head already”. Those are ppl of different culture, and may be, may be in this case the developing country of Malaysia is ahead of the developed western world in terms of tolerance, diversity and inclusion.
- Now lets take a moment to recap and reflect. Diversity has many angles and aspects, we’re focusing on just a few of them. I won’t cover the art and gamedesign aspects because Kiki and Kristin did it – here’s their talk I did state today that working with young talent is crucial once you as a company claim yourself as a global game developer I did state that for a global company is crucial to attract and retain talent from all over the world and help people blossom within our Kingdom with their culture and their skills But before I move towards - lets step on sort of a macro level and focus on the WHY question. Why do we invest so heavily in attracting and retaining diverse people, talent of different age, culture, race, sex, skills. >>>> Gaming used to be a geek culture with own background, history and jokes. Geek gamers have played so much games that they have the context to understand your language. However the games industry is not a niche entertainment anymore. E.g. the pen and paper RPGs still are, computer and especially mobile games are not niche, they’re part of mere mortal’s life. Games are now accessible to anybody and are played by anybody. The growing market is a huge opportunity on the business side. games are played by everybody and have to be appealing to everybody – I mean, you want more players, ideally more paying players, well, then you cater them what they like and enjoy! from a business perspective we want our games to be loved by people of different age, culture, background and all sorts of beliefs younger generation with little to no games experience - generation snapchat and their attention span and focus on influencing older generation that have no core games experience but are willing to play casual games This was probably the main slide of my talk. So those watching this as a recording, please rewind a couple of minutes back and rewatch. And we’re moving on.
- Now here’s a proofpic. More on the King side. There’s a Defold team at King that I love and work closely with, their game is TBA soon. And the team is remarkable in many ways <pic story goes here> Their internal playtest presentation started from CTO stating he is so proud the team is diverse. I play their game and the art, the polish, the cultural references are pretty unique, I must say. They designed characters after some of the team members. You know, a guerrilla named Dima after their lead programmer from Ukraine and alike. Just an example of how global and diverse we are at King, and how this results in us making better games.
- Food! Allergies even for fika, ear plugs on parties, disabld- team and production culture the obvious solution of getting more international people, people of different beliefs and culture onto the team works only if there’s a inclusivity culture people have to feel their input is important, they have to have an opportunity and confidence to have a say in fact it is not a team culture but a company culture that has to promote inclusivity and diversity that would result in much better games staying true to inclusivity and diversity culture - examples our hiring brochure with examples of bad jokes our code academy provides trainings for non-tech talent, including i.e. HR we have company-wide events where new teams present their prototypes, findings, experiments tech trainings so artists, UI, UX, bpm ppl understand the gamedev pipeline better
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV2gX6NbdNs And here’s pretty much a summary video, of where does such culture lead. We have a kind of own GDC, where we fly in all 2000 kingsters to a single place. I am just back from barcelona. And this one is from last years stockholm event. Ownership - Focused, hungry and determined, we take responsibility and make things happen. Global Impact - Devoted about games that create a world of players. Agile - Thinking. Challenging. Adapting. Improving. We never stand still. Open - Always open to ideas and individuals, we take nothing for granted. Fun - It takes fun to make fun. We're passionate about what we do.
- Thanks! My final slide is a moment from GDC, where we had a dedicated booth for our Defold indie teams – teams from BY, small FI city of LPP, the UK, Germany, Distributed team from Moscow, Poland and Australia. We also had scholarship for talented young females, we brought them to GDC to help them pursue their careers in gamedev and inspire more women to join games industry. So as you see we’re staying true to the statement that King is a great place to be and a great place to work from all possible angles. With this talk I wanted to sort of share my personal take on why diversity and inclusion is important, and what we do at King to enable this, and also why, why it is so important. Now I have bonus slides or we can switch to questions instead.
- Bonus slides! This is Ieva, a young talented artist from Sneaky Box, a studio from a small town in Lithuania – her art is used in a project we use globally to teach gamedev to non-techy people. She created chars, assets for it, and we use Defold for the training. Here she’s showing our project on a 15 000 ppl games culture event. It has taken about a year from the concept to delivery to iterate on the project, but the art part was done quite fast, it is the polish after focus groups that mattered.
- I captured this intimate moment on a developer conference in moscow. We had a Defold booth where we hosted some of the best teams in the region. This is Masha, a girl from small town of Cheboksary in Chuvashia, who opened an online school to teach narrative design. She uses the project created by Ieva and Sneaky Box also she is working on her second game with Defold being the engine of choice. You may also recognise the caste picture – it is a cover for Defold’s Facebook page. In fact, this project was Masha’s idea and initiative. She came up with the concept, then we iterated with Sneaky Box, then Ieva did the art, then we tried this on different groups and iterated more. Now we’re releasing the project for free along with manuals and tutorials, we’re also trialling this project at King to teach non-programmers to develop games. HR people asked for it – they wanna try game development as well while they cannot spend much time. Our internal Code Academy teachers used Construct before, now King’s internal tool will be used. I have so much pride and hope in this initiative, since it makes so much sense, helps non-devs to understand gamedev better. We also did Defold trainings for UI, UX people, artists, designers so they can spend more time without asking developers to take their headphones off.
- And the last thing. This can be a separate talk overall, but let me throw in some statements for you to walk away with. The whole make better games thing that we push heavily – it is the technical side we fix from Defold perspective. Out game engine allows games to be run on low end mobiles, on devices available in China, in SEA in South America. Android 2.3, even first iPad – we still support it. We care about these players. And here goes the business case – games have to be global Lots of players have low-end devices or tend to play games in browser - HTML5 is the option we provide Art and game design have to be built with global approach in mind, what is very hard without a diverse team with different passions, interests and cultural backgrounds various complex gamedesign/art cases - i.e. in modern midcore games art is tailored to girls and gamedesign to guys people tend to emotionally stick to game if they feel for the character - there shall be a choice or characters may be designed with inclusivity in mind things may be considered offensive in one country and totally fine in another - show a classy Japanese art to a Scandinavian to get an outburst