A diverse workforce is critical to serve an increasingly diverse and global player community. To showcase how members of the Entertainment Software Association are investing in the movement toward ever-increasing equity and inclusion in the game industry, ESA hosted the second annual Diversity in Gaming Lunch at this year’s GamesBeat Summit 2024.
Today, nearly half of game players are women in the United States, but no demographic is a monolith. “There aren’t girl games or boy games,” Aubrey Quinn, SVP, communications and public affairs at ESA, pointed out. The challenge, she says, is to create games that appeal to a diverse player community.
“When we’re thinking of creating content, when we’re thinking of creating a character, or an agent, for Valorant or any of our games, we’re thinking of the global audience that we serve,” said Farah Sutton, director of diversity and inclusion at Riot Games. “The first thing we think about is authenticity. How do we create content that resonates with players, not only for gameplay, but also with aspects of their identity? And in doing that, we’re really thoughtful about making sure that we’re honing in on the audience that we’re serving.”
In games like NBA2K and Top Spin, Take-Two aims to create characters that reflect the real world, said Chanel Ward, the company’s director of global, diversity, equity and inclusion. And to that end, given the content that they create and the communities they represent, they must build solid relationships with that community in an emotionally intelligent way.
“We have to capture the nature of their intersectional identity, their being, who they are, their cultural context,” Ward explained. “We have to humble ourselves very frequently and say, what do we not know? We need to make sure that we are in a practice where we’re really listening, learning, and building trusting relationships. That’s kind of just a simple way of saying, we’re responsible for our conduct. We’re responsible to not co-opt, to just go in, take, and say thanks.”
And that goes for the developer side as well, said Laura Teclemariam, senior director of product management at LinkedIn. She previously worked at EA in the R&D department, and while working on the Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes title, she was the only woman on the team at the time – and she took a leap when she proposed a squad of all-female characters to the male developers and designers in the room.
“I look at them now as allies. They didn’t know at the time that they were being an ally, but just hearing my voice in the room, allowing me to care about gender diversity and making sure that the game was representative, was a step forward toward building a squad that had great reviews,” she said. “That’s just an example of how having a diverse team can not only benefit the development of the game and make it more universal to more players, but also allow inclusion for everyone on the team to feel like they’re welcomed and they belong.”
Building teams that reflect the real world
Developers in decision-making roles have the opportunity – and the responsibility – to look around the room and consider who might be missing from the room and the conversations, Quinn added.
“The diverse player community deserves diverse creators,” she said. “Are we intentionally finding and building teams who look different, who have different lived experiences, different ages, genders, sexual orientations, races, military experience, whatever that looks like? If you’re creating a game, you’d better make sure that you have that person in the room.”
That sometimes means bringing in consultants – who can unlock essential, often overlooked perspectives.
“It’s so easy for us to think, when we’re thinking about diversity, about all these check box things, race and sex and gender expression and faith, disability,” Ward said. “But what about the accumulation of all those things, and how does intersectionality play a part in how this new piece of content merges with our world and our lore? Those parts are so critical that on our own, it would be difficult.”
The move toward skills-based hiring, rather than hiring for experience, is an important piece of the DE&I conversation for the games industry, Teclemariam added, because it opens up the floor to candidates from a broad array of backgrounds, no matter their ability.
“I think we have to go back to teaching the skills, the craft,” she said “We can bring more people into the industry, especially as it continues to grow at a global scale, by developing those types of programs.”
Actionable steps for change
Where should developers go from here? The panelists offered some steps game industry professionals can take right now to start effecting change. A vital one, Sutton said, goes back to simply recognizing what you don’t know.
“It’s a vulnerable thing to do, and also an empowering thing to do in the same breath,” Sutton said. “Being able to say, we have kind of reached our limit with this, and in order to do this in an authentic way, we need to ask for help, whether that’s getting an SME, getting a consultant, tapping someone else in the company. My charge to folks is, ask for help when you need it. Look for that help from people who have that experience that we’ve been talking about, who have the skill, who have the background. Because without that, we’re simply not going to be positioned to create authentic work to serve players.”
In her work forming employee resource groups at a variety of big gaming companies, Teclemariam developed a top five list. The first is that it starts from the top – getting leadership to align around the vision. The second is training both managers and employees on creating safe spaces, speaking up, and advocating for yourself and others. The third, performance, is about holding accountability across the ecosystem for reaching your culture goals. The fourth is retention — bringing those diverse voices into the conversation, and making them feel safe enough and valued enough to actually stay and see your vision through. And last but not least, once you’ve taken those first four steps, celebrate.
“Far too many times we celebrate the game, but we forget to celebrate the journey of building a diverse team, selling our games to diverse audiences, building diverse narratives that have never been seen before,” she said. “Those storytelling aspects are such great moments of progressing our industry forward.”
The industry is still relatively new, Ward pointed out, and so still has a significant opportunity to be more intentional about its culture, and understand what makes games important to people across demographics, generations and lived experiences, and that requires cultural competency.
“We need to be able to understand and acknowledge the diversity in the room, seen and unseen,” Ward explains. “And then beyond that, building the social skills to have the confidence in conversations around identity, diversity. How do we create containers for people to make mistakes and model grace to say, it’s all good, I know that wasn’t your intention? And we’re here together to figure that out.”
“It’s so easy to get frustrated by where we are in the journey if you don’t zoom out and look at the entirety of that arc and say, wow, we’ve done a lot,” Quinn added. “It’s not always pretty. We haven’t been perfect. But there’s progress.” And as Teclememariam reminds us, that deserves to be celebrated.