Women in Games
Women in Games och Game City hade en sammankomst i Malmö och när vi inte kunde närvara där – det är jättelångt till Malmö om man inte redan är där – fick vi ett referat om vad de pratade om. Peter Lübeck, fd Tarsier, har tagit bilderna.
The late game – A glimpse of a future where video games are a healthy part of our daily life.
What is the role and the responsibility of video games in our coming future? Are we headed for a dystopian future or can we use video games to imagine or perhaps even to bring a better world?
Last week at Inkonst in Malmö, Game City Southern Sweden and Women in Games – South Sweden organised an inspirational evening on “Diversity and Inclusion in the Games Industry” with a powerful group of female speakers active in the games industry.
The evening started with the talk “The late game” by Brie Code, former lead programmer at Ubisoft Montreal and currently CEO and creative director of Tru Luv Media. This is the last part of “The video games are boring trilogy”, a series of talks where Brie talks about the current state of the industry – how games are predominantly made for a specific small group of people, with the same skin colour and cultural background, focusing on engaging the player with a balance between adrenaline and dopamine stimulus, and with that how games now are lacking on making the majority of people to feel connected or represented by the stories they are playing.
“My friends aren’t interested in adrenaline. In a world where we are all overwhelmed with constant shock and change, my friends are looking for relief. They are looking for video games about care and characters.” says Brie Code.
But according to Brie, it’s not only for cultural reasons that people might prefer care to shock. There’s also an underlying physiological reason to it related to how humans have two different stress responses: fight-or-flight, involving adrenaline and dopamine, and tend-and-befriend, involving oxytocin or vasopressin and opioids. Brie believes this holds the key to the future of the industry and gives workshops to game companies about these studies and how to implement it into game design.
“Brie’s talk went right in to my heart, I recognizes a lot of what she was talking about.” – Jenny Berg Nilson, Culture and Sustainability Manager at Massive Entertainment.
After the talk Brie joined Anne Reid, lead writer of upcoming Avatar game at Massive Entertainment, Jenny Nordenborg, CEO and co-founder of NeatCorporation and Albertina Sparrhult, operations at Diversi – a collective force working for greater diversity within the gaming sphere, and project management at Arkatay, on a discussion panel about diversity and inclusion in the games industry, moderated by Ann-Sofie Sydow, biz developer at The Game Assembly and board member of Diversi and Game City Southern Sweden. The overall take on the panel although optimistic, emphasizes the ongoing issue faced in society today and how the games industry still has a lot to grow and change. There are existing dialogues and individual efforts within the industry for creating a more diverse and inclusive work environment and games, but as highlighted by the panelists it is not yet enough to be considered the beginning of a change.
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