Getting Diversity to Speak

Today Tauriq posted a request that all of his followers who are currently boardwarrioring to defend him (I would assume including myself) instead take that time and energy to actual substantial change in  minority developers in games.  He writes.

Lots of folks are trying to show me support. I really appreciate it, but what I would appreciate more is if you took your energy in fighting battles with people who don’t care about me to raise the voices of minority folk. Maybe use this time to try get more people employed who aren’t straight white men.

Fair enough, although it’s still easier said than done.  We still need to do more work encouraging more girls and minorities into pursuing careers in STEM.  Thankfully, large corporations in the industry are taking this seriously, including Intel’s efforts.   EA also took efforts to do what they could when I worked there.  Last year, I went to Laredo as part of one of these programs to talk to kids about how cool it is to make video games – you could tell from the looks on their faces that none of them had even considered that as a possibility before.  But there *is* something more immediate that can, and should be done, by every Lead in the industry right now.  And that is to encourage the diversity that already exists on your team to speak.

Colorblindness is a big problem for game makers.  Up to 10% of caucasian males are colorblind by some estimates, and we still live in a world where many games and genres are dominated by that market.  Being color-blind friendly therefore has the potential to be a huge money-maker for your studio, and really all it takes is some attention – being sure your GUI uses shapes rather than color when possible, for example, or adding some toggles to adjust the GUI in some key ways.  But if you’re not colorblind, you just don’t think about it, and you end up fucking it up every time.

On a recent project I worked on, one of our most senior artists was color blind.  He was a hell of a talented artist, and he knew just looking at every piece of GUI in the game what was going to work and what was not going to work.  But he didn’t tell us any of this until the end.  We ended up shipping a game that wasn’t very color-blind friendly.  Oh, his silence had a reasonable rationale – real or imagined, I’m sure there is some stigma associated with being an artist who has problem with color.  His art was great – he had nothing to fear in this regard, and we had everything to gain from him speaking – but he felt like he was in a position where he could not or should not raise his voice.

That reluctance probably resulted in massive dollars lost because core male gamers in our target market simply couldn’t play the game.

Similarly, when we started working on the MTX store for SWTOR, there was an art request for a pink speederbike.  We wanted to have something on the store for the ladies – in particular, we got a lot of requests for a pink bike, and we figured they might be popular romantic gifts (we were right, if i recall correctly).  However, the original art for the bikes were just… bad.   Comically, awfully bad, and you had a whole bunch of men standing around like dumbasses being unable to figure out why.

I happened to notice one of my female designers making faces in the corner as we were discussing theories, so I asked her her opinion.  She didn’t want to talk at first.  I asked her again when we were alone, and she opened up.  There was huge demand on our boards for a pink bike, but they wanted a cool pink bike – you know, like a pink ninja.  The art we got back was a lot closer to Hello Kitty – elementary school cute, not “I am a dark lord of the sith, master of the dark arts, destroyer of worlds, but I still have a  feminine side” pink.  I got her back in front of the artist who did the skin, where she explained carefully to us, as if we were children, that even the women who do want something that is pink want something that feels badass and appropriate to the fiction.  The artist, for his part, was relieved to have some clear direction to go, and he ended up doing a great job the next go around.

This is not a woman that I would consider a girly girl by any stretch of the imagination.  But to her, the problem was painfully obvious, while to us it was like we were trying to understand ancient heiroglyphics.

The point of these stories is simple: hiring more diverse people is not enough.  As a lead, you have to also get them to speak.  This isn’t easy.  Many minority devs try to hide these viewpoints, because they want to fit in – to be ‘one of the guys’.  It’s no fun expressing these views and watching your more traditional team members roll their eyes.  It’s no fun being outvoted in design meetings, or having your viewpoint shoved down the throats of skeptical coworkers by a boss trying to make diversity happen.   And it’s really no fun feeling like you’re the token minority voice, or geting ‘rubber stamping all the pink shit to be sure it’s good, or at least not totally offensive’  added to your job responsibilities.

Still, if you’re building diverse teams, your job is only halfway done.  You need to figure out how to build a culture on your team where anyone from any point of the spectrum can feel free to speak their mind, and to actually give minority viewpoints across the political spectrum consideration. Because especially as more games reach for more international audiences, the importance of these minority opinions will only continue to grow and grow.