For my STEP Signature Project, I utilized STEP’s financial support to attend this year’s Game Developer Conference (GDC). By doing so, I had the opportunity to participate in various industry-expert led lectures, engage with professionals in Game Design, and become acquainted with the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), a minority outreach group dedicated to assisting students in entering the industry and connecting those students with game industry ambassadors. Attending the conference provided me with a deeper understanding of the games industry and enabled me to establish valuable connections for future guidance and support.
The most important benefit I gained from the conference was learning more about the games industry. This was particularly valuable as I was considering whether to attend Ohio State University for an MFA in Digital Animation and Interactive Media, which would solidify my path towards creating interactive content. For this reason, it was important to make sure that this was a community I would actually like to be a part of since becoming a game developer is not an easy life.
However, after immersing myself in the game developer community, not only did my understanding of the game industry change, but I did as well. During my time there, I was mesmerized by the amount of passion there is to shift games towards being made for prosocial good. Additionally, I came to learn how inclusive the community is to those in the LGBTQ+ community. For me, both of those aspects are major reasons why I loved the game industry from the outside so to see that it was even more so the case on the inside was aa truly heartwarming. Furthermore, the changed that occurred within my own self was the realization that for me, I want to learn more about how we can make games more accessible, especially for the emerging technologies of mixed reality.
Regarding my first change of perspective with the prosocial aspirations of the games industry, this can be most thanked due to the amazing talks I got to attend. One of the best talks on this topic was a talk named “Advocacy Microtalks: Culture, Civics, & Karma” which was made up of 5 different mini talks on how to make games that are a powerful force for cultural change. One of the key take aways I gained from this talk was the quote of “The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn’t resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.” – Jacqueline Woodson. This quote was in regards to how if you want to make a game that actually means something, you have to be willing to truly make it for that community and not water it down to be something that is socially acceptable to everyone. Another key takeaway was that we as designers have to come up with ways to create opportunities for people to be kind by giving players motive, means, and opportunities to be kind. Through doing so we can make games that can help make the world a more wholesome place. Thanks to talks like these, not only did my view of my responsibility of a game designer shift, but I also got a chance to see how the game industry is made up of people like these speakers who want to use our art form to help people.
Regarding the second shift of perspective of just how important the Queer community is to the games industry was thanks to one of the first talks I was able to attend. The talk I am referring to was called “Fair Play Summit: Nonbinary by Design” which described the speakers experience crafting a narrative in which the main protagonist comes to identify as non-binary and how important it is to include as many voices of a community as you can when crafting inclusivity stories. But the reason it gave me such a brighter view of the game’s community was not for the talks content itself but for the fact that before the talk, unlike the every other talk I attended in which most people would wait till about 20 minutes before hand to start lining up, an hour before this presentation, there was already a line halfway down the hall. Through this, I was able to see how important even a community as small as the nonbinary community is to those in the industry.
The final realization in which I discovered my desire to work in accessibility for games can most directly be attributed to a talk I watched on crafting a VR game for players who are blind. In the talk, the speakers discussed what type of adaptions they had to make to provide the best quality experience they could for all their players, no matter if they were blind or not. For example, they discovered that making the game have simply a text-to-speech feature for all written content was not enough since it would either result in players getting an overwhelming amount of information and confusions about what information was important. So instead, they had to do numerous playtests filtering down the information and determining what truly needed to be read aloud and what did not. Furthermore, they talked about how much this meant to the blind community since this was the first VR game that was tailored made to be accessible to the community. Yet, there is still so much research yet to be down on these emerging technologies of VR and AR which is why I had this change of perspective of wanting to go into learning how we can improve these technologies accessibility.
Overall, thanks to this conference I feel surer then ever in my decision to attend The Ohio State University for my MFA since now I know that the industry I would be entering following my studies is one I would be glad to be apart of. Furthermore, thanks to my discoveries regarding the state of accessibility in games, I now have a clear direction for what I would want to focus my thesis research on when I am pursing my master’s degree. Finally, thanks to the opportunity that STEP has given me, I now have a vast amount of people who I can reach out to as I go down this journey.
