Mitu Khandaker

Please note: the format was such that it was 20 seconds per slide – so, there are many slides, and therefore many pictures.

This tak is about romantic love, and the scientific method. These things may seem contradictory, but bear with me. Though first, let’s talk about space. Most of you will already know, that expanding out from the earth is a sort of ‘bubble’ of radio waves; all the broadcasts that have ever been sent, by anyone on the planet.

We’re sending out children’s TV shows & speeches by dictators, all our achievements, all our follies, all the Kardashians. Our media forms a sort of weird mix tape of the human experience, for anyone who might care to listen. It’s been asked a number of times: what would any extra-terrestrial observers make of it all? What would they make of us?

Edit: Of course, we have not been meaning to send out these messages, so this might be a weird analogy. Perhaps a better analogy would be that of  the Voyager probes, 1 & 2 sent out in 1977, containing the famous Golden Record – intended as a ‘cultural Noah’s Ark’.

Obviously, we haven’t been broadcasting games (or sending them out on Voyager…), but it’s interesting to ask ourselves: if alien beings, far in the future, were to assess what life on Earth was like, from only our archive of videogames, what would that teach them? What legacy are games leaving for us? It’s likely a very narrow sort of picture of what it is actually like to be human.

Edit: Regarding games leaving a narrow picture – mostly about shooting things: this stuff is fine, obviously, but, as I said, narrow. There is nothing inherently wrong with games about conflict over borders, or ideology; conflict is often one of the greatest sources of human complexity. However, the problem is that games don’t really reflect this complexity very well, which should be something that games are basically ace at doing.

Moreover, what would our games or broadcasts say about the human experience of love? There’s any number of love stories out there already, but, rather than telling one particular story as such: how do we model the very experience of love itself? What it’s like to love? Because we could look at any one relationship, any one couple…

… for example, this one. But as we start to expand out, we see that the details we think are so important, do not matter at all from a cosmic perspective. After all, aliens would not care about our silly obsessions with borders, or shades of skin, or limits we place upon sexuality or gender. From afar, none of those things seem important.

Edit: The meandering point I was actually trying to get at, here: F*ck a heteronormative approach.

Love is the most interesting bit, and ours is a planet full of people in love. At the Digital Romance Lab, we took the approach that this notion suggests: if we want to teach someone who is not human about our experience of love, and we had only the medium of games to express ourselves, how would we do it?

[Note: not like this.]

We adopted a philosophy of experimentation and iteration (a bit like dating, one might say). If we have an idea, we simply build it, in hopes of discovering whether it is a design path worth pursuing, even if it is a failure, and we’ve had a few of those. But, we also ask the question of which part of love’s complexity we want to portray.

After all, love is paradoxically both universal and personal, experienced in many different ways. It’s this complexity that makes love so compelling when it comes to games. There’s a lot to cover, a lot to model. It presents a fascinating opportunity for developers to explore this experience, which both unites us and gives rise to so much diversity.

Love stories are also interesting when they go a bit wrong. Perhaps it is failures in love that make the successes all the better, prepare you for them, make them ever more victorious. Just like games. The discordant feedback of unrequited romance easily parallels the feedback loop of a game. We explore, we struggle, we learn, we move forward.

[Edit: the next few slides were a very fast, sweeping overview of some of the game-jam projects that came out of Dirolab, to illustrate the purpose and ideology behind the project, so omitted here.]

Some of this thinking has fed into a game I’m working on independently, called Redshirt. It’s a life sim set on a space station, blending classic sci-fi tropes with the impact that social networking has on our emotions. Amongst other things, it’s about capturing things like the uncertainty of sending a flirty message, seeing they are online, awaiting a response. It’s about allowing social experimentation, and trying to navigate social physics.

Games in which we may love but also fail at love, are about allowing players to think systematically about their actions & their consequences when it comes to romantic decisions. Games can be models for understanding real things, important things, and particularly useful for trying to interrogate things as weird and as complex as love. Games are the ideal engines of interrogation.

After all, video games may increase our capacity for complex systems thinking. They teach us that things – including love – may be complicated and beautiful and universal all at once. They allow us to poke and prod at its weirdness, via the scientific method; harnessing our natural awe, wonder, and curiosity about the world, interrogating it through logic and iteration.

Perhaps our best traits as humans, really, are also our most basic of traits. Yet, they are also the ones we forget about so often: how to love, and how to explore.

1. What made you decide to get into games development?

2. How do you think women are represented in development? Are there anywhere near enough working in the industry?

3. Why do you think the numbers are so low in the mainstream industry? Do you think it’s that historically games haven’t appealed as much to women, or is there something else about the industry itself?

It’s not that games “don’t appeal to women”, to suggest that would be incredibly simplistic; instead, the reason why we haven’t associated gaming as a ‘thing that women do’ is a complicated mix of marketing, early arcade culture, and deep-seated cultural expectations, as well as many other factors.

There is nothing about the form of video games that precludes women from playing; however, there are, unfortunately, a lot of things that in games – and gamer culture – which women could point to and go “this isn’t for me”, whether that’s eyerollingly hypersexualised female characters, or just the openly misogynistic attiudes to be found within many gaming communities. There are still too many games which fulfill their own stereotypes, and that definitely makes me cringe a bit. Games don’t need to appeal to women; they just need to stop actively offending them.

4. Do you think the industry, or the education system, should be doing more to attract women into the industry?

When I was younger and naïve, I liked to think that things would somehow reach some sort of automatic equilibrium with respect to the number of women in the industry; but, unfortunately, that doesn’t take into account all the factors which are actively dissuading women from entering the industry. When I think of incidents such as the recent Dead Island controversy, in which some not-meant-to-be-seen code was found, referring to the game’s female character as a ‘feminist wh*re’, it boggles the mind; it’s no wonder that developer friends have often admitted that development feels like a bit of a boys club.

It’s a complicated issue, though, which does go hand-in-hand-with wider cultural sexism; but I do think that as an industry, we should be doing as much as possible to counteract this sort of culture. After all, the form of video games and the content of individual games, are two separate things; there is nothing about the form of games, which means we have to produce content that can potentially isolate half the world’s population. I believe that if we love our medium, then it’s our responsibility – regardless of gender – to make sure that we are maximising its potential.

The lack of women in the industry also goes hand-in-hand with the wider issue of a lack of women in other science, engineering, and technology disciplines. The responsibility for fixing this divide, I think, lies with education, at the earliest possible levels, both at home and at school. You don’t, for example, see girls being encouraged to play with LEGO as much as boys, which is sad. [Edit: This was written before the whole 'LEGO for girls' thing, which, quite frankly, misses the point entirely...]

I think games, though, are themselves a great way to get girls interested in engineering; for example, programming in isolation might not inherently appeal to some people, but the creativity involved in making something as fun as games might be just the hook they need. Indeed, when I went back to do a careers fair at my old (all-girls) high school, most girls looked a bit dubious at the ‘Computer Science’ banner above my head. However, when they discovered that I make games, they were immediately interested.

Getting kids – both boys and girls – hooked on the creativity of making games at a young age is key. Luckily, there are increasing numbers of tools which make it easy to do just that, such as Scratch, or Microsoft’s Kodu.

5. Do you think there are any games or game trends that have drawn more women into the industry recently? Everyone likes to think that casual titles and platforms like Wii and iPhone have brought in more female players – would you agree?

That does seem to be assumption, and it’s possible that with ‘casual’ titles, there is less scope for content that might potentially isolate a female player. Or, perhaps, the oft-quoted suggestion that the (majority) number of women who play Facebook games don’t actually consider it to be a game – but rather than activity that they do online – so avoid all the ‘baggage’ that the term ‘computer game’ might come with.

However, rather than creating games which are targeted at women, the solution lies partly in developing a wider range of good-quality games which appeal to kids. I think if we get kids – girls and boys – passionate about games from a young age, then that is a significant proportion of the battle won. We need to get games to a stage where they are gender-agnostic.

6. Who do you think are some of the most influential women in games development today and why?

 It’s difficult to assume who might be ‘influential’ – it’s often said, anecdotally, that women are more reluctant than men when it comes to ‘promoting themselves’ (and, once again, the reasons for this are complex – but also to do with being more likely to leave themselves open to criticism which wouldn’t necessarily be aimed at her male counterparts) so it’s possible that the most hardworking of women aren’t even very well-known at all.

(That said, there are definitely numerous prominent women in the industry, whom I admire, for example, Brenda Brathwaite, Jane McGonigal, Kellee Santiago, Robin Hunicke, to name just a tiny handful.)

7. What would you say to female students or young women coders and designers thinking of entering the games industry – how would you encourage them?

Well, I haven’t ever worked for a proper, commercial studio, so I’m not sure what to advise with regards to that – instead, I’ve jumped straight into independently making games, having started my own company. Now is a great time to do just that; if there’s a direction you’d like to see games take, then do as much as you can to make that change yourself. Start making games. That advice goes for everyone, regardless of gender. I’d say that overall, my path into development has been a bit unconventional; but the truth is, I don’t think there is really a properly ‘conventional’ route into games. The industry is wonderfully eclectic like that.

8. Recently, several major titles – the likes of Gears 3, Uncharted 3 and Deus Ex – have been written by women. Do you think that having women in major development roles on games has a palpable effect on the content? In other words, do women bring something new to game narratives and construction, or is that too much of a generalisation?

Well, I think it’s difficult to assess what ‘women’ as a whole might bring to a medium; everyone is an individual, after all, and my skills and interests are probably very different to any other women’s skills and interests. However, it is fair to say that having women in major development roles would make games less likely to be actively offensive to women (and by extension, to everyone); after all, this is the only thing games really need to do in order to achieve gender egalitarianism. This also goes for any other gender or cultural identity. Diversity is a wonderful, incredibly healthy thing, and we should always embrace it.