 Hello, thank you Sumina for giving me the toughest act to follow So I'm Morgan and Gonna talk about my game So a little background I grew up playing a lot of video games like especially very taxed-heavy ones like Baldur's Gate any fans Yeah, cool, and I love games so much that I wanted to be a game developer when I grew up And then I learned that the game industry isn't great for women or anyone So I just kind of let that ship sail and I I didn't want to fight that fight But in college I studied computer science and in my first class we made a text adventure game No graphics really simple in the terminal and it was so much fun And it was the first time I had made a game and I realized I can make games and not have to deal with the game industry Which is cool Ta-da And it's important to note that at this point. I still don't know the first thing about game design or like physics engines I got a C in linear algebra like I'm not qualified Quote to make games, but that's fine honestly And I just hope that if there's someone in the audience, I know there's at least one Who's interested in making games, but is Intimidated or they think they don't have what it takes you honestly do if you have an idea then that's kind of the whole battle really So part of why I wanted to make a game was I used to be a programmer I'm not anymore and I wanted to maintain my coding skills without having to deal with other people looking at my code and Their attitude and I wanted to make something creative and technical. It's actually a lot of fun to make a game And I wanted to see if it's at all Possible to maybe make something more diverse and for those of you who can see the slides Which they're all Men looking very intensely at the camera wearing black and red It's uncanny how similar all these pictures are from different video games and this wasn't hard to find like if you just search Video games. This is what you see And I like some of these games, but like damn that's not what I look like That's not what most of us look like and that's not that fun So when I was making the game, I was really inspired by sci-fi especially older stuff like Blade Runner or 2001 Space Odyssey and I really like The past's idea of the future I think 2001 Space Odyssey is a great example because they thought we would have a lot done by 2001 and we didn't But really sci-fi is a great way of comparing our world now to what it could be or to what might go horribly wrong and it can be used as a really powerful way of doing social critique and Robots and I was really really inspired by this game the longest journey. Have any of you played it? Okay, awesome. So for those of you who haven't It's really based on it's just about storytelling and the importance of stories and it also has a really really diverse cast Probably comes as no surprise that this is a Norwegian game and The thing is it's actually recently gotten a lot of flak for people for having a gay Protagonist or having a lesbian couple that doesn't exist for the male gays and That's weird because there's all these people saying well, I don't see why that's relevant Like you're just pushing your agenda on me. It's a game. It's not important. It makes me uncomfortable. I Disagree with that. I hope some of you do too And I think it is important to see yourself in a game and that's really empowering and awesome and It's just a great game. Like honestly you guys should play it So my game. It's a browser based game. It's only been tested in chrome So it's really a chrome based game. Sorry if you don't use chrome And It's very very simple all you do is you read the text and then you select the option for what happens next And one thing I wanted to do was to make the protagonist a woman and to have the player go through Experiences that some women might typically go through that men don't Like having to have a really awkward conversation with someone in the elevator So for those of you who can't read what's on the side says You get in the elevator of your apartment building you hear someone yelling. Hey, hold the elevator You recognize that voice and you can either sigh and push the open doors button or you can frantically push the closed doors button Which I think some of us have been there and You know, you're just stuck in the elevator making really awkward small talk with a guy who doesn't understand that you really don't want to be making small talk with him and I just wanted to show that because that's something women go through But I don't want to make it any more extreme than that for those of you who maybe watch Game of Thrones You know that they've received a lot of criticism rightfully so for using violence and trauma against women to establish empathy and You don't have to show the worst-case scenario of someone's experience to prove that it's different It can just be these kind of awkward situations that you find yourself in There's no point in getting more violent than that Another thing I really wanted to talk about is mental Health my mom works in special ed and a lot of her students are very heavily Medicated to the point where I think it's more fair to say they're sedated and While that can help some people sometimes There's there's a balance, you know people still have to be able to live their lives and I think I Don't know in games. I've never seen one that actually talks about mental health And if any of you know about one like please talk to me afterwards But it's just not something you see or if you do it's a sob story and that's someone's only identity But I wanted to show that People have anxiety. They have depression. They're not always 100% and That's fine. You can have panic attacks You can have no idea what you're doing and you can still be heroic You don't have to be the stereotypical confident protagonist with huge muscles who has all the answers But if you are I mean honestly good for you So I live in San Francisco And if you've ever been there, you'll notice that there's a lot of homeless people kind of historically been the case and It's becoming more and more jarring because there's more and more very wealthy people living in the same areas and these groups do not interact at all and I mean, I work in tech and I know that when people in tech talk about homelessness They're either very judgmental like oh, let's just get rid of all of them. I'm like, okay Like that's not a solution Or they get this savior complex or like we need to rescue every single one of them And I was like, maybe some of them don't need rescuing. They just need a place to sleep at night and for you to not just help them to feel good about yourself and I really wanted in the game for people to have to interact With homeless people with sex workers with anyone who makes less than six figures a year Because in San Francisco that doesn't happen very much unfortunately and It's just becoming clearer and clearer how tech does exclude quite a few people I remember when the Apple Watch came out and everyone was excited and I was like Who can actually afford the Apple Watch again if you can good for you. I mean you're doing great in life But I really wanted this game to force people who are playing it Most of which would be in San Francisco to have to go through an interaction that they wouldn't go through that might make them Uncomfortable even if they don't fully understand why because I think if you can do that in a game and go through it You're like, oh, well that wasn't so bad Then maybe hopefully that translates into real life And if in the game you could see that the homeless person yelling on the street actually has some intelligent things to say You might give them a shot in reality or you might not I don't know. This is just a hypothesis The last thing I wanted to do was to show racial diversity Which turns out to be really hard in a text-based game Because I can't show you the characters and I don't want to do the thing that some writers will do where they're like This is Susan Susan's black Because now that's all Susan is like you to choose a token character That's not fair to Susan And so I was like, how am I going to show racial diversity and In fact, like you can do this through language, you know, people speak other languages than English They use those words. They have accents slang. They might refer to where they're from They might have really hard names to pronounce. Everyone mispronounces my name And it actually kind of worked to my advantage that you can't see the characters For example, the protagonist is a woman and That's kind of about as much as I ever describe about her. I have an idea of what she looks like in my head, but That's just my idea of her. I mean, she could look like anyone you want She could look like you assuming your cool would female pronouns and having the name Mal. Her name is Mal and Really what I discovered while making this game was that showing diversity is Really really easy in games and that gaming companies have no excuse to not do it you don't have to go out of your way to have more than big buff white dudes in the game and I think the trick is really to first write all your characters Just as neutrally as possible Like you're gonna have a Scientist character and they're very dedicated to their work and they're very polite That's kind of their personality and maybe some of you as soon as I said scientist you might imagine white guy And that's where you have to ask yourself. Okay, does this character have to be a white guy? The answer might be yes, you know use your like best judgment But I found it was helpful to write these characters see how I imagine them and then say, okay Could the character be a Native American woman? Yeah, why not? Honestly, and it's better to do it in that direction than to go out and say I'm gonna write a Native American female character because then you're just gonna rely on stereotypes. That's suddenly their only identity So I kind of wish people from like Blizzard or something were here So just drop some knowledge on them, but now you all know how to do it and The cool thing too with sci-fi especially is that you can use this world as a model But you can change some of its history you can assume some things never happen You can assume that maybe some prejudice and bias doesn't exist in the alternate world And you can start to create a more utopian world of like, okay Well, let's assume things are different in this Alternate universe and I think if you have that in your head if you can imagine a better reality Again assuming this is like utopian sci-fi Then you can actually work towards that and it's really empowering and again robots So I'm not empowering note if any of you want to make a browser based game It's really really easy to do it All you need to know is a tiny bit of HTML CSS and JavaScript and if you already know those things awesome and if those words scare you that's fine, too because There are some great resources like code school linda.com or tree house That are free or very cheap and they can teach you how to start coding right away Like you could start today after the talks and so if you have an idea Just teach yourself the bare minimum of front-end code and you can start making a game and you don't have to deal with the industry Of course, you can also look through my source code. It's not beautiful But I'm happy to have people poke around in there ask me questions Whatever it may be and of course you can look at the game as well. It's future perfect game dot Heroku app.com There's only the first chapter up It's very much a work in progress and I'm actually terrified of showing it to people this early on but You should get feedback early and often and I would love it if some of you played it Let me know what you think on Twitter email whatever and There's cats, so feel like cats Thank you so much