 Oh, it's really nice to see familiar and new faces. I am extremely happy to be here today, really privileged, feeling very privileged to be here to share this project with you. So Invisible Arcade, it's a video game concert expo mashup. And I'm going to get all into what it is and how there's diversity sort of in the DNA of it. But I'll just, before I do, I'll just introduce myself quickly. I'm Samantha. This is some of my work. Centris is my current project. Musical game, trying to help everybody make music regardless of skill level. I worked on the Fire Phone at Amazon, so born and raised in Shoreline, but then came back and moved into the city proper because of Amazon also. So I'm thinking about that in the context of the last talk. I also worked at Unity, which is a game in Denmark had the great experience of living in Copenhagen and working with that group. So when I moved back from Copenhagen, I went to the EMP and saw their exhibit on punk rock through the lens of Nirvana in the 90s. And there's a lot of interesting stuff there, great memorabilia. But there was one thing that jumped out at me. This trifecta of roles that's described in the exhibit that's still there now. It talked about how the music movement of that time went from lots of individual isolated scenes to this global movement. And this trifecta of roles was a big facilitator for that. We had artists who were making music, wanting to share the music with fans. Labels would collect a number of artist's scenes on umbrella. And the labels would then work with the venues to set up shows, bring out the fans to listen to many artists. They would come and buy drinks at the venues. The labels would print and sell CDs. So it was this everything kind of fits into place that all these three roles are supporting each other. So I thought about this in the context of games. And indie games, if game developers are the artists, then the labels are maybe publishers. But what about the venues? Maybe the web is a venue? So it seems like there's a kind of a fuzzy analogy that could be made. But I thought that actually using a concert was something that hasn't happened in the game industry and that maybe would help maybe be good to have an event like this exist. Because I like to play games with friends and haven't since I kind of became a young adult. So before and while I was working at Amazon, I was helping out with this thing called the Seattle Indies. Seattle Indies is a group. I met a fellow named Matthew Burns, who is local. We met at the game developers conference and started talking about let's have a Seattle game meetup. So we started to do Seattle Indies. It was as simple as finding a host. Luckily, there is a group called 17Bit that has a big warehouse down in Soto. We just started telling people about Seattle Indies on Facebook. It was super unorganized. There was no leader, really. Matthew and I had started making the events, but we really didn't want it to be any sort of formally structured organization. We just wanted it to be a group of people, a community. We just wanted to have a community and allow people, give people the space to make whatever events that they want. So what happened was there was one person in this group who started to come to the meetups early on. And there was a bit of a culture clash, I think, particularly between me and him. He, just knowing about his background, he had a little bit of military experience. So I think he was expecting or much more comfortable in a very regimented, formalized structure. And there was a lot of tension back and forth about how do we make these events? How do we structure them? What defines a Seattle Indies event? And I feel like, in my experiences working on teams, that, well, the point that I want to make is he started to make me question myself about, am I able to actually work well with people? Because we were having so many conflicts and we weren't able to work well together at all. So I, at one point, just asked him to step away. And he absolutely refused and made many claims about, well, all the things I've done for this community and I can't invalidate the things that he's done. But I also felt like, well, you're totally stepping on everything that I've done too. So we tried to invite him out to lunch to just have a conversation and try to just get our differences on the table and see maybe it's just better for us to not work together once everything's on the table. And it turned into a sort of, I felt very small. I felt very diminished after that conversation. And also, he'd taken this thing that I built or this thing that I'd started. I felt like he'd taken it away from me. So actually, this is the only time I've ever done this. I'm a pretty mellow person. But I literally screamed at him at the top of my lungs, obscenities and finger pointing and gestures. It was not one of my finer moments. But I walked away and I felt a little betrayed. And I decided that I was going to leave Seattle Indies because I didn't feel welcomed there anymore. So I had this kind of reaction where I was like, I'm going to do this thing called Double Cross. And it's going to be harsh and strong and video games. And they're dead, but long live them because they're never going away. So let's do this thing. And I needed that to sort of work through, unwind in a way. So I started thinking about this concert event and in thinking about, well, what is the format? Like performing games as like performing music in a party setting, but the games are playable to you. Like what is that? What is this thing that I want to do that I've been unable to do through Seattle Indies? And so I just started inviting people to this thing called Invisible Arcade. You can see that the Double Cross logo is in that first banner. But it is no longer, Double Cross is no longer a thing that was just a spike in the story. So we do video games on this gigantic screen. On this gigantic screen. They're performed. They're also playable. You can see one of the monitors is there. And there's a little stage for people to do any kind of performance with the game that they want to. We've had character-based readings of a more text-driven game. And we've done some multiplayer games that are turn-based. This is a musical performance of Centris Invisible Arcade. This is a little bit more of the expo of just people playing. And as we've done five of them now, and in doing them, I've always kept in mind that feeling that I carried for a while. I'm not included in this. And I really wanted to have Invisible Arcade be an event that fights that feeling. I really want it to be a place where everyone can come and enjoy games and play games together. They can observe games, watch them, be entertained by them, and then they can turn around and play them. And I want it to be an all-our-welcome space and all-our-welcome event. It's for everybody. Everybody loves video games. It's welcome. And so we have a couple of different roles. Invisible Arcade has been growing very organically. We just had over 100 people at the fifth one this week. And the first one had maybe 20 or 30. So it's definitely growing. And it's very, very exciting. And we're starting to build a leadership team around Invisible Arcade. So it currently is most predominantly myself and a volunteer coordinator named Fia, who's amazing. And we wouldn't be able to do the events without her. So we have event coordinators. We have performers. We have volunteers that work the door and work the games, the expo. And we are also looking to have community management and developer relations for having good communication with the developers that are doing excellent work. This is Mount Your Friends, which is really, really fun. And we've also started doing a little bit more design work. So these are the last two posters. Just trying to figure out what is the identity, define it, and refine it. The logo of the screen and the joystick and buttons, you can see, is actually embedded here in an Invisible Arcade cabinet. So how does one draw an Invisible Arcade? So this is an idea about how to do that. The name, in particular, Invisible Arcade is inspired by my own experiences and also listening to other queer experiences. I went to a conference called QGCon in Berkeley. For a couple of years, it's been in October. In Berkeley, there's going to be another one this year. Everyone should go to QGCon. It's fabulous. And at QGCon, it stands for the Queerness and Games Conference. And I was introduced to the theme of visibility slash invisibility as part of the queer life experience. And so the idea with Invisible Arcade is that it's a space for everyone where all are welcome. But no matter what the mix of people at the event is, it's secretly queer, no matter what. So it's going to be like, this is a queer space, but all are welcome. And that means having a safety to it. And so calling Invisible Arcade is a little bit of a play on queer visibility, even though it's invisible, like something that's invisible is more mysterious, more interesting, and more alluring. So I want to try to get people out and then actually be visible as queer, diverse people. So this is Fia, who's performing a game called Shelter, made by a small studio in Sweden. This is my friend Richard. He is playing a game that's made by a very small team. It's one or two people, I think, and they're in England. So this is just from the other night. This is Solon, who's playing a local game called Distance, made by a small studio called Refract. They're about five people, DigiPen graduates. And here's Richard, again, playing a game called Grow Home, which is another UK-based game, but it's a larger team. We've started to expand beyond independent work. We're looking at what our great game experiences from all kinds of different teams, different sizes, different funding, if you will. So this game, in particular, was published by Ubisoft. It's one of the, you know, we've never had a Ubisoft game in a Visible Arcade before. We're trying it out. We also had a retro game at this month's Invisible Arcade. We showed a Super Nintendo game that's by Capcom, some Japanese developers. So I'm trying to think about, and I'm encouraging the team to think about diversity from all these different angles, diversity in the people that are performing the games, diversity in the games themselves and the teams that make them, diversity in the people that we are inviting and hoping to make feel welcome. That's our goal, at least. So I guess these are some things we've accomplished so far. There's been nobody that has had, as far as I know, nobody has communicated any sort of feeling excluded at Invisible Arcade. It's really kind of, we're trying to keep diversity embedded in the DNA. Yeah, and then the number one thing that's relevant to me on this list is I'm still learning how to work with a team. I have had a tendency to isolate myself and work alone, kind of like the trope of the crazy secluded artist. And having been shaken by trying to work with team trying to work with team at Amazon, at Unity, at Seattle Indies. This is really a good experience for me in getting outside of myself and trying to incorporate more people and accepting that it's not gonna work to have a leaderless structure, but it's not gonna work to have a leader who does everything either. So finding that balance and trying to get people involved and let it grow as it will. So what's next? I really feel that we should start to vocalize the inclusivity and code of conduct like we're doing it alter-conf. That's important, I've never done that before. So we're gonna figure out how to do it. We're gonna do more locations. We've been invited, this will be announced in the next couple of weeks, but we're gonna be doing the Next Invisible Arcade in Chicago this summer. So, and that's because we were asked to do it out there. So people are starting to hear about it and I guess they think it's cool, so I'm glad they think so and we'll come out and do it if we can. We really wanna do a podcast and that parlays into a detail that I missed which is that Invisible Arcade is free. It's free to attend. We accept donations. It's 100% volunteer driven, so all of the money that's been raised for Invisible Arcade has gone directly into equipment and event insurance and rentals and so sort of, and we'll invest in some podcast equipment so that we can start to broaden the reach of this event. I want it to be something that's based in Seattle but globally accessible and we've also started to do that with live streaming through Periscope. And yeah, so we also have failed so far to do an All Ages event because the venue we've worked with has been 21 and up. We're gonna try to do that this summer and if the community grows and we find that we are not, if we're having to get creative with how we spend the donation money that is raised, the best thing I can think of is to actually support creators to make new content for Invisible Arcade for this performer crowd format. And that's an if right now. And so I wanna invite people to ask any questions that's all the slides I have. If you wanna volunteer, please get involved and you can also follow us on Twitter and we have a Patreon and the website. So that's kind of the story of Invisible Arcade and I don't know how much extra time I have but if there is time, I would be happy to do Q and A. If anybody has questions, just make sure you repeat them. I'll repeat the questions that are asked. A question, but it's a statement but I think this is really, I wanna applaud the fact that you're, I'm just saying, hey, this is... Thank you, thank you. The gentleman is saying that's a good event. Thank you very much. The question is, we thought about doing a secondary event where maybe like a game jam format where people are creating games for the event and also submitting games. No, we hadn't thought about that. I love game jams. I'm not sure about game jams as a format. I feel like if we're asking, if we're doing something specific from Invisible Arcade, we wanna support the creators, right? So we'd really love to commission a work. The other part of it is that there's a lot of content out there already. There are a lot of games out there. So the bottleneck that we're facing right now is more of how do we have enough of a curation team to define the kinds of games, attributes that make up a game that works at the event and how do we find them? How do we have those conversations? How do we outreach to those projects? And I don't wanna be negative about game jams either. It's just like I feel like we have to solve that problem before we start to agitate even more creative works from good people. Any more questions? Yes? Well, my father's got too many questions for you. Okay. So I might just have to maybe, maybe later. That's fine. I'll be here, you can chat with me. The gentleman's thinking he has too many questions. I'll be here, you can chat with me later. I'll be here all day. If you have a top number one question, we can do that now if you like. No, not really. Okay. Okay, how am I doing on time? I have five minutes. Five whole minutes. Okay. I have a question about you have like diversity numbers, like how many will you show up? Unfortunately, we don't have those numbers yet. I can say it's still predominantly Caucasian and predominantly male. And that's a byproduct I think of most of my network. That I'm trying to always make my network more diverse. But also I'm not, we're still trying to figure out how to get the word out to lots of different neighborhoods and lots of different people. So we started doing posters around the city. I don't know if anyone saw one around the city. Okay, we had one. One poster spotted in the wild. And so, but any ideas you have would love to chat with you about it. Okay, oh, you're here. The question is, do the people playing the people watching the performance talk to each other? There's a little bit of crowd interaction. So sometimes we'll ask a question of the audience, like should we go this way or that way? And people will shout and we'll figure out, we'll try to hear which one sounds louder. The way the room is set up is we have three televisions that are each running the game dedicated. So there's three games at each show. And then one at a time, those games are up on the big screen. So if you're watching the game and you're like, this looks really cool, you can just walk around the corner and play it or watch someone else playing it. And right there on the floor. So there's a variety of different performances that people on the stage will do. Some people are more quiet and more atmospheric. And some people are very much trying to rally the crowd to be as involved as possible. Sure, so the question is how do we talk about and decide upon the games that are being shown and the performers? So the qualities we're looking for in the games are visual excellence. We want it to be nice and pretty and beautiful and just colorful and whatever to look at. We are looking for games that have a performative aspect to them. So if it's interesting to watch for an hour, like if there's not enough content, there are a lot of games out there today that are super interesting, story-based games, short experiences that are excellent, but they don't last an hour. So we're looking for something that's, for qualities in the game that are more engaging throughout a whole performance. For the performers, we only have a few people, a small pool to pick from. We're looking for people that are comfortable on stage, people with theater backgrounds or tend to have those kinds of skill sets, and people that know the games. So we're, again, we're still a very, very young group in putting all this together. We have time for one more. Yes. As far as getting more people to come to these, and I really love the descriptor, secretly queer spaces, have you thought about reaching out to queer guilds for MMOs, because a lot of times those communities have interests in other non-MMO games and getting the word out that way? The question is, have we thought about reaching out to established groups of specifically queer players? I'm sorry. We haven't thought about that. I'm by no means a marketing expert and we don't have a dedicated marketing or community person. So it's just like we're just trying to get our ideas out there, trying to collect our ideas and put them out there. But again, please, if you have any ideas, just you can email us or tweet at us or anything. I think we're out of time. Please chat with me after, and I'll be around all day. So please say hello if you like. I'll be around. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.