 This is an open source open minds lessons learned making games about diversity for the Incrudo project My name is Jesse And before I begin I like to apologize. This is not a tech talk. So if you're expecting a tech talk Thank you, so there's Anyway, so but I am gonna tell you about stuff that I find really fascinating Stuff that I've been learning when I've been making games about diversity, and I hope that You find interesting too. Okay, so Like I was saying My name is Jesse. I work at the Kree game lab. So the Kree's a center for research and interdisciplinary Interdisciplinarity science hard to say in Paris and at the game lab We make open games for science social change And and for education. So we create games With usually we team up with researchers and teachers and we create games with them We teach we teach we teach game design and in particular We have a really cool summer school that we call glass where we mix Science students and game design students over the summer in order to have them make science games together So we've been running that for a few years. It's pretty fun And finally We have we do some community events So we have this club called the get me to a the Pedro is talking about earlier where people come and they give Talks about game design about educational games and all sorts of stuff related that most of the talks are online on YouTube Some are in French some are in English. It should be pretty clear when you find them So if you're interested, don't don't don't hesitate to check out that our YouTube channel All right, so this project began when these two guys These two brothers Hill me and subi who work for who started a small startup and social entrepreneurship in India approached the Kree and said that they wanted to make games with us that promote diversity and Inclusion in the workplace in India. So, you know, I said, hey, that's a great idea. You know, I mean I don't know anything about diversity or inclusion and I've never been to India But you know, let's do it right. How hard how hard could it possibly be? and so it turns out that Diversity is very dangerous. Okay, and this is true studies showed that it can cause discomfort Create rougher interactions create a lack of trust Greater perceived interpersonal conflict lower communication have less cohesion in a group and more concerned about being disrespected So why are we trying to do games about diversity again? What's what's the point? Well, it turns out that diversity is also very advantageous for organizations Obviously, it also is advantageous for a society as a whole but I won't even argue that point just for Organizations to be diverse actually brings them a great advantage and there's all sorts of studies that have shown this It's really interesting. There's stuff that diversity brings so the most obvious thing is that okay You're a diverse group. You have people of different viewpoints that come right that makes sense But what's really interesting is that the dynamics of the group changes when you have Change when you have people from different backgrounds. So people actually share information better than they would perhaps because If you're with someone who you think is very similar to you You might not think that you really have to talk about something because it's obvious. They already know it, right? but if you if you don't trust that they really know what you're talking about then you're going to put it out and If you think that somebody has a different viewpoint than you you actually do a better job arguing your viewpoint Which means you do more research you back up your thinking you think about what you're going to say before you say it Whereas if you're with people who you know, you generally all agree you don't do that You just get lazy and you just say what you want to say, you know and in on the flip side of that to people with Differing opinions for dissenting opinions are actually more likely to bring them up in a group that's diverse So once again if you're in a group that with everyone else that's pretty much like you You generally try to stick with that like like you part and you won't bring up the Oh, this might not work, you know kind of viewpoint, which can be very important. All right It is shown in the corporate world to lead for better performance companies make more money When they have in particularly this been studied with having females on corporate boards for example And in the scientific world, it turns out that scientific papers Written by groups of authors that are diverse are cited more and have higher impact factors Which is another kind of cool cool element And there's a third reason I think that probably big companies have started to care about this which is to avoid really bad PR I don't know who remembers this thing with Google photos when it rolled out Was it two years ago and it was misidentifying people as gorillas And you know obviously right no one thinks like Google's out to do that, right? That's not there That's not what they're trying to do but it does indicate well How come they didn't pick that up right and we don't really know but we can suspect that the reason They didn't notice it before it rolled out is maybe the people testing and doing the QA were not of bad background Didn't have that skin color weren't from that part of the world And maybe there's a reason that they also to have diversity. Okay, so Okay, so diversity is so good. Let's do it. What's what's the problem, right? In fact, I think people most people would agree with that point most people would agree with that point in the current political climate Maybe not everyone would agree with that point, but I think a lot of people would think well You know we've moved on right like we know diversity is good. We know people are different than us It doesn't mean that they're inferior. So, you know, okay, that's good The problem is that That's not actually even if we think that way. That's not the way We're really thinking because it turns out that as this as the quote goes We are not feeling beings who think oh, no, sorry We are feeling beings who think not thinking beings who feel Which means primarily we are driven by emotions and our thinking it can be all kind of wacky afterwards and In fact, even the fact that we're we make decisions and our reasons behind the decisions may largely be Thought up after the fact that's been studied too. So people will tend to make decisions And then you justify why you said that right so you make decision first, you know explain later So that obviously doesn't lead to making really good decisions where you're taking in all the information And in fact, there's there are researchers who suggest that there are ability to reason Did not come from is not motivated to make really good decisions But rather to convince other people to join us We want to do which is really crazy, which means that basically Once again, we're making a decision Then we're justifying it and then we're going to explain it really well so that we other people can agree with us So that's kind of scary and in particular it leads to all sorts of bias So then there's different kinds of bias probably the main one that we talk about is called confirmation bias So that's what they talk about a lot nowadays involving the news it means that When you get new information and it agrees with what you've already thought then you tend to Accept it as true. If you get information that goes against what you already thought you tend to disregard it And if people confront you with information that goes against what you think often rather than changing your mind You will probably double down on what you believe and think that there's some kind of like plot to try to get you to change your mind and In terms of stereotypes this comes down to people right so you know categorizing people based on what their skin their age How tall they are how pretty they are whatever kind of thing and make some kind of judgment about the way they're going to act and in fact, this is well interesting little side note it's even been studied that When we see people who we consider very inferior to ourselves We actually the part of our brains that light up is not the part having to do with people But rather the part having to do with objects, which means we are capable of literally seeing people as objects, you know Yes You cannot make such a straight forward assumption Well, this is based on this paper is what I'm talking about. I don't care about whatever paper parts of brains are not significant in the way We see people Okay, I don't know. That's what that's what I've understood so far Now obviously the two things can go hand-in-hand you can have bias against stare against groups of people Okay, so it actually makes sense why we act this way, right? Our brains have evolved for a certain reason most we don't know for sure But most most likely it's because we need to make decisions quickly Especially in a more kind of wild situation where there's predators. There's different groups of people Maybe there were reasons to be scared of other groups of people and it made sense to try to run away or something that okay, um So get back to the workplace In the workplace obviously if you want a diverse workplace, well, you have to hire diverse people Okay, and some of the interesting studies they've done have involved sending out CVs So some of the render they put out resumes that are exactly identical except for the name on the top so in this particular study There was they had one one person was named one fake resume was for John and one fake resume was for Jennifer They sent these out at university laboratories to be hired by faculty members, right? and in this case the It turns out that Jennifer. Oh ten minutes. Okay, Jennifer would be was judged less competent Would not be as hired as often and if they were hired wouldn't be paid as much So that's kind of that's kind of scary too. Okay, and if you think that hiring based on CVs is bad Well, it turns out that interviews are much worse. In fact Some people suggest that interviews are probably the worst way to hire people Because it's when you have the most bias because you're communicating with them You come down you talk about stuff that you enjoy in common and you're not judging them based on what they what they need to be doing Okay, just a quick side note a really interesting example. They've done is for orchestras So it used to be in the US. There were very few females in orchestras. I think it said 1970 was less than 5% And the way that they got around this is doing these blind These blind What's it called when you're getting hired can't think of anyone blind blind Recitals so people would come they put up a curtain and they play behind the curtain And it actually at some point in some orchestras they made people take off their shoes Because there was a thing could people could hear when it was a woman walking when it was a man walking. It's just it's crazy Okay, so Let's go on to games So when we started this project making games to promote diversity We started with the assumption that most of ideas were not going to be very good and that we needed to So the our conclusion is that we need to try a lot So basically we structured our projects so that we started with prototypes a bunch then we cut them down To just for that's what we're doing now And we're going to be developing then for the next year and then putting them out there All our projects. Well, it's open source. Otherwise, it wouldn't be here We also do we're going to put out all our data as open data. So all the analytics we get back And the process itself is open We're trying to put put it all on our blog so people can reproduce our ideas try different things that we didn't do Etc. Okay, so we started with game jams and with working with people with the organizations that we're going to be at And this was I was going to go through all the different ideas that we tried, but I'm not going to have time So we tried abstract platformers online comic captions five-minute debates about celebrities automatic stereotype generators a whole lot of different stuff and we put all these things out there we had Our people our testers in India try them and rank them based on how engaging they thought they were and how much they learned And based on that we picked these four games So one of them is a let's see so hired is a game where you We kind of we kind of teach about bias So we give people biases and you have to hire someone and so you you pick up cards And everyone's trying to hide their bias because if someone else finds out They're out of the game and so that you come up with these really funny arguments where you're kind of Trying not to say why you don't want to hire women because you have to come up with funny things. It works up pretty well In my state is a game for about learning about different regions of India It's too hard for me, but for people who live there they can they can play it This is kind of a weird physical game where you pretend to be pirates that all have different physical handicaps And you have to play a cooperative game and another day is a visual novel that we're creating now About you being a manager at a oh, sorry. I lost the microphone one second all right, so Don't have a lot of time, but I just wanted to say a few things that we learned with this process so far So one thing is that we've learned to Favor concrete ideas over abstract ones once again based on the assumption that the the abstract things People might agree in the abstract about diversity But might not act that way in a concrete decision-making process We found that getting people to talk is really Really really valuable and that for that board games actually surprisingly good So when we started this we were gonna make only video games and then it turns out most people wanted board games You can play them well They actually also work well for a company like you bring everyone in through a meeting room You put a board game on a table people can start to play and then or card game You know or other kind of tabletop game people you know can start to discuss Oh, this happened to me this happened in my aunt, you know, you can start discussing things that way We also found that in general people really do like to find out about each other and they also like to share things about themselves It's just that you know, it's a little scary and you're worried about being judged And so by putting them in a game context where they feel comfortable you can make that process a lot easier All right in terms of the process we found that game jams are really fantastic as a way to start Come up with lots of different ideas and try a lot of things out We found that using paper prototypes are really great too So even for video games to not just code something but to do stuff on paper and try to make a board game that would act Like the final video game is a great process because it's really quick and you can change the rules You can change the rules like ten times in an hour and you don't have to you know Which you could never do with with well, maybe if you're an incredible coder you could On the flip side that's hard for other people to accept sometimes if you have a paper prototype people don't take you seriously So that's you know, it's a little harder that way Okay And having a diverse team obviously also makes a big difference This seems very obvious, but actually when we were starting the project we were mostly guys And none of us were from India. So we were you know, we thought oh, it's so cool We're gonna work with the Indian partner. It won't be a problem. They'll teach us stuff But there's stuff that's hard to hard to learn all on your own And so as we started hiring more people who were Indian who are women it made things a lot easier So in conclusion Diversity and inclusion are good things for organizations And that over time our our bias has moved from something that we you know It's just out there some overt thing into some implicit thing That's within ourselves that is harder to address for that reason because people don't think that they're biased We all none of us think that we're biased. We all think that we're very rational Games have been shown to To help people tackle difficult subjects And we found that icebreaker and tabletop games are really great for getting people to start to discuss And finally with prototyping is a great way to start Any process like that? So to get back to the original question about Ken games really improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace My answer is you have to wait and hopefully I'll tell you next year. Okay. Thank you very much And I think we have time for questions. That's good. I've rushed a little bit because I That's all I had plenty of time. Okay. Any any questions? Yeah, I was really interested in the game you mentioned about having to hide your bias Okay Okay, so the way it works is that you pretend that you're you pretend that you're all Management at a company and that you have to hire somebody for a position. Okay, and then you show it's a random random Right now it's cards and then we're going to move it to a mobile game But right now it's the cards and so you see the people with us with a fake CV And then everyone that has a secret bias card So for example mine, maybe it's like, you know, I don't want to hire a woman Maybe someone else that want to hire I know Muslims or something like that and then what you do is you argue about who you should hire and you don't want to hire the person that your Bias is about but But if you truly obvious and I'm like, you know, you know, I don't know She's gonna go on print a leave at some point Well, then they'll know that that's my bias and so they can call me out, etc. And you try to like get the So you're trying to fight for it, but without really letting it in It's kind of cool. Well, the discussions that come out are really funny Yes Recruitment process who are the people coming? How did they came there? Why how many? For the game jams or in India origin. Oh, yes. Okay. So it's very two very different things. So let me just go back to this slide real quick That we're talking about oh say I'm supposed to repeat the questions and I forgot myself So the question was about the recruitment process for the different events. So When we were in India, we we basically did like board game making events With the different groups that ZMQ who is our Indian partner is in touch with so there's companies There's non-profit organizations and there's and there's also government Part parts of the government. So these are basically contacts of theirs that we're interested in promoting diversity in their workplace and In Paris what we've done is more kind of used there are Gemini a community of people who are interested in making games Maybe don't know so much about diversity. Although that's not totally true There are people who really do and kind of get them say, okay, let's make games for over the weekend and you know Okay, well for the king shoot how many I think for the Paris one It's around was like around 50 people or something like that. I would say 40 to 50 Yeah, yeah, and then but in India. We've done smaller things. We've done it also at school with a bunch of students. Yeah Any other questions? Yes That's okay, so the question is how do you measure the impact so That's really hard. It's really hard because there's a few different things You couldn't you could try to measure the impact of the game in terms of what people learned And that is difficult in itself We have to have a very specialized standard questionnaires And the other attempt is to try to see what the organizations actually do in real life So that's what ZMQ is planning on doing so there basically is the idea to see if the management makes any changes in their procedures so Because I didn't talk about that but there's a lot of things that organizations can do to try to promote diversity in the workplace It's not just like you know talk about how good diversity it is There's like very concrete things, you know like that you can do so you can make the hiring process more open You can make people have to write down everything they want about a candidate before looking at the CVs And that way you can argue it Actually, if you're interested in that there's a really fantastic talk by an HR researcher at Google called Called something bias Diversity diversity at Google or something like that and it's really fantastic and he goes through all these different Hiring practices that they've done at Google to make it better So for example on the on the interview thing they basically are trying to get rid of Typical interview where you would just kind of talk to the person and ask them questions And they've replaced it with like a script so like you know This is the first question and then the answers are this this or this you know and these ones are good And these ones are bad now next question, you know and the answers are this this and this which is it's kind of strange Because it feels very robotic, you know, it's like what we're replacing people with you know an algorithm But at the same time it does get rid of the bias right because it's something is standardized and it's not about that Yes, maybe I'll go to him first since you've already asked a question That's okay Yes Sorry you had you had another question Okay Another example Yes, so the question was about competitive versus cooperative games so in this Okay, so just a quick thing about competition and cooperation What's cool is that both things can go nicely together like typically in team games There's a cooperation between the people on the team and there's a competitive thing between the teams, right? And that's an element where you can mix it. I wouldn't agree that Competition is bad like by itself because I feel like there is There is it is something that motivates us and as long as it's within a game context where we understand We're in a game. We're competing in the game and when we get out of the game We're not competing in the same way. I think I think it's acceptable in this particular games Sorry, let me skip to the ones that I picked Yeah hired is competitive Pirate Partage. This one is Non-competitive right now, but when we tried it in India, they kept saying we want a scoring system We want to be able to know if we're better than the other ones So we're thinking about making it competitive just to kind of add people so have people play in a team But once again have the teams compete, you know, how many cards did you get through that kind of thing? This is a visual novel. It's you just play on your own. So it's not competitive and in my state You could play it competitively if you wanted, but you don't have to it's more like an icebreaker. So Maybe time for one more question. Yeah I just wanted to respond to that in another way to me diversity is fundamental of life I mean you don't have diversity you have that right? It's just a natural process that applies quite many social process So I'm curious why you promote diversity as a competitive behavior Because you put it in the workplace as a competitive asset was on the contrary I think it's pretty much the competition that kills diversity. So I find there's a bit of a contract. Yes so so there was an observation about how Diversity is something that creates can create crop cooperation if I understand quickly and why are we trying to promote competitivity? Which is as a why are we trying to promote diversity as something that's competitive as an advantage? I guess the reason that if you're trying to bring diversity into an existing social structure made of companies that are competing then it makes sense to sell it to them as a Competitive thing. I guess that's the answer. It's more like utilitarian anything else If you were in a different social structure where you could be people be much more collaborative, then I think it would be it would be wonderful I think it would be a different society all the good. All right, maybe we should stop there. Well, thank you very much