 I'm Sarah Shiger, I'm Mary Ms. Advert, oh that's so loud, we are the PhD students in the digital media program at Georgia Tech. So I was primarily concerned with issues including university and games. In addition, we're going to different games. We also work on a little project in Atlanta called Deer Game, which is a collaboration with Harris, a feminist book store in Anta. We're a big fan of our kid actually, our kid cabinet just sat there in the store and we do ongoing events about the connection between feminist theory and community. I'm an intern for my research, I'm tangentially related to games, but mostly it involves activist organizations in Atlanta that have a different form of technology to use and what that means for tech design. So two sort of different spaces but both provide similar topics from different directions. Right, so that's our title. I know it's a melt hole and all these words are super meaningful and they're very important. But essentially what the basis of our topic is, is how to organize a diversity conference when you're mostly working with white dudes, or both at Georgia Tech. We do important work there, it's a great school, we work with a lot of really awesome people, but there are also just a lot of cis white dudes who are also from the south, so that's like another layer of complexity on top of that. So just keep in mind that's sort of the context that we're coming from. So the main challenge there is how do you organize a conference where the content is both about diversity, but you're also practicing the value of diversity. It's not just a talking point, but something that actually gets involved in the organization structure itself. And that happens through a conference called Different Games. Yeah, so just a little bit out of the history of Different Games, we're actually organizing our third year conference right now. It's coming up in the first weekend of 8-year-old this year, and Different Games actually started in 2012, and it's sort of a direct response to things that were going on in games at the time. So in 2012 was the year of this hashtag Reason Why emerging, which was a discussion on Twitter that happened around the answer to the question posed by a moderator at Kickstar, their games curator who said, Why are there more women in games? And all these women from the industry and folks who experienced discrimination on various axes kind of responded that by saying, Well, this is a thing that happens a lot, and kind of showed about what their experiences were. And it was a great different moment of people kind of speaking openly about the issues that happen in games. It also was a year that when you said Peezie put together her Kickstarter campaign for Trips for Women, her online series about sexist and psychrips in games, trigger warning, sorry, it's a little bit late. Sorry, I didn't mean to go into it. So I should have said that at the beginning of the talk. There's a lot of harassment of Anita that was incredibly disturbing, including things like the theme of Peezie put together and sort of anti-semitic and such and this sort of hate speech that was directed at her. So they gave some of the things that were sort of panelist for wanting to create a conference that would speak to both the issues of women experiencing games, but also broaden the discussion to be inclusive of other kinds of identities that might experience discrimination and typing games. Another kind of form an important figure in about 100 and to this day, and an entropy who wrote Rez's video games series came out around that time. And it was for me personally really important because it was one of the first times that I'd seen somebody talk about games, DIY games, indie games, in the way that I was interested in seeing them talk about, which was deeply connected to activism, to feminism, to personal identity and to, you know, expression creatively and politically. And a lot of the things that happened since then, which we've been really excited to sort of highlight at the conference have been creations by, you know, being created by various marginalized groups, including, you know, women people of color and folks of various gender identities, and who, you know, whose work might not necessarily make sense in certain mainstream spaces. They may not, you know, want to go to GCU to see each other work, or they might not really be welcome in those spaces because they're oriented more towards commercial production. So things like why a free and open source tool for making hypertax games and stories. It's been really important to the conference and the community as a whole. And so just to come back to the conference a little bit, I'm going to pass the mic over. So, our talk is mostly going to anchor our organization process for the last year and a half, so we're going to hit you a little bit so you know where we're coming from. It's going to be sort of worldwide, so if you need to, need to slow down, I can do that. So, right, last year and a half games, very well attended. This is at NYU College, there's a space there called Game Center, which is, it has a master's program for game design. Right, it has a very generous label with us, and so that sort of came with a built-in independent games community in New York, but we also had people come from across the country, which is nice. Pretty well attended. We also had a bunch of speakers from the independent game development scene, and we actually flew them out to seek, because as you might imagine, the independent game development scene is not super financially lucrative, and it's certainly not financially lucrative for women of color, for women, for a bunch of other marginalized identities. So, we had a bunch of different sponsors, institutional sponsors from Direct Attack, from NYU, we also had a financial sponsor, we had corporate sponsors, as I mentioned, and they mentioned it, and they supported this cause, and when they're supported, they're able to fly out of speakers, and they're having a big difference. So, they made very good talks about some of the challenges in their field, and things that they've learned from their own personal experiences. They were also really honest and really supportive, and it created a space where, if you've been to various game conferences, like GGC Game Developers Conference for example, those talks tend to be very work-oriented and industry-oriented, and so these were very informative, and they were talking about how to do self-care, or how to be honest about your own experiences, where you can gain a better life without, you know, putting yourself out there for yourself at risk. So, these were very sort of intimate, honest, generous talks, and we're very privileged to have them all. This is Lee Alexander, primary games critic, this is Todd Harper, and an angry, formative kaha'i, who is an independent developer and instructor at NYU. Yeah, and a teacher at NYU at Parsons. Teacher at NYU at Parsons? America, this is another big figure at the independent game development scene. We, in addition to financially supporting our speakers and having safe spaces for intimate honest talks, we also have content that is usually covered, or topics that are typically covered in other game conferences, so this was taught on kink and gender and sexuality. We also have a bunch of workshops, so this is a post-colonial reading of a very popular recording, which we'll have it in. We also have an arcade, so people who are independent developers got to have their names on display, and if they chose to attend, they actually got interactive people who were playtesting their names, so they got live feedback. This is a tabletop game. Avery McDonaldo? Avery McDonaldo, the quiet, the quiet in here? Sorry. No, it's okay. This is called a quiet year, it's a tabletop game. You can look it up online and I think purchase it, but it's about having corporate companies in game making. Yeah, it's basically a role-playing game about community building. So that's pretty cool. People can play together, people can play alone. I think this game is about contemplating our mortality. We did some of that. Yeah, a little bit of that. You guys have central crises. So now you're all caught up. That's what happened last year. So, yeah. So we wanted to talk to you. Do you want to walk on these? So here's some of the organizers from last year. Sarah, me, and here's the rest of our organizing committee. So, you know, some diversity could be better. And so, one principle that we really wanted to embody. Sorry, I turned it off. Oh no. Did it die? No, I think I just turned it off. Just hold on. There we go. Hey, thank you. Sorry, I have wish haters. Right, so we wanted to, we acknowledged that it was a problem or a challenge that our organizing crew was not as diverse as it should be. And so there were a lot of experiences and perspectives that were not being represented. Yeah, so you might want to, I don't know if you want to talk about this one, but one of the things that we sort of learned from this process and the thing that we were sort of, the sort of guiding what we wanted to talk about today was the labor that sort of gets put into organizing an event like this, organizing any event where you're trying to be sort of mindful of structures and power that exist. And it definitely came into our organizing process in terms of how we tried to handle things kind of on a, you know, I don't know, sort of basic business level, but also on an interpersonal level, kind of doing the emotional labor of, you know, working with people who are both doing the important work but also learning at the same time that they're doing that work. So one kind of example maybe is we had a subcommittee organizing around the arcade. So we were selecting different games that we were allowing in and sort of having conversations about which games would be appropriate for a conference about diversity but also in an arcade setting. And one sort of access of privilege that we had to deal with was this question of expertise. We had some people who were educated in game design, some people were educated in game development, some people who were like film critics. And so without sort of an actual formal criteria or checklist for what counts as diverse, like there's no capital D-diverse switch that you just flip. Like this one's diverse, this one's not. This one's in, this one's out. So through those conversations we had some people who negotiated our different expert teasers and values of knowledge that we contained to sort of set it out. You know, even though this game is not like a 3D, first-person virtual world that is mega immersive, like even though it's not sort of the primo game according to regular game industry standards, which sort of a game expert would go for and like support, we also wanted to have games that represented other perspectives and maybe had different representations even if they weren't the most technically impressive or well-designed games. Yeah, so we did have to sort of come up with kind of our own standards for things that were going to be sort of true to the spirit of conference but also create a great conference experience because obviously when you do an event of this nature that's trying to call attention to different kinds of makers, there's also like a tremendous responsibility to do it well to have it kind of, you know, with my mom and the community and you're really excited with, you know, whatever you came away with from the event. You know, other things just kind of happened, you know, within our organizing team. You know, there was a lot of kind of ways that we had to negotiate how we would discuss or like things that would come up in this session about, you know, people sort of based on their own identities making, you know, assumptions about related sexuality, related to class and, you know, the way that we were to support or not support. One of the biggest things was that everybody involved in the conference last year had a college degree or was involved in higher education directly at the time. So obviously this created a huge sort of disparity in terms of like what voices were going to hear or sort of what the expression of the conference will be in terms of how it's curated, right? We're all curating from a place of extreme privilege, if not financially because grad school, guys, you know, right? But like, you know, from a sort of institutional place of privilege in terms of access and also, you know, working amongst people who have different sort of professional levels of experience means that you do a lot of negotiating if you want to be sort of, you know, non-hierarchical and you're organizing and you want to sort of, you know, embody certain values around being inclusive of everyone's voices on the team. That means that you have people who are tenured professors having discussions about what keynote speaker to invite with people who are undergraduates somewhere or, you know, are the game developers and that means that, you know, as an organizer you do some labor around trying to make those conversations go in a way that reflects kind of the principles that you're organizing around. So we have about 15 minutes left. We're just going to keep running off of examples. Yeah. But feel free to put your hand up and ask questions. Oh, yeah. Yep, that's it. But one thing that I've heard pop up across some of our talks this morning here at Alta-Conho was a question of age and experience. And so there was some answers, more answers were touched on this and I wanted to give an example from our own organizing experience. We had people who have never done a conference before. I've never done a conference before. And so one challenge that we had was that there were a lot of sort of logistical issues and professional issues that come up when you're hosting a conference and if you've ever done that before there's no way, there's no way you have age. Actually, I take that back. There's probably a way to do that. You shouldn't have said that. But it's not going to include all those sort of tacit knowledge and learning knowledge that you get from hosting a conference. And so one model that we sort of came up with was trying to identify with all our volunteers and all our, who are all fantastic. I mean no one's getting of course credit for this. No one's getting paid. So the fact that people were volunteering to do this was just phenomenal. It blew us all away. But one thing that we did was we asked our volunteers and other people that were working with what they wanted to get out of the conference and then tried to pair them with tasks that were held back. So one example is someone wanted to build a web development scale, which is not necessarily a task that the top are to-do lists for our first conference but we heard about someone who was working at our work best age and so they got to develop some skills out of it. And so really having an open conversation with people that you're working with about what they want to get out of it is sort of matching people out of that way that can be a strategy for sort of accommodating for different backgrounds. Yeah, another thing, we've kind of scrolled like I said over the past few years and I think the conference is improved each year and I'm really excited about it this year. But we really, the way that the conference is improved has been sort of by having this sort of dialogic process with the audience of the conference which is really, really wide and varied which is one of the things that's unique about it and it's great to be in a sense like this like all different conference is also sort of open to a lot of different audiences, right? We're not GDC, we're also not an academic conference, we're sort of somewhere in the middle and so we spend a lot of time figuring out how to speak to a lot of different audiences, how to work with our speakers to make sure that they're not going to deliver a dry sociology paper to an audience of folks that are interested in game development and so sort of having people be aware of the various audiences they're having to but also being responsive to the different audiences that we're trying to be inclusive of. So this means that very practical things come up like the first year we gave the conference we put up our event and it had a boilerplate security statement from NYE about like what they do, you know, make sure you have an RIG on you, you know, we'll be checking in at your conference bed and somebody showed it to us and was like hold on, that's incredibly problematic for me you know, I don't have a legal idea that actually represents my identity so this is going to be incredibly, you know uncomfortable to have my body released that way and that makes me realize like, well we need to work with NYE to figure out how we can have better security practices that won't make people uncomfortable that can make everybody feel safe and that's going to be increasingly things are kind of the safety issues that have come up around games in the past year and making sure people feel safe but that's something we're sort of committed to you know, reaching out to the community asking for income on what we need it you know, and other things like during the conference itself, you know, there was issues with people using able language and I think we saw a great example of it today like, you know, the only thing you can really do is understand them and say, you know hey this happened, can we all be mindful of this and that's the thing that came up for us in terms of reminding people, you know and making any acceptable space because we will make mistakes and just, you know say sorry, I didn't know that, you know and that's really the most important thing it's for people to kind of acknowledge when they do make mistakes one thing I was saying, I was here another thing great tip that we got was like hey can you have chairs that maybe don't have arms that are going to accommodate people who have bigger bodies you know, that's not something that I would thought that would necessarily but, you know, it's about accommodating people who are coming from all different places and, you know, have a different experience of the conference based on that again, if you want to put your hand up we're just going to keep going so to piggyback out that one thing that I'm looking at our label point there and one thing that I was thinking about is a lot of the decisions that we get and like comments for commitment cover Twitter or, you know people reaching out and contacting us but that's not something that we try to enforce, we're not trying to put the onus on marginalized groups to make that space safer for them or rather we try to make an explicit that we are trying to make these changes and we're not going to cover perspectives, we're not going to get everything right but, you know, having that back and forth dialogue like Sarah mentioned earlier and like there's this trend of like hey women, why don't you use yourself in conferences more and that's not a dynamic that we really have to play into but at the same time I acknowledge that there is a lot of knowledge and experience that is very useful Yeah, this is also something that has come up in terms of and what you maybe think of with the whole sort of like putting the burden of education on people was the fact that, you know in 2012 when we created the first conference we actually created an inclusive piece that we used and we actually read it at the beginning of the conference it had everybody, like actually we didn't have a printed program last year so it was up digitally but the first year we actually had physical programs and people there was a signature place where people sort of signed and it was very sort of like frank and sort of like here's language to do mindful of like here are like practices like maybe, you know talking over people or you know maybe taking up too much space that people can be mindful of in the space to make sure that everybody feels welcome and nobody feels silence then we all can participate and sort of be a community together here and that was something that a lot of people responded really well to and it ended up sort of being used by a lot of other conferences following because at the time this sort of model tended to be and I feel like this has changed but it hasn't really gone away is the harassment policy right so having a harassment policy what does that say to people that like harassment is going to happen and you know here's like you know maybe the draconian response that we'll have to it but that's not sort of setting up maybe an expectation for what like you know behavior we do want to see and sort of creating a way that people can maybe fail at things but you know acknowledge them apologize move forward and still have a productive conversation you know it's been a lot of time actually with our volunteers making sure they're our volunteers who are ready to maybe manage conflicts if they came up we have done that over the years you know actually like aside from people and you know actually moderated conversations between people that you know when they felt comfortable and they approached us wanting to do that so that's kind of a role that you know we see it as sort of like our you know responsibility to sort of provide that if we're going to provide a serious case but I don't know if anybody has questions yeah just pass the mic to them so this actually gets organized locally with students from Georgia Tech and also folks that are really working with us from Rhode Island from Chicago from the West Coast from ThoughtWorks from ThoughtWorks right here yeah also from the Irish so yeah so there's actually a lot of land involvement and you don't have a Georgia station each of it but that's something that we're interested in doing potentially in the future but you should definitely come in part sometime in your games other questions? one, two oh boy time yeah take one question one more question so I forgot hands sorry thanks for wanting Sarah I was just wondering if you guys for things you learned about what works and what doesn't have we what have we anything I think it's not formal um what oh well okay so one thing that's coming up is that Mary and I are actually hopefully that's coming out that's the continuation of the Beyond Barbie annual combat series they're doing one that's actually I'm talking about different identities beyond gender this year and I also want to mention there are some a lot of those from your own different games and the one that is that is co-founded by me from your own about the piece that you consider our as a but there's a really great inclusion including saying itself to reflecting on the process and thinking about that at different games and at different games yeah at different games um we whatever you can have a look at those we just got out there