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Hello.  I just want to emphasise, just be open and honest, give us genuine answers, there’s no such thing as a wrong answer in this kind of stuff.  If the answer is no don’t worry that it’s unpopular or anything like that.  That’s all good.  For the sake of the video, could you please say your name and summarise what you do in the games industry please?
Yes.  My name is [anon] and I work for XBox at Microsoft.  My job role is that I am a user researcher.  I work together with teams developing all sorts of different games to help them get feedback from players, to make the experience better for all kinds of players.  In addition, one of the other things I do is I also lead the Team XBox LGBTQ group that is focussed on better inclusion of queer and trans employees and players and content in our products.
Just to give you a heads-up, a lot of these were aimed at developers, but I thought it’d be really interesting to have someone who’s involved with a platform holder also answering these things.  So I’ll phrase it in a way that fits you.  If you’re thinking about the games that you see come through and the communities you see built on them, how do you think they’d be different if the developers were working without market constraints, if they weren’t trying to please a financial base?
It’s interesting.  I actually think about that a little differently.  I often think that there’s a lot of market potential that developers are missing out on right now.  I think a lot of expanding the canvass of what games are is actually an opportunity for them to make more money than they’re making now.  Because there’s so many people out there who they don’t see something that seems welcoming that to them they don’t define themselves as a gamer.  They haven't had the experience that says, I want to play games, I want to play these types of games. 
It’s a pretty unusual thing because if you think about other media, other creative media, people are like, no, I’m not really into the written word, or I’m not really into video or music or things like that.  But games is a different thing that I think there’s just a tonne of opportunity space there that I think there’s room for a lot more different kinds of ideas than are out there right now.
It’s almost you feel like the industry has a fake idea of what the market forces are?
Yeah.  In some parts.  I think very often it’s not intentional on their part, they see the people who are already playing their games and it’s harder to see the people who aren’t there and know that they’re missing and that there’s so much more opportunity to bring more people in.
We’re going to go through a couple of different topics, big groupings of questions.  The first one is really thinking about society and how games change how people feel about society.  Do you think players have their social views or behaviours changed by playing games?
Absolutely, yeah.  I think it is something like a lot of different media that there are stories or experiences that are really meaningful to people and sometimes those are stories of what happens that opens up new possibilities to them.  Sometimes it is a character who has an emotional experience or a journey that really opens their eyes to something.  Or it’s something that for the first time they’re seeing an experience that reflects their own and really can change the way they think of things, knowing there are other people out there like that having that experience.  
And then I think also there are games that, I mean, have all sorts of different things in them that force you to make hard choices or think about the impacts of things.  Or think about what violence means in the world and that kind of really open peoples’ eyes.  In a way that like if you’re just passively taking something in it may not hit as hard as actually experiencing it and having to interact with it in a way that really makes it hit home.
Obviously there’s a lot of things in there, you’ve mentioned you’re kind of very pro-social, help people understand the impact of violence, do you think that’s a typical characterisation of how games impact on people?  Or is that one characterisation and there are other versions out there?
There are definitely lots of different versions of it.  I think there are some things that – there are some genres that have very narrow experiences and each game in that genre doesn’t vary a lot.  So I would say for some games there’s maybe your first experience with it changes something but continuing to play it doesn’t open it up as much as the greater possibilities that are out there.
So repetition in the media actually decreases impact?
I think so, yeah.  Or I think often in general with humans, seeing something different or being made to think about something in a different way can really change things and often things you are very familiar with.  Like in some ways your analytical or your emotional reaction that you may have just isn't there because it’s just so familiar and it’s—  And that’s perfectly valid too.  Gaming can absolutely be a thing, it is here for me to relax, it’s here for me to decompress, it is here for me to turn my brain off.  But there are also tonnes of games out there that can engage you in new ways.
A lot of the games out there use very fantasy settings like dragons and elves and things like that, or very extreme social settings such as war zones for example.  With most of the stuff that you see coming in through your team and through your work, do you see there’s a theme?  Or do you prefer games that are exploring non-violent mechanics or non-extreme settings, like real world settings, do you have a preferences yourself?
I definitely want there to be a wide range of experiences and I’m really happy seeing more and more of that.  Actually last night at a games festival there was a brand new award there that was sponsored by XBox which was gaming for everyone award.  There were three games that were recognised there, one is I Hope, which is a game that is made for kids going through cancer treatment and helping.  That is set in a fantasy world but you are fighting the villain of cancer and it’s something that helps kids going through that have another way to talk about and experience that.  
Another is We Are Chicago, which is about the effect of gang violence on people in Chicago.  The third one is a game called A Hero’s Call, which is a game, it’s a role-playing game that’s made by developers who are blind for blind gamers to be able to experience genres of games that typically aren’t accessible if you have low vision.  
Why do you think those developers were pulled to make games like that?
Definitely from the perspective of XBox we have the gaming for everyone isn’t just the name of an award it is a big focus that we have within XBox as a whole.  It’s something where we want XBox and gaming industry overall to be a place where everyone can have fun. There are people who may have never seen experiences that they have represented or have never been able to interact in a game in a way that they wanted.  And it’s something that we really want to support, so we have different kinds of ways we support development.  But all of those games went through our idea at XBox programme which is our independent developer programme which are often smaller games, people with very deep passions, that we want to be able to enable them to explore exactly what they want to explore in gaming and get that out in the world and reach those players they really want to reach.
Alongside of all the other stuff that’s on XBox, we have other stuff as well, which is nice.
Yeah.
Obviously your organisation has very deliberately chosen to – Microsoft has chosen to do the games for everyone.  What was it that drove you to be involved with this or to drive your team to be involved with this or Microsoft be involved with this?  Where did the motivation come to get this initiative started?
The motivation overall within the company came from a lot of different people who were looking around at the games industry, looking around at where the most effort was being spent in games and the most money was being spent, and really seeing that was unintentionally leaving people out.  There are certain kinds of gamers who didn’t really see games for them or games that represented them.  And then there are also people who because game developers don’t always share the experiences of the players, because being a game developer is a very different thing where you’ve been working on something for five years and (laughs) it’s hard to know what it’s like coming to it for the first time.  
I think that game developers don’t always see the knock-on effects of decisions they make and sometimes those can lead to bad experiences for players that lead them to decide this type of game isn't for me or gaming in general isn't for me.  That’s something that nobody wants to happen, we wanted to put a lot more focus behind it.  It came together from a collaboration of people in all different levels of the organisation and then it was something that became a formal role and a formal organisation that focuses on that across all of XBox so that we have that kind of deep connection to everybody.  Everybody who’s making games and making sure we’re including as many people possible in the people who the game can be for.
Because it’s beyond just LGBTQ issues, there’s been a few other events, can you talk about those?
Yes.  I mentioned that gaming for everyone is a game content thing but it’s also a thing focussing on gamers and focusing on game developers.  At the game developers conference this week we have several events that we’re hosting.  Some of them are things that we’ve had a long-term commitment to as a company.  There’s a women in gaming section, which I think I’m going to get this wrong, but I think it might be the seventeenth annual this year that Microsoft sponsored.  And then the blacks in gaming event is something that Microsoft sponsored for fourteen or fifteen years.  Just last year we started a Latino gaming event. 
And this year the two brand new things, one is that we sponsored an accessibility conference focused on better addressing disability issues in games.  And the second one is we have our first LGBTQ in gaming event, so focussing on sexual orientation and gender identity and gender expression.
A lot of stuff.  What’s the player response been to this kind of stuff?  What’s the community response to these kind of initiatives?
It’s been very positive for what I’ve seen.  I think in general players are happy for games to include more people and make it so that more people have a better experience.  And I think anyone who may get upset that more people are included is somebody who is both fundamentally at odds with our philosophy and it’s also fundamentally at odds with our business.  There’s no financial reason for us, there should be no financial reason for anybody else, to try to shut people out of gaming.  It’s something where they should absolutely be including as many people as possible.
Do you think the discussions about diversity inclusion or inclusiveness in an intersectional way, do you think these are being driven externally to studios?  Or do you think they’re driven by internal individuals who’ve been active in different scenes?  Where do you think this conversation gets into a studio?
It depends studio by studio.  I think there are certainly things that come from people being extremely passionate, like having a family member who has certain kinds of accessibility issues and that’s where the passion starts from and then that expands out to lots of places.  I think the more common situation right now in gaming is that there are a lot of people who want to make things better but they don’t know where to start, and that’s something where an organisation wide focus like gaming for everyone gives them a place to go.  So they could say, okay, what can I do to better include people and what does that mean for games?
Actually one example, so Microsoft, XBox and Windows 10, we have a game called Killer Instinct, which is a fighting game and there are lots of different characters from different cultures represented in there and this is a remake of a game that came out twenty-five years ago or so.  A lot of those were replicating those characters.  And there was a character in the original game called Chief Thunder.  Originally he, based on where things were at the time, he was kind of created as a generic native American character, and I think every fighting game at that time they had generic versions of lots of cultural – of people of different cultures.  But was something that with the new version they took a look at that and said, we can do better.  
And it’s something that they actually got in contact with Nez Perce tribe to talk to them about how Chief Thunder could be a representation based on – because the visuals of the character were some things from that tribe and that culture and that is something that they wanted to make the identity and the culture of the character something that more closely aligned.  So they worked together with the tribe to both make sure the visuals were things that were accurate and authentic to the culture and then also to work with them to create a back story for the character that was actually true and deep representation of the culture and things that the Nez Perce wants the world at large to better understand about their culture and their history.
Reminds me of Never Alone of course. 
Yeah.  And that’s a game that was done in close collaboration like that.
With the Inupiat’s up in Alaska I think.
Yes.
Just to move on to some of the academic stuff or research things.  Is there academic research or internal research on entertainment games that’s really influenced your work?
There is some.  I’m trying to think of things that are public versus non-public which is always the thing in industry (laughs).  I think an example is something that definitely is public, it’s research done with academic rigor but it’s being done by a commercial company, but they share out a lot of their data.  So there’s a company called Quantic Foundry that does research on what motivates players to play games.  And they have done some research that shows some interesting patterns in terms of how different kinds of players may be excluded from certain kinds of games.  
For example, if you have a game that is a competitive game where you’re playing multi-player against other people, that’s something that the people who are most motivated by that are young males.  And young females are not as motivated by it, but one thing that’s really interesting is that for both males and females as you get older everybody is less motivated by competition.  So when you get two people who are aged forty or older the motivation for competition is both low and there’s no gender differences there.  So it’s something when you think about a game that the only thing you can do is compete against other people, you’re probably leaving out everybody who is older and also especially leaving out younger women.
That sounds like a really interesting study.  And obviously you then have the question of is that because of how teenagers are raised now and so will the teenagers now be representing those same patterns when those teenagers are forty?  Or is this a change as a result of 1980s upbringing or something with—
Yeah, it is very interesting.  I think it is a little hard to tell, right now it’s not a longitudinal thing, they took a snapshot in time and looked at people of different ages.  I think one thing that seems to make it seem like it actually is age related is that decrease, that slope, is very, very consistent.  So there isn't like a generational change drop or anything like that, it’s just for every group you just get a year older and it’s down a certain amount and it just keeps going down.
You mentioned there that the research you’ve seen, that’s not public academic research, that’s commercial research.  And obviously there’s research within your company.
Yeah.
Are you aware of any educational establishment research which is useful to your work at all?
So the main stuff that I can think of is actually things that are done by industry organisations that often they work together with academia to produce them.  So groups like the Entertainment Software Association and the ESAB are both groups that they often work together with other people to better understand the demographics of people who play games and some of the details of preferences in games and things like that.  Which can be really great for just understanding what I was talking about, this – when you look at people who play games there are a very wide variety.  And there are things – like for example I think there are a tonne of women above the age of thirty play games, but based on how some developers categorise people they don’t think of those people as gamers.  And they’re just a big opportunity for people to create experiences for people who already have shown interest in games and could have much more out there for them.
Have you ever been involved with doing academic research or any academic publishing?  Do you generate this work yourself basically?
So I haven't when I’ve been working in industry.  I think the closest thing is actually contributing to some book chapters on research.  So that is something that is out there as academic research but it’s not exactly in the academic field.  So yeah, some book chapters around how we do our research and how we try to make sure we are getting as unbiased an understanding as possible of what’s going on with players.  
So previously when I was in academia I contributed to research as a research assistant, I wasn’t one of the researchers directly but one of the things I worked on was research on unconscious bias.  So I actually worked in the lab where the implicit association test was developed, which is a measurement took for implicit bias.  It’s all based on reaction times but it’s basically about things that happen automatically in your brain.  Is it when there are certain social groups or certain concepts out there, are you more likely to associate positive ideas with them or negative ideas? And those automatic associations are things that can colour your actions and your thoughts without you even realising it.
And that work directly feeds into your stuff these days do you think?
Yeah, absolutely.  In game development when you think about some of the things we’ve been talking about, about players getting excluded, often that is very unintentional.  Some of it just has to do with as humans we all come from our own perspectives and it’s just hard for us to put ourselves directly in the mind of somebody else.  That leads to all sorts of different biases, just because it’s easiest for you to recognise and think about perspectives that are close to your own and it’s hard for you to truly understand deeply other peoples’ perspectives.  So that’s something that both goes into the research we do, so a lot of our research is about bringing players voices directly to developers, so they can really get into the experiences and exactly what it’s like for people trying to play their games.
Then another thing is just helping educate game developers as a whole about how the way our brains work can influence things in a way you may not want to, so that’s important to bring different perspectives and to do things in a structured scientific way so you’re sure to actually understand what it’s like for the people who are going to be the ones at the end of the process playing your game.
Yeah, it’s very interesting.  You’re in research, you’re a community research, you’re finding out what the community wants and filtering that but it doesn’t go as a public academic research, it’s not published in journals or anything like that?
It isn't, yeah.  Not as much.  There is a – so in my field, games user research, there is some publishing, but I think partly just because of the nature of academia versus industry, it’s mostly people in academia doing the publishing rather than people working in industry.  But it’s something like with this work around things like gaming for everyone, this isn't something that we want this to be secret and we have the secret sauce for being able to include players.  This is something that we really want the whole industry to be better and the whole industry to be better serving people, so it’s something that we’re very actively looking at how do we better share and better help everybody understand exactly what can help players be included.
So I suppose that’s – my next question really is why are you attending GDC?  But I suppose that’s the answer there, isn't it?
That’s a really big one.  So yeah, actually earlier in the week I gave a talk to other user researchers about reducing bias in the user research process.  Because like I talked about there are those things that our brains do automatically and we can definitely help game developers break through those biases.  But it’s something that, user researchers are humans too (laughs) so the same kind of biases can affect our work in different ways.  There are really valuable and important ways to be able to structure the way that you do research so that you’re minimising those biases as much as possible and getting an accurate view into the player experience.
Why do you think people attend conferences, is it skills and knowledge development or is it networking or business?  Why do you think people come to GDC or conferences like this?
It is interesting.  So if you think about game development research that’s out there, there are a lot of things out there.  GDC is such a powerful way to bring that all together into one place and into one experience where you get to be bombarded with different perspectives in a short amount of time, that can really open your mind up.  I think another part of it is just that it’s so powerful to be able to connect in person to other people.  So no matter where you are, there are students looking to get into the game industry, there are people who have been in the game industry a long time, there are people who work on their own and don’t regularly have that physical connection with other people.  It’s something where you can build those connections that really help you improve everything you’re doing.  
And that’s true for me as well, I’ve had lots of conversations about the work that I do, both as a researcher and the work I’m doing for better inclusion in general.  And hearing from different people about what they’re doing and creating connections where we’ll be able to continue the conversation and bounce ideas off each other, then I don’t think we ever would have connected unless we connected in person at GDC.
How do you think games are going to differ in the future?  If you can convince people that there is a market, which I believe you’re very convincing, how do you think games might change in the future to really invite more people in?
There is nothing wrong with all kinds of games and some games the vision for example is this should be really challenging because this is made for people who that is really, really satisfying for them to get past the hard challenge.  But I think what will happen is getting away from some of the defaults of the game industry, around like here’s a default kind of content or a default way you play or a default level of challenge that think it’s really going to open things up.  And I think it’s something where some of this is really easy, it’s just about opening up possibilities for developers.  Some of it is just offering people different options and settings in the game they’re already making and not changing anything else about their game, that can make it for people who the game may not have worked at all for them or may have been really challenging for them, make that much better for them.  
But yeah, I think what’s really exciting to me is I think some of where things can get creatively stuck in a rut is just not seeing the other examples out there of things that inspire people to go further and make even more different kinds of games that can bring new experiences and experiences that connect deeply with people.  So I’m excited for the momentum I see in terms of the variety of games.  For example, being at the independent games festival awards last night, just seeing the amazing variety there.  And then also seeing how much that was valued and rewarded by people who are in the games industry.  I think we have a lot of momentum from within of people wanting to create a diverse, wonderful world of different kind of games.  
And I think the more examples that players see out there and other developers see out there, that’s only going to increase and will be able to get a lot more people to say, yes, I play games, I like them, here’s a whole bunch of different games that I like that are out there.  Rather than right now for some people that it may be, oh, I’ve only seen one that really works for me.
Exciting times.
It is.
Thank you very much for talking to us, I really appreciate it.