Kate Edwards: Still outspoken, from ArenaNet to video game unionization

GamesBeat: You went to Tehran and had an interesting experience there.

Edwards: I did. When I was running the IGDA, I was invited to Iran a couple of times, but it never worked out with my schedule. Fortunately, this year it did. It took a while to get my visa as an American citizen, but I did. Picked it up in the Netherlands. It was a phenomenal experience. The organizers did a great job putting together this conference. It was a lot larger than I expected. They had at least 1,200 or 1,500 people there. The Minister of Culture visited on the second day. From what I was told by the organized, he’s very pro-video games. The mayor of Teheran was at the closing ceremony.

Like every experience I’ve had when I visit emerging markets — and I’ve done a lot of that in my last several years, both in the IGDA and outside of it — you start to very quickly realize how similar we all are. It’s a wonderful thing. Game developers all around the world have the same concerns. One thing I kept trying to remind the developers in Iran — they kept talking about how they’re desperate to find publishers, desperate to get exposure. They’re no different from any developer anywhere else in the world.

That gives an instant commonality with this group of people around the world, but at the same time, it also punctuates the differences. They’re under sanction by a large part of the world. It makes it really challenging for them. How do they get their content out? As a content market it’s very closed. You sell your games within the country. They want to have a voice outside their country.

Some companies are trying to figure out creative ways to do that. I know one that said something about having a path from Iran to another Middle Eastern country to a European country, a way of getting games out of Iran so they can have exposure to a wider audience. One thing I was trying to encourage them to do, as I’ve done in a lot of emerging markets — they’re sitting on such tremendously rich history. They’re the current successors to the Persian empire. They have millennia of history. Instead of trying to copy the west and do things we’re doing — they have so many great historical events and characters to leverage.

I started my keynote to the event by showing them some of the ancient Persian board games that were created in the region. Some of the developers afterward said that they didn’t even know they had that history. Part of it was just encouraging them — hey, you helped start this for humanity. This art form, this narrative of games, you helped create this, and now you’re on the other side helping carry it forward. Hopefully that message will get across. I saw some games that were based on local legend and history.

GamesBeat: It seems like a country where you have to be careful what you say, still. How did you think about that?

Edwards: It’s interesting. I did the opening keynote for the conference, but later in the day I gave an advocacy-related talk, similar to the ones I’ve given recently, where I encourage developers to stand up, to overcome whatever issues might be holding them back, imposter syndrome or whatever it is, and find their righteous rage, as I call it. Stand up and address issues that are affecting them, whether it’s something very local to their — if it’s in your studio, in their city, in their industry environment, whatever it might be, see what you can do to make change. That’s the message. Find it within yourself to make change, because evil triumphs when good people do nothing.

As I was up there on stage giving a message like that in Iran, I was conscious of the fact that — here I am, an American, basically encouraging a form of rebellion. Obviously my focus is on rebelling against things that are wrong in our industry, things we want to fix or make better in our industry. But I was mindful of the fact that this could easily be misinterpreted as a political statement. I had to be careful. Of course, as a woman in Iran I had to wear the hijab the entire time, regardless of 105-degree heat. There are things you have to be mindful of. I was trying to be as careful as I could.

GamesBeat: It’s a brave thing to do. That seems pretty normal for you, though, going all over the world.

Edwards: I feel it’s necessary. I guess part of it is me as a geographer. I’m curious about the world. The way that fuses with my passion for games — I want to go wherever I need to go to help developers wherever they are.

I had a couple of people who are from Iran and live in the west, live in the U.S., who pushed back on me after they saw that I was there. They said, “Why are you supporting this regime? Why did you go?” Ultimately, my mission, if you will, is to help game developers. I want them to succeed because I love this medium. I love what they do. If that means going somewhere like Iran, I’ll do it. Now, will I go to North Korea? Probably not? That’s another story.

GamesBeat: They need to start making more games first.

Edwards: True. I don’t know that there’s much of a game market in North Korea compared to Iran. But it’s important for us — events like this go to great lengths to try to get external people to come in and help. I had discussions with some government folks while in Iran about, for example, how desperate they are to get more help from the west to build their knowledge. They have a lot of technical skill. They’re one of the biggest producers of engineers in the world as a country. But they don’t have a lot of the game design knowledge. They’re desperate for it. They have government support, and so the issue is, how do we carefully navigate that space and help game developers succeed there, while being mindful of the politics involved? It’s not easy.

GamesBeat: What do you bring back from all these travels for American developers to learn?

Edwards: It depends. For me, a lot of what I bring back — one thing I’ve noticed in all of my travels, and one of the things I really like, especially about visiting emerging markets — my sense is that for a lot of these developers, there’s a level of naivete. They don’t have the history of games in their markets as much as the west or parts of Asia. But there’s this incredible depth of passion for the medium.

You see that in the west too, but often, in my perspective, it tends to have a layer of cynicism on top of it, because of all the things we’re very much aware of in our industry. The work-life balance issues, lack of diversity, online harassment, all these other issues. In these other markets, they may be aware of these things, but they don’t experience them as much or as directly. It’s this unbridled passion for just making games. It’s refreshing to see.

Trying to transfer that back to the west and say, “Don’t let cynicism get the best of you. Try not to anchor yourself.” It’s so easy. The ArenaNet thing alone recently — I know so many people who repeated their assertion that they should just leave the industry. “I’m done with it. I’m tired of hearing about this kind of thing.” I completely understand why they would say that. I want to tell them — just over that hill, so to speak, there are people who are as excited about games as we used to be, or still are in our less cynical moments. It’s so cool to interact with them.

My hope is that as we communicate better with each other as game developers across the world and find different channels to do that, we can maybe draw on some of their passion as we help them. That’s a relationship I’d love to see more. How do we help people in these markets who need the knowledge and need support to help grow their ecosystem? We might find a renewed spirit for the medium that we love and work in.

I guess that’s part of an idealistic hope on my part. I openly admit to people that I tend to be idealistic, but that drives me forward. I believe that things can change. Some people think it’s idealistic even to assert that, but I believe it.

GamesBeat: Do you believe that hits can pretty much come from anywhere now?

Edwards: I do. A successful game can theoretically come from anywhere. How it emerges into the market, how it reaches the market, and which platform it’s on — there are so many factors to success. But a lot of it tends to be a bit of serendipity. Often we talk about the Angry Birds example, this game from a small studio in Finland that found its way to success, but there were a lot of factors that enabled that, like being one of the early games on the iPhone platform. It was an intersection of technology and a lot of other market factors.

I do think a game can be successful from anywhere. It’s just a question of whether you can predict it. That’s the problem.

GamesBeat: What would you predict for the games business going forward?

Edwards: One of my big things that I’m pushing for, and why I still advocate for this industry — it’s because I want it to mature. I want it to better represent itself. One of the big things I’ve been harping on after I left the IGDA is about how we as an industry don’t speak for ourselves. We let the broader public media shape the narrative of who we are as a medium and who we are as people making games. You see acts of violence and we’re instantly criticized and painted a certain way.

I always assumed the trade associations were the ones who were going to stand up and defend us, and in some cases they do. But for the most part their role is to interface with government. That’s a very important role. It’s a critical role. The Supreme Court decision in 2011 is the ESA’s success. That’s a major victory for the industry in the United States. For the rest of the world it has no direct impact, but it might have influence. That was a great thing.

But when I constantly meet people in the public who still assume that games cause violence — there was the Pew Research study from just a few years ago, where they asked questions of American adults. Do games cause violence? Do they cause obesity? Repeatedly, all of the perceptions are completely counter to what we believe the narrative is. No, they don’t violence. No, they don’t cause obesity. No, they’re not a waste of time. But the public still thinks that.

Who is representing us to the public? Who is out there correcting the record when you see a story in the media that assumes someone committed an act of violence because they play games? There’s a lot of churn internally within the industry among developers about this, but who is stepping up and saying, “Wait a minute, that’s not true. Here’s research. Here’s evidence.” Sometimes the trade associations do it, but a lot of times they don’t.

GamesBeat: There’s perhaps a perspective problem around whether games are a subculture or part of mass culture.

Edwards: Right. What I’m trying to assert, and I think a lot of us understand this implicitly — I think we need to understand that we are mass culture, and we have been for a while. We need to step up our — I use the word “maturity,” when it comes to how we handle our response to the public and how we interface with the public. My assertion is that it’s developers who need to do this. Not the companies, although that would help. Developers themselves need to step up and be more vocal. “This is what I do. I’m proud of what I do. I’m not ashamed to call myself a game developer. My product does not cause violence.”

I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal stories where, for example, a game developer in a local jurisdiction invites a politician to their studio, someone who may be anti-games or may be ambivalent, and they show them. This is how games are made. They step them through the process. They let them meet people. These are people with families who are contributing to your economy. They have a going concern. Why aren’t you supporting these people? There have been stories where the attitude of politicians have changed 180 degrees after just one visit.

The more we can open up the black box about what we do as an industry — one of the reasons film doesn’t have this problem so much is that most of the public understands how movies get made. There have been films about making films, lots of them. The public understands the process of filmmaking and what it entails. With games, not a lot of people understand how games get made. We’re just this big black box, and some people believe that evil comes spitting out of it that’s going to destroy society. It’s on us, truly on us, to open up the box and share with the people around us. “This is who we are. This is what we do. We don’t need to be apologetic.”