Getting Schooled: Five Things I Learned From Talking about Games At Cabot Primary School
/The games industry isn’t where it needs to be in terms of diversity. One study conducted by Ukie in 2022 found that the workforce tends to skew white, heterosexual, and male. And though class isn’t explicitly mentioned in the study, we have clues that it might be an issue, as we know that a) 82% of people reported having an undergraduate qualification, and b) middle and upper class folk make up the majority of the population who benefit from a university education.
Related to this, for the longest time we’ve heard champions in diversity, equity, and inclusion talk about how we have to proactively reach out to young people if we truly want the best chance of promoting the games industry as a space that’s welcome to everyone and, by extension, encourage people from a wider array of backgrounds to become part of it.
So, I recently decided to heed this advice and reached out to a local school, asking if I could do a talk about the games industry – to which they graciously accepted and invited me to speak at their morning assembly.
That school was Cabot Primary, a wonderful place of learning in St. Paul’s. It has excellent programs to support a highly diverse array of children aged 7-11 years old. The young people there were smart and enthusiastic, and the staff were passionate about giving them the best education.
None of that was surprising, but what did shock me was that I came away from the experience probably learning just as much as the kids. How to do outreach better was part of it, but some preconceptions about young people I had were also challenged, as well as some of the problems with how the games industry presents itself. Here’s what I discovered;
Seeking Out Your Intended Audience Is Super Effective
It makes sense, right? If we want to reach specific audiences, we can’t expect them to come to us – we have to seek them out.
In this instance the room was filled with about as diverse an audience as you’re going to get – education is compulsory for everyone regardless of background after all! And of course I was also reaching a younger audience, one that has had less time to build up pre-conceptions of what things they can and cannot do when they’re older; less opportunities to be told that “girls don’t play games” or “STEM subjects are too hard for most people” or that “art isn’t a real subject”.
This makes the subsequent work of encouraging them, as adults, to consider the games industry as a viable career path, much easier, (hopefully) in turn increasing diversity within the industry further down the line.
Gemma Davies from Cabot Primary, who worked with us to organise this, tends to agree about the importance of outreach
“Auroch Digital delivered an engaging and inspiring assembly which had all our KS2 children hooked! [They] showed the children how the games they love playing are created by a diverse group of people with a range of skills - all of which they start learning in school. It was great for the children to see people from a range of backgrounds (many reflected in our school) and open their minds to different career opportunities.”
You =/= Your Audience
It’s tempting for us to assume that the things we make will be played by a hyper-specific kind of audience, or conversely to not think about who our audience is at all. Both are a problem because, if we don’t keep the customer in mind, how can we possibly make things that will delight them?
I think it’s a trap to assume that our end user’s life experiences are the same as ours, or to assume what people, of all ages, want from a product.
Only by going and talking to the people who play games can we truly understand what they want, and this has to guide what we end up making, or we risk making something for nobody. I’ve spoken about this before when I talked at SDC, but I think this point is deeper than the “authenticity” discussed there; it’s about a much more intrinsic sense of “value” from a product.
But I think this has DEI outreach ramifications too. It was awesome to see the reaction of the children when they saw people that look like them on the presentation screen, doing something really cool for a living. If a little girl sees a woman who’s a programmer, or a marketer, or running an entire company within the games industry, they’re much more likely to recognise themselves in that person, making the connection that “hey, I want to do that”, and hopefully going on to do it.
That’s why my presentation had a core focus on – and lots of photos of - people on our team from different backgrounds; it reinforces to people in that assembly room that somebody, somewhere, works in the games industry, and looks not too dissimilar to people like them!
Kids’ Expectations Around Monetisation Are… Worth Discussing
“Are all your games free?”, “Do games really make loads and loads of money?”, “Who decides how you pay money in a game?”… if these questions from children under 12 made you wince slightly, you’re in good company.
The games industry seems to be building up an expectation – certainly in the eyes of these consumers - that games are free at point of entry, but that it’s normal to then spend money for things once you’re playing them.
This is a huge departure from when I was growing up, where games were all physical and uniformly priced. While some of the younger team members here at Auroch grew up in a time when digital content could charge lower prices for non-GaaS experiences – such as Xbox’s revolutionary Summer of Arcade – the acceptance of this kind of monetisation is a totally different kettle of fish.
The school kids certainly knew a lot about premium games too, with lots of excitement around games from LEGO, Nintendo, and PlayStation, but the instinctive rancour that people like myself often feel when asked to put their hand in their pocket in the middle of a game, simply didn’t seem to be present here.
Our Industry Is Opaque, Making The Barrier To Entry Artificially Higher
Early in the talk, I asked two related questions: “how many of you play video games?”, to which the response was a unanimous “Me! Me! Me!”; and “how many of you have thought about making games when you grow up?”, where the response was much less enthusiastic. It got me thinking about why this might be.
First, there are many “hidden” roles in the industry. Sure, we have programmers and designers and musicians, but just as importantly we have finance departments, operations managers, marketing teams, HR folks, legal representatives, and so on. They’re not what people immediately associate with the games industry, but without them, the games industry falls apart.
Second, I think the more technically-focused jobs can appear to be more impenetrable than they actually are. As we went through the presentation, which talked about what people at Auroch do, and related it to things the kids are learning about in school, you could see understanding dawn on their faces.
Evidence for both of these came from speaking with one of the staff afterwards; they told me that while they can easily teach what a nurse, pilot, or plumber is, there are some jobs in the world where it’s unclear who is involved in making them, and further to this, what the more technically-focused people actually do. Primary school teachers might be able to explain broadly what a person in the legal department does, but aren’t necessarily “in the know” on what a 3D artist does.
But when you explain to kids that, when they sculpt something out of clay they’re making “3D art”, and that’s what video game 3D artists do, but with special software on computers, then it makes sense to them.
This Stuff Takes Effort, But The Rewards Are High
The things I had to do for this outreach were as follows;
Research schools to find the right audience.
Make contact with that school, pitch the talk.
Go through any safety and wellbeing governance; seeking references or getting a background check.
Write and put together the visuals for a presentation, have it checked by a colleague.
Practice the presentation.
Coordinate a specific date for the presentation at the school.
Travel to the school.
Do the presentation and answer any questions that may come up.
None of the above is without cost, either to Auroch or myself. The school also has to throw its support behind the endeavour. So what I’m saying is that work to increase and improve diversity in the games industry is not free, and it needs support to make it happen from many different sources.
Without Auroch’s support with the time to do this, a work culture that sees value in it, and the school’s willingness to get involved, I couldn’t have done any of the above, or learned what I learned.
Ultimately, we all have to put our money where our mouth is when it comes to things that hopefully improve our industry and our communities.
I think there’s also a lot of value in getting out there and being seen to be doing this kind of thing. Cheering from the sidelines is good, but getting involved – like this, or like this, or any other number of ways - shows a physical presence and support for something you believe strongly in, ideally encouraging even more people to get involved.