HOWTO: Diversity and Inclusivity in Tech and Film Industries

For the last three years, I’ve been working with the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Center on an amazing summer game incubator: Critical Hit. We’ve always strived to create an inclusive, creative and safer space. Me and my co-directors Ida Toft and Jessica Rose Marcotte decided to summaries our findings in a talk at GDC. Our goal was to help people interested in running inclusive spaces either within game, film or other industry contexts. Watch the video of our panel below to explores how to attract diverse participants, manage the selection process in an inclusive way, and uphold a safer space policy while make content on a tight schedule.

Critical Hit is an incubator that hatches experimental, avant-garde, unique, and otherwise innovative games that might not get made in a commercial ecosystem. It welcomes all aspiring makers, including students, indie developers, new media artists, and hobby developers. Each year, Critical Hit focuses on a new subset of game design, continually innovating and testing cutting-edge game development pedagogies.

When you cram sixteen diverse creators into a room for the summer and ask them to produce experimental games, you occasionally run into some surprises. This talk discusses lessons learned from helping creators from many diverse backgrounds, both personally and professionally, as well as how to manage spaces where diversity and inclusivity – of both traditionally marginalized groups and people with unconventional skills – are a priority.

 



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