I got the opportunity to attend the second iteration of For Devs (formerly known as Game Summit Sweden)! Here are some of my reflections.

For Devs is a game development conference in Stockholm organised by Dataspelsbranschen (the Swedish Games Industry organisation body). My conference ticket was kindly sponsored by my employer Resolution Games.

First up was an introduction by Per Strömbäck, head of secretariat at Dataspelsbranschen, who welcomed everyone to another year of the For Devs conference. He also introduced Marléne Tamlin, the Head of Sustainability at Dataspelsbranschen who presented a sustainability report titled Code, Climate, Creativity: Game Development and the Green Transition.

The first talk of the conference was the keynote titled Sweet Baby Detected: Representation and Innovation in Narrative Development, by Kim Belair, CEO of Sweet Baby Inc. Here, Belair first described Sweet Baby Inc’s role in the games industry as a narrative development studio and likened their work to that of Carrie Fisher’s as a well known script doctor, stating their wish to be “gamedevs for gamedevs” rather than becoming known by gamers.

Belair then went on to explain what it felt like to be harassed, stating that the entire team (as well as people who defended them) were hounded off of social media and that they lost their voice as individuals. She stated that when being harassed, it didn’t matter what you believed in or said, and it didn’t matter what the rest of the world believed in or said either, due to the sheer amount of misinformation being peddled. Belair worried that this would spell the end of the company and of her role in the game industry, believing that she would be considered “too dangerous to work with”. In reality, while companies were publicly silent, in private many teams reached out and gave support. Regardless of the harassment, deadlines didn’t change, and production didn’t and couldn’t stop.

After the keynote, Bernice Chauly, senior writer and cultural advisor at Avalanche Studios Group sat down with Kim Belair for a Q&A session. Chauly opened the session by stating that harassment and hate speech has always existed in the writing and art community, making references to Salman Rushdie and James Joyce. While Chauly and Belair discussed further repercussions of the harassment, Belair expressed dismay at the fact that it was harder to do outreach work with game developers now due to her email and social media pages being filled with hate, and that there was a tacit agreement within the games industry that if you get harassed, you’re on your own. Both expressed concern that the industry was creating a player base that feels like they have a right to hold game developers hostage if they don’t get what they want, with one proposed way of managing this expectation was to normalize the humanity of game development.

Belair and Chauly went on to discuss diversity in games, stating that the goal wasn’t simply tokenism (diversity for diversity’s sake) or exoticism, but rather having characters with personality that makes underrepresented people feel like you thought about them. Finally, they spoke about writers feeling unseen in a project, especially when most game projects are primarily driven by tech. Writing is mostly seen as easy to delete, and as a final wrapper to be added towards the end of the game. Was it possible for a writer to be valued first and foremost?

The next talk I attended was The Mystery of the Remake by Anna Oporska-Szybisz, senior level designer from Bloober Team. Here, she spoke about the challenges of working on a remake from the much beloved game Silent Hill 2. In particular, she stated that her team relied on 4 key elements for gaining a good understanding of the original game:

• story: It’s important to play the original game multiple times and analyse all aspects of it. If there are any ways where more details from the story can be hinted at in the game, then do so.
• theories: Take a look at fan theories as well as fan’s reactions to the original game. Don’t spend too much time on it though.
• changes: Make only necessary changes to the game (such as quality of life, or stuff that fans of the original game asked for), and always think about how these changes will influence and impact players.
• symbolism: Finding out ways to further enhance the story beats in the original game.

Oporska-Szybisz also made sure that the team kept both new players as well as older and more entrenched players in mind by using playtesters with varied backgrounds. Some playtesters had never played the original game before, some had never played horror games before, while some playtesters were very familiar with the original game. Even then, she still expressed worry that there might be backlash from some players. Bloober Team also met with the original developers of Silent Hill and received feedback from them.

After lunch, I listened in on a panel titled Being the Voice Of Reason and Nice Vibes – Being a Community Manager and What To Think About with Hanna Fogelberg, Head of Community at Landfall, Anna Erlandsson, community manager at The Gang, and Jeremy Fielding, community manager at Stunlock Studios. The panel first discussed who consisted of their respective communities before talking about ways to make community spaces more inclusive, such as by being present to set an example to the community, establishing social structure and tone early, and starting community building early to make sure early joiners become long standing community members. A note was made that community run spaces tend to be very difficult to establish boundaries and rules in if you haven’t set them before hand.

After discussing the pros and cons of each social network and community space, some tips and tricks were mentioned on how to better work with community as a community manager. These included:

• Ensuring that the dev team always kept you as a community manager informed of any possible changes being made. The community loves being informed, and it prevents things potentially spiralling out of control.
• Ensuring that the community manager knows the truth and why about things so that they can appropriately communicate them with the community. Players often look at the community manager to learn more about the company, and if they look like they don’t know what’s going on, they will infer that the company doesn’t know what’s going on too.
• Making sure that the moderation teams feel appreciated, and not giving them jobs you don’t want to be doing.
• Encouraging and supporting community run events and competitions, as well as any interested modders.
• Not focusing so much on negative people and forgetting the positive people in the community. It can either implicitly encourage people to be negative to get attention, or make people afraid to speak.

Up next was a session by Raunaq Singh Sokhi, game designer at EA DICE, and Emelie Fuller, software engineer at EA DICE, titled The Tetralemmas of Game Making. This was an interesting talk that centred around tetralemmas, concepts from Buddhist logic, as tools for decision making. While a dilemma contains two options that are mutually exclusive (either choice A or choice B) and collectively exhaustive (they’re the only options that exist), a tetralemma has 4 different options (choice A, choice B, both choice A and B, or neither choice A and B). In essence, framing an issue as a tetralemma can allow the consideration of other options that may not have been considered before, which can then allow for reframing the problem or question.

Here, Singh Sokhi presented the use of tetralemmas in figuring out how to best understand whether new game modes released in Battlefield 2042 were a success or not. While previously, new game modes were always compared to the Conquest game mode (a classic mode that was always popular), evaluating them was therefore framed as a dilemma (either it was better than Conquest, or worse than Conquest). Framing the problem as a tetralemma however reframed the problem of evaluating game modes as being multimodal, where game modes could be designed with different goals in mind and succeed and fail for each of them. Fuller then described another use of tetralemmas in the production process, particularly when working on prototype code that was deemed valuable enough to require for production, but not up to standard enough to keep the existing code. Here, the problem was reframed by leveraging existing systems that had been battle-tested, and repurposing them for a completely new feature.

I then dropped in on a panel titled The Power of Mentorship with Paula Ingvar, general manager of Candy Crush Saga at King, Valeria Matos, senior UI designer at King, Jenny Brusk, project manager at Science Park Skövde and founder of DONNA, and Astrid Vahlström, mentee at King. The panelists first talked about specific mentorship opportunities for students, minority groups, and early career graduates in Sweden that were interested in joining the games industry, such as DONNA Day and King’s internship and trainee programs. A distinction was made between formal mentorship (such as through the aforementioned programs), and informal mentorship (that occurs outside structure programs).

The panelists described being a mentor as being able to give back and being able to help underrepresented groups. To “become the mentor you never had”, it was suggested to be an active listener and champion your mentee whenever possible, as well as find career and networking opportunities for them. It was also important to set clear expectations and boundaries (such as having a specific amount of session for example, since you can’t do everything). For people who were interested in finding a mentor, they suggested asking your manager for help in finding someone suitable (since ideally a mentor should not be in a direct line of supervision to you since that could introduce a conflict of interest) or by going to industry events and asking around. It was suggested not to set the bar too high (an industry star might be too busy to help out for example) and that everyone could be a good mentor depending on what you were looking for.

The final talk I attended at the conference was Make Games with Humanity by Shila Vikström. This was a fantastic talk that discussed a lot of topics that I have also been thinking about lately. Vikström started the talk with a personal message about how much games mean to her and to everyone in the industry, and how inevitably, games are not made in a humane way, stating that the industry is full of people filled with resentment towards the system, mistreated, burnt out, creatively hurt, and fallen out of love with games. Inevitably, more energy is spent on what type of game we want to make, rather than how we want to make it, and while there’s lots of educational programs to bring new people into games, the industry is doing almost nothing to make them stay.

Vikström proposes several areas that need to be tackled:

• Crunch as part of the workflow: It is important to kill the romanticized view of crunch and to create and implement anti-crunch policies. Having transparent and collective accountability also helps to avoid silent crunch; you should not continue to work outside of work hours since other people in the team will see this and take after you. Remember that the only people that will remember your late nights are your family. Work will never care.
• Considering real passion to require enduring hardship: Creativity is nurtured by giving it space to grow, and workplaces should actively carve out time during the week to do so. People should lead with compassion, since people won’t feel safe otherwise. It’s also important to make space for life (and not just games), since we tend to derive inspiration from real-world activities.
• Neglecting my own well-being or the well-being of others for the game: Ask yourself why this is happening (and if you can’t, ask someone you trust). Take accountability of your actions; there’s nothing dangerous in admitting that things haven’t gone the way you expected. It’s important to remember that it’s just a game. Health is more important and always comes first.
• Participating in an environment that may discourage open self-expression: Incorporate psychological safety (the ability to express things without risk of consequences) into the workplace. Regardless of how many people champion this, if the CEO does not, then it’s useless. The CEO is the prime culture bearer. It’s also essential to normalize vulnerability related to work (asking for help or saying that you don’t know something)
• Deprioritizing or neglecting the processes of development: Capitalism is a tool, use it! Focus on the fact that poor motivation, burnout, the hiring process, and training is expensive. Be proactive, not rehabilitative; it’s harder and more expensive to fix things after wards!

After a sneak peek by Johanna Nylander, head of analytics at Dataspelsbranschen, at the upcoming yearly report on the Swedish games industry, the conference was officially over!

While everyone made their way to the Night of the Devs conference after-party, I had to head back home to take care of a newborn. Nevertheless, it was a great edition of the conference, and I managed to both meet people I didn’t know before, as well as catch up with people in the industry I already knew. I look forward to attending again next year!