It was a joy to be interviewed by Lucy O’Brien, IGN Games & Entertainment Editor. We had a very reflexive conversation about some of the challenges that women face in the video game industry. What makes her piece stand out is that she examines deeply at our roots, our first spark of delight at finding game development as a viable path, to the systemic barriers, and finally to the actionable elements that can help us as an industry improve. Ms. O’Brien had interviewed 55 women and non-binary game developers from around the globe, and it’s extremely empowering to hear the stories that resonate with me. If there’s an equivalent to a palatial mural of our times on women’s experiences today in the games industry, this is that article.

 Read about it here!

 

An excerpt:

The no-girls allowed reputation around video games is further encouraged by years and years of mainstream advertising that has turned its back on the female gender (or sleazily revelled in its aesthetic). As video games continue to be primarily marketed towards boys and men, boys and men continue to primarily develop them.

… “To be honest, I would like to see a whole change in the way games are marketed,” says Vee Prendergast, a game developer from Perth. “Mainstream game advertising is still so male-oriented despite the target audience having completely shifted.”

This viewpoint is shared by Tanya Kan from Toronto, a game developer who frequently contends with the ill-educated idea that video games are, by default, ‘shooters’ or ‘gun games’, an idea as archaic as believing every video game console is called a ‘Nintendo’. “The moment I tell a bunch of strangers or friends I’ve not seen for a while that I make video games, they immediately think I’m going to make the next Halo,” says Kan. “I’m like, ‘I make pacifist games.’”

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I’ve a delightful time speaking with Caty McCarthy, editor of Versions. Versions focuses on AR/VR/MR development at Kill Screen, including experimental works! She asked me questions about collaborative development of Eviction Notice and how it went from game jam to its current iteration with a collaborative team, how it contrasts with my work on my 3D visual novel Solace State, and how we hope people will take away from it.

Read about it here!

An excerpt:

Eviction Notice is something that came up from a game jam in the Dames Making Games community in Toronto, and it only started in July 2016. So it’s a fairly recent game. Whereas Solace State precludes that by almost two years in terms of its ideation and its concept. I was doing quite a bit of research for Solace State, and it’s about civil rights, youth movements. I tried to find a very diasporic expression for it, something where from my own ethnic background I can compare and contrast it with the institution building in the west, for example through the Occupy Wall Street protests and so forth.

From the research that I did and interviews I did with individuals who are activists or politicians, I also wanted to create a spin-off. A different tonality regarding civil rights, or the loss of culture in a slightly different format. For something like Solace State, I was very focused on breaking away from first person, so everything about that is going against the idea of configuring people in a kind of first-person-shooter experience. I wanted to disrupt that. I wanted to look at a city in a different way, from a different perspective. Eviction Notice, however, is fully into first-person because that’s part of that appeal. You want to be immersed in that environment.

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I’ve had the honor to be interviewed by Conrad at Kill Screen. Our interview focused on how my political philosophy brought about an unusual aesthetic and game mechanics in Solace State, as well as many of my narrative designs and inspirations. It was such a fun conversation, and I’m so happy that a publication that I’ve been following for years has interviewed me!

Read about it here! 

An excerpt:

I caught up with Kan as she was returning from a talk about Solace State and the politics of affect at the Different Games Conference in Brooklyn. “The idea is that you affect others and others affect you consistently and continuously,” she said about Solace State. “There’s not one root cause of events, as is in contrast with, for example, Marxism and its modes of production. It’s much more indeterminable. What this means is that politics [are] very open and political change is bound to happen.”

 

I have had the honor to speak with Miss N at Femhype about my unusual game development process and especially about what drove the development for my 3D Visual Novel, Solace State. Read the two-part interview here: [part 1] [part 2]

Miss N: A lot of your work revolves around narrative-driven games.
What drew you to making those kinds of games?

Tanya: I’ve always just made sense of the world through stories for as long as I can remember, as soon as I had the language to form sentences. Undergrad especially sharpened my desire to shape narratives through the study of media forms and power in governance. I’ve always wanted interactive ways to talk about society—even if they happen to be imaginary ones. And governance itself can be seen as having a structure that has constant rules and standards of play.

And much more! I really enjoyed this interview because Miss N knows just how to ask such interesting and diverse questions! Thank you, team at Femhype!

Also received some love and coverage from Hand Eye Society’s Toronto recap in their March and February newsletters. Thank you to @gollydrat for the wonderful writing!