Ethics and inclusivity in the gaming sector| Poornima Seetahraman

Poornima Seetahraman

Director Design, Zynga.

Poornima has been part of the gaming industry for 16+ years. She is currently a Director of Design at Zynga. She has worked on franchises like BioShock Mobile, How to Train your Dragons, Neopets, and FarmVille 2: Country Escape to name a few. She is a Women in Games Ambassador at WIGJ and the founder of Women in Games India (WIGIN), multiaward winner and a Hall of Fame Inductee at the Global WIG Awards 2020, making her the first Indian game developer to receive such an honour. You can know more about her at http://drowlife.com/

My journey started at the age of sixteen when my friends introduced me to games like Age of Empires II and Warcraft III. From there my interest kept growing. During my college days, I created campaigns for these games, and shared them with my friends to get feedback for improvement, not knowing that this was game design!

After graduating as an engineer, I was recommended as a game design programmer and had a month to come up with a Game Design Document (GDD). Back in 2006, there were few resources for this. I relied on articles by Ernest W Adams and Tom Sloper. Enjoying the process made me realize how beautiful it is and what I wanted to pursue. From there, I worked with different companies, honing my skills, and contributing to the gaming industry. While I have worn different hats across my career, game design and the process of creating will always be close to my heart.

Educating ourselves is supercritical.

As designers, we cater to our target audience with the kind of products we are making, and that is aligned with our business values. Finding that intersection is critical when beginning. Although you are not limited to just that, that is how you make your mark. Like the current organization I work for, Zynga is a known trendsetter of social games, where you can play with friends, and play different games that appeal to a diverse audience. These are the values retained while expanding our portfolio to various genres and platforms.

People running the company and their approach to it, invariably have an impact on end products, along with the team. Aspects like ethnicity, inclusivity and diversity are key, having gender-neutral characters or ethnically diverse characters are some simple levers to address these ethics. Various mediums can help to create a better ecosystem, an experience that is more diverse and perhaps more realistic, and utilize it to break some ageold norms. As designers, letting go of inhibitions and aligning with socio-cultural changes help us design better. Putting ourselves in the shoes of our diverse target audience helps. Player first approach is key. Games like Last of Us, Gris, and Celeste do a great job at this. At Zynga, we have multiple DEI initiatives at the organizational level that reflects in the games we make too.

Everyone who plays games is a player, a gamer!

We have evolved from creating idealized body images and female objectification aimed to appease to cis-male gamers to creating powerful female characters today and providing customization aspects into the hands of the players. The evolution of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider is a classic example. There are so many games where gender has gone beyond binary and in some cases, gender itself is eliminated or even normalized to be non-binary.

User behaviour changes according to social norms, and with that, we have evolved too. Here unlearning is the key. Educating ourselves is supercritical. This further helps us fuel our inspiration and the more we learn, the broader our mindsets become. Another way we restrict ourselves from growing and learning is that we often think that exploring and learning are not part of our daily routine and only doing certain tasks defines our performance. “Me time” is critical in personal and Our brains professional life, we underestimate the impact of downtime. are like machines that need some relaxation and maintenance to run smoothly. Healthy habits should be not just for physical health but also for mental and emotional wellbeing. There too exists a bias or perception issue about elitism in the gaming industry. Hardcore gamers are not the only set of players that the industry looks at. A big share of the market is casual games. For this, I came up with a broad-minded spectrum.

As designers, letting go of inhibitions and aligning with socio-cultural changes help us design better. Putting ourselves in the shoes of our diverse target audience helps. Player first approach is key.

While some aspects of a game are defined as casual or hardcore, it only comes down to the players. We play for our reasons, with motivations independent of the game itself. Tetris, a classic arcade-style puzzle game that is considered a casual game, has a hardcore world championship competition as well.

Gamers can be further categorized as:Casual gamers: who play games when they get the time. Mid-core gamers: who try to keep aside some time to play games. Hardcore gamers: who prioritize games over everything else.

Today is an age where players who enjoy God of War, Florence, FarmVille, or High Heels can all coexist and call themselves gamers! Designers need to realize this, otherwise, they are limiting themselves.

Everyone who plays games is a player, a gamer!