people to come work and be themselves. We want that, we want that different kind of person.” Carmona has experience of being that different kind of person – And not just as a Brazilian woman working in the UK games industry, which is reportedly 70 per cent male. Carmona began her career back at home in Brazil where, she casually mentions, she was the second woman ever to work in the games industry in Brazil. “It was not really an industry per se,” she notes. “There were not enough people in the beginning, right? I never thought that ‘oh, I’m the only one, or the second one.’ I only started thinking about that when I started studying. In my class there was me, and there was this one other girl who dropped out the first semester. So I was the only one. I was like, yeah okay, maybe there are more boys than girls in games, we’ll see.” “Once I started my master’s degree, I was the only woman researching. And then I went to work, and there were no women at all. So I was like, okay, I have to change this. So I started teaching free lessons for game design at one of the museums back in Sao Paulo, in order to incentivize more people to join the games industry. And the women would come in, and I would come to them like, ‘Do you want to work? Because I’m hiring.” She wasn’t just that different kind of person in Brazil, either. Carmona has worked in a frankly exhausting number of countries – Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Germany and Sweden before landing in the UK at King. It’s this global mindset that has informed Carmona’s stance on the importance of maintaining a diverse workforce. “I think I’ve worked with over 100 nationalities” says
Carmona. “I’m very lucky. I’m very humble that I’ve had such opportunities.When I was in Mexico I was working for a Japanese company, so my manager was Japanese, and the other people were Mexican. I was the only Brazilian, and there was an American. So we were all different. It sounds like a joke, right? “A Japanese, a Brazilian, a Mexican and an American enter a restaurant...” she laughs. “Then I moved to Chile to work for a Canadian company. So there were people from Montreal – French Canadians, and we had all these nationalities from Latin America: Argentinians, Brazilians, Chileans… it was amazing. I moved to Germany and it was the same thing, and when I moved to London, well, everyone wants to be in London. So I get to work with people from Africa, which I’ve never visited, but I have someone from Eritrea on my team. And that’s amazing, because the way they see the industry and the world is so different. “It’s the same with Indians – a huge country with so much possibility. The way they consume games, the way they monetize behaviours is completely different. So if you actually want to make a product global, we need those insights. The way they operate and use phones and apps in China is completely different than in the US. If we want our games to thrive, we need people who are from there – we’re not going to travel everywhere. “I’ve worked in so many languages, it’s been such an interesting experience for me. And that made me much more globally aware. When I started in Sweden, I built a team of 23 people with 17 nationalities, almost everyone was different. I think there was someone from Panama,
“If we want our games to thrive, we need people who are from there – we’re not going to travel everywhere.”
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