Someone asked me last week, after my Color Me Shocked post: “You care about diversity?”
Yes, I do.
While I’m against most so-called “affirmative action” programs, I am very much in favor of making sure that everyone who wants to be in the game development industry knows they’re welcome and should give it a try.
After a decade or so of hearing about “women/girls in video games” either as employees within the industry or game players, many developers are weary of the topic. Many developers even say that if more women and minorities applied for jobs, they’d be happy to hire them (assuming they’re qualified, of course). But, they point out, when they sort through the stacks of resumés and start interviewing, the faces across the desk are almost always white, and always male.
A harder line is taken by some: If more women wanted to work in the video game industry, they say, then these femmes would be taking the courses in college, tackling game projects on their own, and applying to industry companies for jobs. That is, after all, how most of the white men got into the industry. What’s good for the gander, should be good for the goose.
I think both views (“I’d hire them if they applied” and “They aren’t applying so they obviously don’t want to be here”) are shortsighted and flawed. Both push the responsibility off of the industry and onto people who may not have any clue that they are welcome in the industry and are unaware of the way in.
The recent rush (rash?) of “how to get into the game industry” books might help the situation some. The increase in game playing by women, girls, and minorities will also help add some curves and color to the video game industry. As a more diverse group of people are exposed to games, more people will want to get involved in making them.
So, in some ways, the situation is correcting itself. But that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. As the IGDA report showed, minorities are still incredibly underrepresented in the video game workspace.
How do we fix this? I’m not sure. But here are a few suggestions:
Don’t assume that women don’t want to be programmers. The argument that “most women don’t want to be programmers” is stupid. Ignorant. M-O-R-O-N-I-C. After all, neither do most men. Programmers are a minority in the population. If someone wants to be a programmer, by all means LET THEM. We need more programmers. In all industries.
Don’t be surprised (and subtly resistant) when someone (male or female) wants to act “against type.” Yes, there are gender and cultural tendencies present in career selections, but no one likes to be stereotyped.
Don’t lump together people who don’t want to do something with those who never knew they could. The first is a choice. The second is correctable.
In 20 years, I expect the face of the video game industry will be very different from what it is now. I’d like to be able to look back from that future date and see that I wasn’t a speedbump in the integration process, maybe even that I helped in some way.
Games and game technology are poised to transform the way we educate and train students at all levels. Education and information, skill training, even political and religious beliefs can be communicated via video games. But these games and repurposed game technology, collectively called “serious games,” have yet to be fully embraced by educators.
It’s not enough to declare that “games teach” and leave it at that. Teachers aren’t going to hand out a game to a bunch of students and simply trust that the students have learned the material.
Serious games, like every other tool of education, must be able to show that the necessary learning has occurred. Specifically, games that teach also need to be games that test. Fortunately, serious games can build on both the long history of traditional assessment methods and the interactive nature of video games to provide testing and proof of learning.
PS The article was originally slated to appear in Game Developer magazine. But we got bumped because Valve got longwinded in their Half Life 2 post-mortem. As if, somewhere in the video game industry, there is someone (probably a hermit; an indie hermit, no doubt) who doesn’t know a) they were late, b) they were over budget, c) their source code was hacked, and d) they were really late. Ah, well. So it goes.
“The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has found that most game industry employees are 30-year-old white males with university-level education.”
Boy, was I optimistic about diversity in the video game industry. Even if, as the report states, it demonstrates a bias towards the North American video game industry, it’s still surprising homogenous.
Maybe I see more diversity than there is because I don’t find white males very attractive, I tend to block them out in favor of seeing females of any ethnicity.
Other Fun Report Facts
Average age = 31 years
Average years in the industry = 5.4 years
Percentage of people with disabilities = 13% (e.g., cognitive, mobility, sight, etc)
More than 80% have a university level education or greater
More than 60% of studios claim that obtaining diverse applicants is challenging
Average income = $57,000 US
That average income statistic is pretty low for a programmer or artist with 5+ years of experience. Damn. But it’s even less for non-white, non-males. It’s staggering, really, to see the differences there:
White
Black
Hispanic
Asian
Other
Compensation
$58,593
$42,603
$44,416
$50,272
$53,433
Years in Industry
5.6 yrs
3.8 yrs
3.5 yrs
4.1 yrs
5.8 yrs
We’ve got a lot of work to do, it seems.
Oh, and most video game developers are heterosexual (92%), the report states, with lesbian/gay, bisexual, and “undisclosed” splitting up the remain 8% almost equally. The report called that 8% a “noteworthy” representation and added:
“Bisexuals, lesbians, and gays seem to think that the industry is not currently diverse but that diversity is important and vital to the success of the game development industry. Interestingly, unlike the opinions split by gender, the heterosexuals differ significantly in most areas from the other sexual orientations. Thus there is more of a split based on sexual orientation than was seen with gender.”
What does it all mean? Mostly, I think, it means we’ll have another one of these surveys next summer.
If you have digital cable, check out the show Radical Sabbatical on Fine Living. The show is 30 minutes long, and profiles people who leave a variety of professional careers to follow their dreams. Due to the short format of the show, the profiles can be a bit “entrepreneurial lite”, but still present real people making real changes in their lives.
I haven’t seen anyone on the show leave Madison Avenue to pursue a career as an indie game developer, but these people are indies, no doubt there. Also, the levels of success shown are pretty varied–sometimes the profiled people are still very early into their new careers–so it’s not all about instant millionaires, which I think makes it more useful to indies of all stripes.
Currently, the show runs at 12:00 am (midnight) and 12:30 am (midnight-thirty) on Sunday evenings. It might run other times during the week.
US Employers, bless their cold, dead hearts, usually take care of a worker’s taxes by:
Automatically withholding income taxes for the federal and state governments.
Picking up roughly half of the worker’s Social Security (FICA) tax.
Oh, and sometimes they even kick in to pay for health insurance and retirement. But those are topics for another day.
When you’re self-employed, though, you’re fully responsible for your own “withholdings.” And also for the other half of the FICA.
This additional 7.5-ish% for FICA is what is often referred to as the “self employment tax.” And it’s also the source of much pain for the newly self employed. Why? Because it boils down to a significant “tax hike”, levied for no other reason than you dared to strike out on your own.
After several years (some handled better than others), I’ve worked out the following somewhat simple approach to handling my taxes:
I immediately take 22.5% of gross revenue and put it in a savings account (currently earning 1.51%; hardly exciting, but I opted for liquidity over interest rate, and it was easily available).
Every 3 months (April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15), I send 5/6th of the accumulated total to the Feds, and the remaining 1/6th to the state.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Death and taxes and all that.
Why 22.5%? My original plan for 2005 was 20%. But I got paranoid about March (hey, the year was clicking along pretty good at that point) and adjusted up.
Why the 5/6th and 1/6th splits? Comparisons of my Oklahoma state taxes to my US federal taxes the past couple years showed that as the approximate proportion.
At the end of the year, depending on how my overall revenue weighs in, I expect I’ll owe a bit on federal taxes, and get a bit back on state taxes. My goal is hit within $500 of what I owe, either over or under. However it goes, I’ll adjust to compensate for 2006, and start the process over again.
I use a simple Excel worksheet that calculates my “projected taxes” from revenue, and also tracks my “actual” payments made. When I add new income, “projected taxes” are updated automatically, and I can see how much I need to send off into low-interest-earning obscurity for the next few months.
Why do I do it this way? Mostly because I like Excel worksheets and approximations more than going through the tax tables (or hiring a CPA) and figuring it out accurately. That’s also why I try to overestimate a bit.
The Most Important Thing with tax withholding, as I see it, is that you make it as automatic as possible, and you make the money as difficult to tap for other purposes as you can. That’s where a single, simple calculation (like 22.5%; well, it’s simple if you let Excel do it for you) comes in handy, as well as a bank account that is in no way connected to your main personal or business checking account. Out of sight, out of mind, and, hey, it earns a bit of interest if you do it right.
Someday I might add a bit of complication in the form of additional corporate layers (and paperwork) in an effort to reduce my tax rate, but I’m still building to the point where the revenue would seem to justify the extra effort. Right now, I’m more interested in simplicity and getting it done as painlessly as I can over protecting every possible cent.
Hopefully, this post has one of two results:
You see how another indie handles this very annoying task and work out your own approach.
You see how I’m really screwing it up and can contribute a bit of useful tax advice.
Why New Indies Should Start with a Small Project; or “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”
The One-word Answer: Practice.
The 700-ish Word Answer: I’ve always been an advocate of new indie developers starting with smaller projects before tackling larger, more commerical projects. A lot of other people have given the same advice over the years.
Unfortunately, in the past couple years, the advice “Do a small project first” has morphed into “Build a casual game first, to make some money so you can afford to make the game you want to make.”
It’s time for the former to re-assert itself over the latter.
There are plenty of very good reasons to build a small game as your first indie project:
Experience with the entire software development process. Few professional programmers, whether in the dark recesses of corporate America or the even darker recesses of the video game industry, have ever taken a project from original design through completed development with stops along the way for requirements revisions, quality assurance, and “What do you mean users can’t be expected to place the necessary files in the proper folders and edit the Windows Registry to setup the appropriate default behavior?” Programmers today are most often specialists and responsible only for a limited portion of the project, and designs are more often dictated from “on high” with little or no interaction/input from the developers.
Experience shipping software to end users. Software always behaves differently when the developer is hovering nearby. End users will surprise (and infuriate) you with what they try to get your software to do. And it’s not their fault for trying.
Experience setting up shop on the Web. Few us took (or were offered) any marketing courses in college. Creating a Web page to present and sell a game is a crash course in marketing and sales.
Experience as a business entity with a product to sell. A big part of this is building a meaningful presence on the Web and learning what you can hand off to third parties (like payment processing) and what you should guard like the gold it is (your customers). There is new information to track, like revenue and expenses, and maybe even royalties or profit-sharing to pay to team members. There are customer service skills to learn. And more. Much more.
In other words: While your first project might make money, that’s not the point of the project. Your primary goal with a first project should be to get experience–in everything. Being an indie is often the same as being the chief-cook-and-bottle-washer of any small business: If it’s going to get done, you’re almost certainly doing it.
If, by some stroke of luck, you get rich off your first project: Rock on. If not: Who cares? This project served other purposes.
The focus on building a casual game first, on the other hand, intentionally or unintentionally, puts the emphasis on making money. It also puts an artificial limit on possible projects. Casual games are/were a good fit for a first project, since they usually have a simple design and the resource requirements aren’t extreme. But there are far more games that can be made than will fit in the “casual” or “core” categories. Why limit yourself to match-3 or card games?
Further, focusing on the monetary return (where bigger is the only possible definition of better) puts a burden on the project, and on the development team. The project moves from “Let’s give this indie thing a try” to “I better clear at least $25,000 or I’ve just wasted 6 months of my life.” This is the same difference visible between investing and gambling. One is a calculated risk taken with resources that you can afford to lose. The other is a mad dash for the end of the rainbow, sink or swim, with no pot of gold and sinking being the most common outcomes.
Being an indie doesn’t have to be a gamble, and you can learn as you go. “Practicing” on a simple, yet still complete and salable, project can provide you with valuable experience that you will be able to use and build on with the projects that follow.
I’m one of those indies that subscribes to the “ideas are a dime a dozen” mentality. In other words, ideas are only as valuable as their implementation. Or to put it yet another way: An idea is only as good as what you do with it.
Back in early 2002 I read Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices (I know some of you have heard this story, so bear with me a moment). When I came back from GDC that year it occurred to me that indie game developers needed a book like that. A book to explain the entire process of independent game development from beginning to end, from design to team building to development to selling it on the Internet. Within a couple days I had a rough outline put together, and had even shown it to a few people who agreed that it was a book worth writing.
Then, for no good reason, I put the book on a back burner and did nothing with it for over 4 months. Throughout that time I continued to think that the indie book idea was a good one, but I never did a thing with it.
Fortunately, a friend, on hearing that I had a mostly-completed book proposal sitting around gathering dust, mocked me about it. So over the Labor Day weekend of 2002 I finished up the book proposal and sent it off to a publisher. Within a week, I was in negotiations to write my first book, The Indie Game Development Survival Guide.
The moral of my story: Never sit on a good idea.
An idea, no matter how great you think it might be, has very little value sitting on a shelf. The best way to extract value from a good idea is do something with it.
In my hobby-oriented reading today (yes, I have enough hobbies to choke a remorhaz), I came across this advice in a blog post by freelance RPG writer Martin Ralya, “Lead With the Cool Stuff”:
Bootstrapping Means Never Having to Ask Permission
Few things annoy me as much as hearing that it’s “impossible” to get started in [insert industry here] without having “a lot of money.”
For example: I heard that phrase on a show last night, where a lady talked about how it was impossible to get started in the fashion industry (as a clothing designer) without “a lot of money.” Then she talked about the various friends and family and private investors who were solicited for funding before she even got started.
Hackles raised, and probably somewhat challenged by the use of the word “impossible”, I started putting together a plan for how it could be done by starting small, focusing on the local fashion scene, and leveraging Web-based resources and incremental successes at the small end of the scale to ratchet up to the higher end.
Would it work? I have no idea. All I know about the fashion industry is that they like to keep reporters with cameras out of their third world sweatshops.
Regardless, though, within a few minutes I had a plan, a starting place. With a bit of research, and a willingness to work/live cheap while it grew, the plan could adapt/evolve. It might work. And if I cared, I’d give it a go to see if would work.
I like growing things, building things. I like seeing something small and envisioning it huge. Or at least much larger. And I hate asking anyone for permission to follow my own dream.
If you want something, don’t just stare at the chasm between where you are and where your goal is. And don’t waste time whining about how much easier it would be if someone just gave you the necessary resources. Stop looking at the chasm as a whole, and start breaking it down into smaller challenges that you can begin to tackle with the resources you have now.
The fact is, you don’t ”need money to make money.” At least, not the way most people mean it when they regurgitate that bit of so-called “wisdom.” What you need, what you must have, to make money (or otherwise reach your goals), is the willingness to do something, to make something happen.
Don’t ask for permission. Don’t wait for someone else to do it for you. It’s your dream, your goal, your game. Make it happen.
I hadn’t planned to attend IGC 2005, but then decided to go anyway when Benjamin Bradley of Garage Games asked me about speaking. Unfortunately, this week my health didn’t cooperate and I had to bail.
So…after deciding not to go…and then re-deciding to go…I had to not go after all.
Made for a busy past couple weeks. So many decisions.
I’ll miss IGC, mostly for meeting and talking with other developers. Some friends I only get to see at conferences, and I’ll miss that especially.
Why the Indie Game “Sundance” is Still a Long Way Off
The Independent Games Festival, the Indie Games Con, and probably a few other events all want to be the “Sundance” of the indie game movement. Usually, what this means is that the event wants to be the place where independently designed and developed games can be seen by industry movers and shakers and then turned into “real” (AKA “retail”) games.
So far, though, these Sundance copycats have ushered very few indie games into the mainstream video game market.
Why? Because in the world of PC games (and I’m lumping Mac games into this for the time being) there is no common PC platform that will run all or most PC games.
Sundance and similar film festivals work because screening a film nearly always has the same user interface: a screen. Whether a film is, in fact, film, or is video (analog or digital), or a flippin’ slide show doesn’t affect the viewer. And where the format affects the projector, conversions from one format to another aren’t rocket science.
So, when a Hollywood insider sees a film at Sundance that he (or she) likes, she (or he; this is Hollywood, y’know, hard to be sure sometimes) can buy the film confidant in his/her/its ability to show that film in theaters everywhere. Or on TV. Or release it on DVD or VHS. One film can be marketed, with little tweaking, across a variety of experiences that all boil down to: watching the film on a screen.
When will this happen at the IGF? When will a publisher like, oh, EA, see a game at the IGF and go “Wow!” over that game, and be able to take that game, and with only a “little tweaking” release it for the Xbox, Playstation, Gamecube, PC and Mac?
Not too bloody soon.
For that matter, when will the mainstream game consoles become viable target platforms for self-funded indie games?
Let’s also consider the numbers. From Sundance’s “2005 Festival at a Glance” Web page, you can see that the festival had over 2500 (2613) feature length films submitted and nearly 4000 (3887) short films submitted. Even if you consider that many of those were shot over the prior 5 years, that still the equivalent of 500 features and 800 shorts created each year. Indie game developers are a long way from hitting those kind of production numbers, even in the rapidly glutting any-old-POS-we-can-label-casual-and-ship arena.
The IGF had 118 submissions for 2006. And they called that a “large amount of entries”. It set a record. I’m happy to see more and more indie games being made, of course. But 118 only seems a “record amount” in a very limited universe.
And compare the IGF’s paltry 20 “finalists” and 10 student showcase games with Sundance’s 200+ screenings in 2005.
The IGF has grown considerably since its inception in 1999. It has helped draw industry attention to indie games. And even if very little attention has lasted pasted the closing of the current year’s GDC, and rarely resulted in the acquisition of indie titles by retail publishers, it’s trying. Everyone gets points for trying.
Finally, the last reason that I think an indie game “Sundance”-style festival is a long way off is because of us indies. We’re falling down on the job. Besides spending the past 2-3 years busily trying to shift the default definition of “indie” from “game developer wannabe” to “casual game developer”, we’ve not been completing projects.
And, for the record, I sure as hell count myself among the “slow to complete projects” crowd. Like anyone else, I could list off excuse after excuse. The proof is in the pudding, though, or the lack of it. No completed game? No excuse.
When will there be a “Sundance” of indie game development?
When indies can reasonably target a mainstream video game platform beyond the personal computer. (struggles to keep a straight face)
When video game publishers see the market niches that indie games can satisfy.
When indies finish more games across more genres and gameplay styles.
On the other hand, though, it’s possible that we won’t even need an Sundance-style event. Sundance and similar film festivals were created to provide a showcase for films that otherwise never would have been seen due to the structure of the movie industry. There was a huge, industry-controlled chasm between filmmakers and their audience.
Indie game developers, though, have the Web bridging them to their players. Reaching players isn’t always easy, but it’s possible. And even when the publishers and the portals try to corral all the players and restrict game developer access to them, players and the game developers still manage to come together on their own. We did it before the publishers and the portals came along. We can still do it.
