(This is an interview conducted on the Game Dev Unchained podcast, an audio podcast that has been transcribed into written form. Please forgive and assume anything written that seems off to be completely my fault and not of the guest. Thank you!)
"The thing that lots of people do with people of color, when they’re writing with people of color is that they reference movies. They think the black people in movies or tv are real black people, but they’re obviously not. Black people tend to be stereotyped and they tend to be from a very small pool of what that community is really like. Don’t use Hollywood shorthand to inform you what you think a group is. By far, I think that’s the biggest, BIGGEST mistake."
CHELLA RAMANAN (WRITER)
Introduction
We love telling stories here on Game Dev Unchained, so much so we do it each week rain or shine with a new guest but this week was special. We got the opportunity to interview Chella Ramanan about character and story for games. Concentrating the topic both on the micro level and macro level of general ways that the literary arts is helping deliver the goods in the game industry. We touched on diversity issues in development as well. Chella had just a brief time off before her new gig at Ubisoft starts (at the time of this interview) so we were ecstatic to get the chance to work with her for this week’s post Here are some of the notable excerpts from the interview.
Chella: “My name is Chella Ramanan and I'm a videogames journalist but not for much longer. I've been writing about videogames as a journalist for about 18 years. I’ve written stuff for the Guardian, the game section, and I’ve just written my last column for gameindustry.biz who are based in the UK. Additionally, I'm the co-founder of POC in Play which is a diversity organization which focuses on improving the representation and visibility of people of color in the games industry. We’re based in the UK but hopefully one day we’ll be international. Furthermore, I’m a game developer as well. I’m working on a game called Before I Forget, which is a narrative adventure game about a woman with dementia.
With my partner, Claire Morley, we’re 3-Fold Games, a little micro studio. I’m currently working on another game called Windrush Tales, which is about the Windrush generation… And last year was the 70th anniversary, my dad was part of that generation so I wanted to celebrate it but then we found out that our government was trying to send / deport some of that generation under the hostile immigration policy that our government currently employs so it just made that game even more worthwhile to make.”
Larry and I have been in the game industry for a long time, and I’ve looked primarily at the design discipline and the writing team as the main measure if the game is going ot be fun or not. However, the game industry is still very much referral-based. We hire the kind of people that we know and that we’ve worked with before, who has a very similar type of thinking as ours. Those two disciplines, writing and design, I feel, have the most influence on how the game shapes and forms. As an artist, we get our directions from those two teams, so as I'm talking to both a writer and designer, I would love to know your perspective and thoughts about that.
“Well, I mean, I haven't really worked in big teams, but that’s about to change as I’m about to join Ubisoft. But in terms of my teams, I was thrown together with the people on Before I forget, and although there were only three of us, and I was the only person of color, we were all women. There were moments where I said "Oh, I just quite like her to be Asian, to be Indian." And they were just like "Okay, fine cool." That was nice, but my own personal experience differs from my peers who are still are in small teams. Some have sometimes struggled to get their voice heard or their perspective is sometimes overlooked. So that is a bit sad and sort of dispiriting and wearing down that person. There’s a lot of emotional labor in that being the lone voice that perhaps isn’t listened to.”
Well, an 18 year career in games journalism and also being involved in two simultaneous game development projects…
Chella: Yeah DON’T EVER DO THAT (Laughs).
Well as the designer of the group when did you see that transition in your life occur. Were you always interested in game development or maybe because during the journalism you’re like ‘Oh, I actually want to try my hand at it now” Tell me the story of how you got into game development yourself and how great it’s been?
