Game Culturalization and the Art of Building Inclusive Worlds

When creating game worlds, designers strive for originality and creativity. However, they often put their games at risk by not considering various aspects that can impact the reality of their worlds, such as the logical consistency of the milieu or not thinking through their creative choices which influence the perception of inclusion. This lecture, presented by a geographer and cartographer with 20+ years of game culturalization experience, will explore the key factors that impact globally-facing content and how developers of creative media can be more inclusive in their choices and in turn enhance the experience for local players.

Biography
Kate Edwards is the Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), hired in December 2012. She is also the founder and principal consultant of Geogrify, a Seattle-based consultancy for content culturalization, and a unique hybrid of an applied geographer, writer, and corporate strategist, built upon a passion for global cultures and media technologies. Formerly as Microsoft’s first Geopolitical Strategist in the Geopolitical Strategy team she created and managed, Kate was responsible for protecting against political and cultural content risks across all products and locales. In the Microsoft Game Studios, she implemented a “geopolitical quality” review process and was personally responsible for identifying potential issues in all 1st party games between 1995 and 2005.
Since leaving Microsoft, she has provided guidance to many companies on a wide range of geopolitical and cultural issues, and she continues to work on a variety of game franchises. Kate is also the founder and former chair of the IGDA’s Localization Special Interest Group, a former board member of IGDA Seattle, the co-organizer of the Game Localization Summit at GDC, and is a regular columnist for MultiLingual Computing magazine. In October 2013, Fortune magazine named her as one of the “10 most powerful women” in the game industry and in December 2014 she was named by GamesIndustry.biz as one of their six People of the Year in the game industry.