Emma Brassington has been a regular attendee of GaMaYo and completed some work for GaMaYo looking at interventions to make events and GaMaYo more inclusive and welcoming from 2019 -2023. Here is her story from her very first time coming to GaMaYo in 2014 when it was a smaller event in a room above a pub through to creating a set of getting started guidelines for inclusive events following learnings and insights from working with us.
Prefer to watch rather than read? Watch the interview sharing best practice here.
My First Experience of GaMaYo
I first attended a GaMaYo event in 2014. I loved it and it was totally overwhelming.
At the time I had just started running Digital Creativity Labs, a large, research centre at the University of York, and had been collaborating with games companies for a couple of years. I knew a few people attending, including Jamie (Sefton – who runs GaMaYo). I also had people I could go along to the event with, so I wasn’t on my own. But it was a big event, and for someone who loves games, but isn’t a full-on gamer, it was intense.
It made a huge difference to have Fee Laming on the door, offering hugs, doing introductions, and making sure everyone felt welcome. My feeling of imposter syndrome was reduced by the friendly welcome, and having game demos spread around the room to check out gave an opportunity to watch, play with, and meet others in a way that isn’t present in a standard networking event.
But if I’d gone along on my own, would I have gone all the way to Leeds to a big event where I knew no one and my background didn’t quite fit? Probably not.
Learning what makes an inclusive event
In 2019 I got asked to get involved with a study into how to make games industry events more inclusive, funded by the Screen Industry Games Network (SIGN) and led by Anna Ozimek, an academic at the University of York. She had recognised the importance of games industry events as a route into the industry and saw the value of making these events more inclusive as a way of increasing diversity in the industry.
In an industry where the main career route is through who’s in your network and getting your portfolio seen, attending events is key to building your career. During her research, Anna and her co-researcher Carolina Rueda interviewed organisers who ran inclusive games industry events that welcome a range of different underrepresented groups. They created an in-depth report that included best-practice recommendations for making events more welcoming and inclusive which was published by UKIE in 2021.
My involvement in the research was in my role as a Women In Games Ambassador, helping Anna and the team connect with event organisers and get insights into the experience of different types of events from the perspective of women. Jamie Sefton from Game Republic and GaMaYo also provided support as an industry partner, keen to find ways to adopt the output from the research and make their events more inclusive.
The report was extremely comprehensive and is well worth taking a look through, but as an event organiser it can feel quite overwhelming. There are so many things you could do to make your event more inclusive, made more complex by so many underrepresented groups, and within those are a wide range of individuals with different needs.
Helping event organisers apply best practice
Being someone that loves organising events, particularly those that get people talking, sharing, connecting and innovating, I knew there was more that could be done to raise the profile of the work and to help event organisers adopt the recommendations in the report. Jamie was also keen to understand more about how to apply the recommendations to the events he was running.
So in 2022, I secured follow-on funding from the SIGN project to take the outputs from the research and apply them to events around the North, with GaMaYo as the main case study.
GaMaYo 2022
My aim was to develop a set of “getting started”, easy to implement guidelines for event organisers that they could easily incorporate into their events, making the best practice recommendations from the research more applicable.
Over the course of three GaMaYo events (May 2022, Nov 2022 and May 2023) I worked alongside Jamie to deliver the event, implementing the most relevant best-practice recommendations from the research, and introducing different interventions. In addition, we started to create a way to assess the diversity of attendees at the event so that there was a benchmark to work from, and set up a series of interviews with event attendees to get a more in-depth, qualitative understanding of individual’s experiences of the event.
These interviews provided us with some fantastic feedback, including:
“I’ve found GaMaYo to be one of the most inclusive, if not the most inclusive space and event that I can go to. I’ve never felt icky going there. The whole crowd, everyone has been really nice, and I know that Jamie and Emma are always on top of making sure that anybody that attends the events are respectful and do take measures if anything bad does happen, but thankfully, people have been really nice. I think people have been nicer than I would have expected.”
Event attendee, May 2023
“There’s much more information concerning safety and being nice to one another, essentially, because the event promotes itself as a friendly place to be able to meet people. There’s always a note about, ‘Please respect people,’ because it makes the event just much nicer, effectively.”
Event attendee, May 2023
The process of making events more inclusive is always ongoing and evolves with the attendees. In May 2023, Dr Jackie Mulligan joined Jamie in helping to organise GaMaYo, and I stepped away as the project came to an end. Jackie has done an amazing job following up on many of the recommendations and suggestions, evolving the event further, as well as applying them to Game Republic events.
“The support helped Game Republic to more fully appreciate how decisions in event design impact on how welcome people might feel at events. The intervention has helped us to think more creatively on what we can do to increase attendance for under-represented groups.
As a result, we have instituted a better meet and greet system to identify new people, name badges, and pronouns and will be introducing ambassadors to events, which help everyone to feel more welcome and comfortable at events. The updated code of conduct also helped to guide people and make people feel safe at the event.
More funding to experiment further would be good in particular looking at the experience in real-time and qualitatively, more evidence on interventions and new ideas to support inclusivity, sample survey for use at events to measure outcomes.”
Jackie Mulligan, Game Republic
In this interview Jackie shares some of the recommendations which have been adopted by GaMaYo, how they have been used within the event, and the impact they have had on the diversity of the event. She also shares some of the new ideas they have successfully adopted along the way.
Get started making your event more inclusive
The output of the project was a set of “guidelines for getting started on increasing inclusivity in games events”. They draw together the practical recommendations that GaMaYo and 4 other case study events of different formats, purpose, and size found most useful when starting to think about how to make their event more inclusive. The case study events were Leeds Games Toast, GEMS (Games Experiences Made In Sheffield), The IDA Network and the #RaiseTheGame Festival of Food Evening.
You can find out more information about the SIGN project on Increasing Inclusivity in Games Events at https://empower-up.com/2024/07/increasing-inclusivity-in-games-events-getting-started/
About Emma Brassington
Emma Brassington is a leadership coach and trainer, working predominantly with women in the tech and games industries to build their confidence and resilience to speak out authentically about their ideas and share their perspectives. She is a Women In Games Ambassador and set up and ran the £18m Digital Creativity Labs research centre, aimed at connecting academia with the games and media industries. She regularly organises a wide range of events including game jams and hackathons, which led to many cross-organisational collaborative projects. She offers coaching, training and facilitation to organisations and individuals, and is always happy to talk about speaking opportunities.
About GaMaYo
GaMaYo is a network that is free to join for independent game developers and studios making games in The North. It runs events at least twice a year where game developers can demo their games and get feedback from fellow developers as well as publishers, platform-holders and investors. The events over the years have seen many developers go on to release fantastic games and secure work, deals and contracts. GaMaYo was started by Andrew Crawshaw in 2011. It is now owned and managed by Game Republic. Game Republic provides business support, networking opportunities and runs 12 events a year for its members that include game developers, service providers and educators who work in the North of England.