5 minute read
Changing the Game
Like the characters in the video games she produces, Dr. JC Lau has faced challenges in her career, but has overcome them one by one to land at a job she enjoys, helping make the video game industry more welcoming to people from all walks of life.
Currently a producer at Harebrained Schemes in Seattle, Washington, she served as a founding member of their Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Council, a group comprised of studio leadership and members of underrepresented groups, to consult and provide guidance for positive studio impact.
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Her master’s degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University guided her on that path, as she worked as a teaching assistant for then faculty specialist and current department chair Dave Paul’s class on race and gender issues in America.
Lau gravitated toward the course to gain an academic perspective on her own experience as the only non-white, non-male, non-American student in her cohort of 12. Later, she taught the class, focusing on how the marginalization of certain groups is reinforced by the gaming industry.
After graduating from Western in 2007, Lau earned her doctorate at Australian National University – the top ranked university in the southern hemisphere. Her connections at Western played an integral role in her acceptance into their doctoral program.
Lau subsequently worked at Virginia Tech for a couple of years, teaching moral, political and legal philosophy, as well as a race and gender topics course. It was then that she decided she wanted to make games – the fruit of a seed that had been planted decades before.
PURSUING A CHILDHOOD PASSION
In the early 1980s, Lau’s mother – thinking computers might be a good investment – presented her three-year-old daughter with her first computer. On that “clunky Apple IIe,” Lau got her start as an avid Pac-Man player.
For the first few years, she noticed that all video game characters were white males. But the introduction of a lead Chinese female character, Chun-Li in Street Fighter II, was a literal game-changer for her.
Lau’s first role in the gaming industry came at Microsoft, where she worked on the Xbox team in localization – translating the words on the screen into other languages. The nature of the work lent itself toward empathy and openmindedness, and the team she eventually led was diverse and inclusive.
Then she took a job at Bungie, a large studio working on video game titles rather than consoles. She kept projects with thousands of tiny moving parts on budget and on schedule.
“I love working on video games,” she said. “It’s weirdly chaotic. There’s a magical element to how they get made.”
THE “INTERCHANGEABLE ASIAN”
At the 800-person studio, a team member could go for years without meeting other people on their project – only seeing their messaging icon. Of that group, however, only about 10 were women of color or Asian women.
And in a studio with “200 guys named Dave – there were more Daves than women!” colleagues still called the women by the wrong name, or mistakenly gave them credit for work others had done.
The occurrence of mis-naming one’s Asian workplace colleagues is so frequent that the phenomenon has been termed the “Interchangeable Asian.” Lau was quoted in a June 6, 2021 New York Times article on this topic, “The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian,’” by Brian X. Chen:
On one occasion, multiple colleagues congratulated Dr. Lau, who identifies as Chinese Australian, on a presentation led by a colleague of Korean heritage. “These were people I worked with on a daily basis,” she said.
Dr. Lau, 40, left the company in 2018, after two years, and said a major factor behind that decision was the feeling that she wasn’t being recognized for her contributions, which included testing games and founding the company’s diversity committee. She suspected that her gender and race — and her co-workers’ inability to even recognize who she was — put her at a disadvantage, especially at a large company.
for in order to advance,” she said. Dr. Lau, who holds a doctorate in philosophy, left Bungie to become a producer at a smaller games studio.
However, Lau notes, this concept is not particular to Bungie – it’s cultural across the gaming industry.
SHIFTING A CULTURAL MINDSET
At her current 70-person studio, she loves having the opportunity to make cool games like BATTLETECH with cool people. a letter to studio leadership. They received a response from the CEO: “What can we do to support you?”
“Everyone has a really good growth mindset,” Lau said. “We want to learn how to be better – to get to know people for people.”
Lau with Malin Castegren, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Paradox, at PDXCON 2019 in Berlin. Both were awarded the Gold Star Bunny –an honor for those who go above and beyond on the team.
Lau has contributed to these efforts by organizing the first HBS Harejam – –a studio-wide game jam/hackathon and monthly lunch for various minority groups at the studio (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+).
“I can’t solve the problem for the industry as a whole, but I can impact the people around me in my studio,” she said. “If enough people do that… overall there will be a shift in the cultural mindset of those who make games. I can make things better for our player base.” ◆
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