Culturalization in the Gaming Industry with Kate Edwards (Part 1)

Kate: It is one of those issues where you get these knee-jerk reactions to world events, just like we are dealing with what is happening in Israel and Gaza at the moment. I have had to deal with that in some of the games I am working on as well, because there is content that is related to that. We have to be very mindful of the fact that all of these things are tied together. We do not make games in a vacuum.

Brian: Today we are talking with Kate Edwards, CEO and principal consultant of Geogrify. Geogrify is a consultancy which innovated content culturalization. Kate is also the CXO and co-founder of SetJetters, an app focused on connecting tourists to filming locations. She is the former executive director of the International Game Developers Association and the Global Game Jam. Following 13 years at Microsoft, she has consulted for EA, Bioware, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Lego, Ubisoft, and many other companies. As an award-winning 30-plus-year veteran of the game industry, in 2021 she was included in the Forbes 50 Over 50 Vision List and inducted into the Women in Games Hall of Fame. Kate, welcome to The Native Experience.

Kate: Thank you. Thanks very much.

Brian: Tell us about yourself and what you are nerding out on right now.

Kate: I am a geographer and I have been working in the video game industry for 30 years now, since 1993. My first game was Flight Sim 5.0 back during my Microsoft days. Since then I have worked on almost 270 games including Call of Duty, Halo, Fable, Age of Empires, and on and on. That has been my core job, the culturalization process. I also spent time running the International Game Developers Association for five years and the Global Game Jam for three years. I am on the board of TakeThis.org which deals with mental health in the industry.

Kate: What I am geeking out about right now is they announced the Dune Ornithopter LEGO set that I obviously pre-ordered this morning. I am a huge LEGO fanatic. As far as games, I was proud of myself for finishing Diablo 4 but I have barely made progress on Starfield or Tears of the Kingdom and I have not even touched Baldur's Gate 3. The other thing I geek out about is the SetJetters project, an app that helps you find filming locations.

Brian: Where did your passion for geography and travel come from?

Kate: I have two great parents, both of whom were teachers. Every summer we had time off and we did road trips as a family, piling into our old station wagon. My older brother and I and my parents, mostly around the Western US, sometimes into Mexico, a trip into Canada when I was seven. That constant exposure to new places and cultures generated this hunger that comes with wandering, that wanderlust. Even my gameplay reflects that. The games I like most are giant open-world games like Breath of the Wild or Skyrim where I can just wander and discover.

Kate: I was four years old when we landed on the moon. I remember watching it on my grandmother's TV. That moment was so amazing that I later wanted to pursue being an astronaut. I read Lord of the Rings in fourth grade, which blew my mind open for creative fiction. Then I was 12 when the first Star Wars came out. For people in my generation, that was a complete life changer. We had never seen anything like it. It was a combination of the geography and travel from the family road trips, the technology from the space program, and then Star Wars and other movies. I was just a total geek.

Brian: Tell us more about what Geogrify does.

Kate: That is my consulting company. I call it culturalization work, to offset it from localization. Localization is basically language translation. What I do is work on everything except the text, although I deal with some text-related stuff. A lot of what I deal with is character design. If you have a character based on real-world culture but in a fantasy game, you are trying to emulate someone from a desert climate. A lot of times they end up looking like Arabs, like Bedouin, with robes and headdress. The issue is whether that is too similar to the real-world culture. Is there enough allegorical distance between the inspiration and the implementation?

Kate: I have worked on dancing games looking at body language and gestures because they are very culturally specific. I look at symbology and fictional languages to check if the glyphs look like something from a real language. Cultural appropriation is a very big issue, most commonly using elements from Indigenous cultures inappropriately. I also read the narrative scripts to understand if they are communicating something that might be perceived as a hidden message about a historical event or recent political event. My job is to look for unintentional things. The team is constantly building massive amounts of content and it is hard to slow down and take a step back.

Brian: Any horror stories or interesting stories you can share?

Kate: In the original Age of Empires, we released the game into South Korea and it included a scenario where Japan invaded the Choson Empire, which is what history tells us happened. When we released the game, it was banned. The government said that never happened. All the history books outside of Korea say it did. We eventually had to make a special patch only for Korean players that changed history. Instead of Japan invading Korea, Korea is now invading Japan. Did not happen. The team had a debate about truth and ethics, which is the right conversation to have. Some people disagreed and others said we don't have a choice if we want to sell this game in that market.

Kate: Another problem was a game called Kakuto Chojin on the original Xbox. One audio file contained chanting from the Quran. It was put into the game inappropriately. The developers caught it really late. Copies were already on trucks moving to stores. They played the audio for me. I took it to an Arabic linguist in my building who confirmed it was a stanza from the Quran. This became front-page news in the Middle East. It was a huge PR disaster. The head of the Microsoft Middle East region asked me to go to Riyadh to help deal with the backlash.

Kate: I landed in Riyadh two days after the second Gulf War started. I met with the religious council of the Saudi government and had to apologise directly to that council on behalf of Microsoft. After the dust settled, the head of the games division reached out and said, that stuff you have been telling us to do, I think we should be doing it. That incident was no different from a lot of companies I work with where they cannot conceptualise what I do until they walk through the fire.

Kate: Just yesterday there was a story about Spider-Man 2 getting backlash because the character Miles Morales is from Puerto Rico and they used the Cuban flag in the game instead of the Puerto Rican flag. That is what I look for and I can easily fix it, but they have to come to me first.

Brian: Is the industry getting better?

Kate: On the whole, yes. It is incredibly different from 30 years ago, even from 10 years ago. We have had punctuated moments. 9/11 was a big wake-up call for how we represent Muslims. Black Lives Matter three years ago was also a huge wake-up call for a lot of companies to understand that representation truly matters. It was unfortunate it took that incident because there were many prior that could have woken them up. The Russian invasion of Ukraine also woke up companies to understand that politics does influence game content. We had Age of Empires IV having a tournament the weekend after the invasion, and one of the four new civilizations was the Rus people. Some wondered why there were Russians in the game, but they are the Rus Vikings, technically the original Ukrainians. How do you explain that in a tweet?

Kate: It is one of those issues where you get knee-jerk reactions to world events, just like what is happening in Israel and Gaza. I have had to deal with that in games I am working on because there is content related to that. We do not make games in a vacuum.

Brian: Tell us about SetJetters.

Kate: SetJetters is a passion project from a hobby of mine. Set-jetting is visiting filming locations. I have loved doing it since I was a teenager in Southern California. I got my start because I was a huge MASH fanatic. I found out they were filming at Malibu Creek State Park. During the summer before my senior year of high school, a friend and I went up and found the filming location. The day we got there, they were actually filming. An extra, Nurse Kelly, saw us and told us to talk to the security guard. When there was a break in filming, they let us on set. We got to stay the whole day and meet Alan Alda and Mike Farrell. That ignited this love of bringing to life places you have seen in film or television.

Kate: When I first visited the Lars Homestead location from the original Star Wars in Tunisia, I was weak in the knees, starting to tear up. I could not believe I was at the very place where it all started. I partnered with four other people, three from the film industry and one from tech. We created the SetJetters app, available on iOS and Android. It helps you find filming locations around the world. You can collect scenes and earn badges. Most importantly, you can do a shot sync, using the phone camera to recreate the exact film shot. You see the original shot and yours on top of each other.

Kate: We are now partnering with film commissions, tourism boards, and local cities. Many places have annual events like Stand By Me Day in Brownsville, Oregon, and Goonies Day in Astoria. Our community suggests 50 to 100 new scenes every month.

Brian: How do you strive to provide a truly native experience? Any tips or advice?

Kate: One of the biggest pieces of advice I received was a quote from Mark Twain: comparison is the death of joy. That has sat with me for most of my life. We spend too much time comparing what we are doing with other people around us. It is a distraction from just doing what you want to do. I mentor a lot of younger people coming into the game industry. They grew up in an era where social media is designed to compare. It has a mental wellness impact where they think they are not achieving what others are achieving.

Kate: Just focus on what you can do best. When you see somebody who does something better than you, guess what? You may have just found a mentor. Reach out and say, can you show me how to do that? I think we need to be more open to that and stop pretending we have our act together, because most of us don't. The passion you hear from me about these things, that is my joy. I reached a point in my life where I just don't care what people think about what I am doing. I am having fun. I love what I do. I am doing stuff that helps people. And that is enough for me.

Brian: Kate Edwards, CEO and principal consultant at Geogrify. Thank you so much. Remember, always strive for authenticity and embrace the power of native experiences.