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It's early January - this marks 10 years of working @Digitalextremes! 10 years at one company feels pretty special in this industry - Time to review this journey, year by year... themed for reading ease. To the surprise of no one: 10 years as a woman in games means CW!
2011 - Year of Fear. Light CW. Student trying to get foot in the door. Numbers approximate - 9 women, 100 men? 1 of those men puts his hands under your dress straps while you work. You know nobody. It takes you 10 years to publicly talk about this experience (hi!)...
but that man is long gone now, the industry has had a reckoning, and to hell with anyone who makes young people feel vulnerable in this industry.
2012 - Year of Change. This is when Warframe started. The company's first attempt at a self-published, free-to-play game that was a company life preserver. This life preserver was messy, with no knowledge of what it took for buoyancy - we put everything into teaching ourselves.
2013 - Year of the Citizen. This year instilled principles in me about the importance of community work that have been the foundation of my sensibilities, priorities, and judgements ever since. Devstreams started here.
This year the community team also needed to grow (and still does to this day with wonderful people).
2014 - Year of Egress. This year includes some of the first wave of managing the reality that people don't just put down games and walk away to do other things, but this natural occurrence is now a business.
By now some people had been playing Warframe for 2 years and had moved on (which is.. expected), but it's now possible to very publicly divest on the way out.
Community professionals deal with this daily, and the closer you are to what you've built, the harder it is. No one should expect their game to be Hotel California, and you can only improve when you can separate valid issues from the noise. Some surgery required.
2015 - Year of Quality. A bit tongue in cheek for Warframe players, but in 2015 the importance of the ideals of your team vs. the realities of the hardships of game development come into play. The more transparent (and frankly vulnerable) you and your development process are..
..the more you have to deal with as a community professional. Like glass, transparency as an ideal is fragile, and dangerous when shattered.
2016 - Year of TennoCon. We started TennoCon this year, a decision that largely changed my priorities and workload more than any other decision I'd made up until this point. I'll never forget the feeling I had when people showed up.
2017 - Year of Graphs. This year is hard to theme but what stands out is how much I started loving the use of analytics. Why? Likely because after TennoCon 2017, we started seeing something we had not seen in the prior 4 years: spikes...
..This is a double edged sword in the internet era, spikes can be used as points of celebration, or pillars for the proverbial heads of your team when a game developer missteps.
2018 - Year of (intermittent) Confidence. Having a top-rated GDC Talk, running our Fortuna TennoCon Demo with Megan and Danielle. In 2018 I intermittently convinced myself to stop feeling like an amateur and be confident in myself and the world we've built with Warframe.
It took 7 years to have intermittent bouts of confidence. Yikes.
2019 - Year of Extremes. CW. There are few ways to frame what this means other than the chronological story of showing my Grandma my placement on the Forbes List one week, to then finding out over a Facetime call that she passed away the next while I was at The Game Awards.
Surprise twist: Add in a cyber-stalker the entire year who would find every account I have, and while Devstreaming would send videos of them ejaculating on top the stream. Every city I visited for work they'd change their area code to and pretend they were there.
2020 - Year of Loss. There is no accounting for how much 2020 took away from us all. This was a year of colossal suffering. Suffering that wanted company. We were more online this year
- and the climate was understandably tumultuous. In gaming, there seemed less patience for mistakes, yet perfection is impossible (especially in games). Easy to lose confidence in this climate.
2021 -?- It's only a couple days in, but, it's impossible to feel the confident at home. I feel like I'm learning everything all over again. Starting the first year of a new decade like it's 2011 again. I honestly feel afraid. But I can't let 2021 be another 'Year of Fear'.
All in, my decade journey has continued for 10 years because of the people. People on my team and people in the community most of all.
OH god this is way too long but oh well, 10 years in the making!
