Jedidjah Julia Noomen, Game Narrative Designer (Part 2)
Jedidjah Julia Noomen, photo courtesy of the subject
This week we interview Jedidjah Julia Noomen, a game narrative designer, writer, and director based in Amsterdam. Julia has a background as a writer and director in theater, film, and immersive performance. We talked about the perspective she brings to game creation from those other mediums.
In PART TWO of this interview, we discuss the difference between gaming and other performance mediums, the special relationship game creators have with their audiences — the players, the importance of accessibility, and the importance of diversity in creative teams within the world of gaming.
This section is part two of a two-part installment. Read part one here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity from a longer conversation.
The*gameHERs:
You’re talking about having this background working in theater and film that you brought into games. What is unique to gaming as an artist compared to other mediums of performance?
Jedidjah Julia Noomen:
I think there are two things for me that stand out:
One is internally, the way you work together with a team. That’s one of the reasons I started out in theater and film. People sometimes ask like “oh you want to write a novel as well?” and stuff like that, but I like writing something that other people will work with. Being in games was an even better way to work within teams because in general there is less of an author in gaming. It's much more collaborative. In theater, I can write a play, and then there might be a director who says “well I'm going to do it differently,” but there's not a constant back and forth between the playwright and the director. You might have like do a rewrite or whatever, but there's not a lot of iteration.
That's different in gaming, and that [collaboration] is something that I really enjoy. Sometimes it's annoying, because especially as a writer, you've written something and you just want people to like it, and then when [the designers or developers] come back and say “I'm not sure about this,” or “we skip that whole part of the gameplay, so this needs to be different,” you’re like “oh no!” But it's great as well because it teaches you to not consider your own work as like the Holy Grail, right? And I think that's quite unique to the gaming industry.
The other thing — the external thing — is the interactivity and — especially for me — the individual interactivity that's in gaming. When I do, for instance, interactive theater, it's still slightly on rails because it's on a location, or you need to make sure that people know where they can walk, and where they can't walk — stuff like that. So even though you try to make it as playful and immersive as possible, there's always sort of a structure in there.
Of course games have that as well, but because you play it individually in your own home, or maybe on the train or whatever, the player is really having that that personal experience. That's something that I find quite exciting. Especially because I can never really know what they're doing.
I think [my interest in this] goes back to my theater experience where you can see what your audience is doing. When I write games, I don't especially like watching Let's Plays or [other streaming services] from projects that I worked on, not because I don't appreciate people doing that, but just because I sort of like that idea of people enjoying the game and me not knowing about how they do it, and not dictating how they should do it.
GH:
Maybe to put it another way is that gaming provides the structure and the boundaries in which players have to stay within the software and within the medium of the game. And so their individual experience can then, within those walls, really be much more diverse of an individual experience, as opposed to when you're working within a space in the real world, and you have to then figure out how to define and curate that experience just because of all the other constraints of like…being in a real place.
JJN:
Yeah, definitely.
GH:
I think that that is really interesting, and a really interesting way to think about gaming as an individual performance experience that is a given to the player by the people who created the game. I think often people don't think about gaming that way. Because it can be something that you can do by yourself, it’s easy think about gaming as a really personal experience, but it is still an audience experience. There’s just a degree of separation [between game creators and audience].
So we're talking about like something that excites you about the medium of gaming. What are you interested in right now as a game maker in terms of topics or themes you want to explore in your work?
I don't know how much control you have over these things. . .
JJN:
Well, obviously, yeah, sometimes I have control over those things. Sometimes there will be people or teams or studios that you go like, “Oh, I'd love to work with them. I don't care what they're making! I just I would love to work with those people!”
But on the other hand, as far as themes go, I worked on a game that was really important in terms of accessibility last year: Alt Frequencies, in which one of the base ideas was that it needed to be accessible to visually-impaired people. So it's an audio-only game. That accessibility in games — and not just in games but in life experiences as well — has been something that I've always been aware of and thinking about, and sometimes actively working on, but being able to work on the game that had accessibility as its core value really gave me the experience to dive into that and think about accessibility much more. That game experience has been really useful to me, both socially, in realizing how important and how relevant accessibility is , but also creatively because thinking about specific accessibility issues also makes you think of other things. So that's something that I definitely am now always taking with me when working on new stuff.
GH:
What an important experience that brought accessibility to your focus.
To pivot:
because at The*gameHERs we are a women-led community focused on amplifying and centering the voices of women, femme-identifying gamers and non-binary gamers, I want to ask you a little bit about your experience in terms of how you thought about gender in the in the world of gaming. How do you feel your experience has been shaped by your gender identity? Or perhaps you want to just speak about women in gaming generally — whatever you think is relevant to your perspective.
JJN:
I think for me for me personally. I feels horrible to say I've been lucky, but I think I have been when I hear experiences of many other women, that I have not felt too much discrimination against the fact that I'm female throughout my work career. That doesn't mean that I haven't felt it at all, or that I haven't seen that happen to others.
In general, not even working in games, but just playing games, I think most of us have the same experience of other people not understanding, or people having preexisting ideas about what sort of person you would be, or what you would look like if you enjoy gaming.
What I did find interesting when I came to the game part of my career is that there is that gender division [when it comes to how we think about the consumers]. I think that in general (and again, this is my experience) but thinking about gender divisions and — not just gender but other marginalized groups as well — I have not seen that that much in theater and film. That also has to do with what we were talking about earlier: that you think about your audiences from the get-go in gaming, and I totally get that segmentation in your audiences means you think about [gender] segmentation.
I do think that I've encountered quite a lot of, let's say. . . paternalistic kind of game design/game development. I've worked for companies that make games specifically for women audiences that not had enough women working for them. Sure, things like that change, but sometimes it's weird to think like, “okay, so these people are making games for women but they're all men? Maybe it's a good idea to get some women in there as well.” The fact that sometimes people don't even think about that sort of worries me. You need diversity, and I've been shocked at how many people have not been thinking about that. It’s something that I find important, and I try to at least to make teams aware of that.
Because whatever your target audience is, or whatever the story you're trying to tell with your game is, a diverse group of people working on something is always good. I gave the example of “you're making games targeted at women, so why aren't there enough women working here?” But on the other hand, it's not just that. Even if it's not your main target audience, I think that that diversifying your team is always a good idea. I've been shocked sometimes by the number of people that I’ve encountered who don't understand that.
Having diverse teams has become important to me in the last couple of years, not just for women, but in general, for every minority group. It's not that hard to diversify!
You also need to think about it in in different ways than just seeing gender or race, but thinking: how can make sure that we have a diverse group of people [building the game]? Or a diverse group of actors [acting in the game]? For instance, when I was working on the game we were just talking about, Alt Frequencies, it called for a really large cast, and and we really wanted to have a diverse group of actors in there. And sometimes that was hard because casting agents [and other people we were dealing with] didn't understand why we found that important.
So that’s less of like a personal thing. . .
GH:
Well, I think what I’m hearing is this is what you believe needs to happen to progress the future of game-making.
JJN:
Yep
GH:
And from a creative standpoint and an inclusion standpoint, but also from a financial standpoint. . .
JJN:
Yep, exactly
GH:
And thinking about that, if we really want to take care of more of our audience members, what we’re talking about now really ties back to what you were saying earlier about always keeping your audience in mind as an artist. As you were saying, gaming is a really audience-driven platform. When you focus on that, it's a very creative process to have a diverse team of people making your work because as you're getting more perspectives in the room, you are then taking care of more potential people who would be interested in your product.
JJN:
Yeah, definitely.
GH:
I think that what I'm hearing is that you're speaking less about your personal experience [with discrimination] and more about what you have witnessed and what you believe needs to happen moving forward.
JJN:
Yeah, exactly. And I think that the hard thing about that is (again) talking about those audiences [in the game design process]. It's weird because the gaming audience can be really vocal, but not always on diversity issues or about women's issues, stuff like that.
Let me give you an example: Years ago, I was working on this game, and there was an outside company that made the designs, and they made designs for the main character, a woman. There was a nice character design — she had a skirt on and high heels. But she was supposed to be working in a bakery.
So we said like, “okay nice design, but she's working in a bakery. No woman would wear high heels while working on baking stuff, and the skirt [is impractical], so that makes no sense, so can you change that?”
And they said “yeah, but I mean. . . any woman looks great in high heels and a skirt, right? So this is why we want her to look like that.”
And I was like “oh my god, did they just say that?”
Okay so, that's something that I personally would object to, but if you do a game like that and she has the heels and the skirt, and it's not like it's not overly sexist [in the rest of the design], I think nobody on the Internet, or on community sites would say “oh, I like this game. I just wish she wouldn't wear high heels.” Because it's a tiny detail, and it's not the overly sexual design, that would be something that probably would not get changed fast because of how audiences react.
But on the other hand, if you were to change that, you would still not get the audience reaction, but it would do something, I think. It would be important.
So there are these weird discrepancies between having that audience, and having the audience be vocal, and wanting as a game developer to cater to a larger audience. I think the previous instance is a tiny example of a case where if you could have a more diverse group of people working on a game like that, there would probably be more people mentioning things like [the character’s costume] — tiny details — and it would be also easier to change them. You wouldn’t necessarily have a really direct and immediate impact, but you could at least slowly try to show different kinds of people [in the games]. I think that it is really important [to be able to change these tiny details], but it's not showing results exactly from the moment you release a game.
This kind of change probably goes slow because also you can't directly put numbers on it. Right now, [the game companies] can't say “well if she wears high heels, women are not going to buy this, so we need to change it.”
Thankfully we do have bigger issues being addressed with AAA games — whole discussions about, for example, do we have a female lead or not, and sometimes those discussions get really heated. Those are the big things, but I think that there are small things underneath as well [that can make change]. And I think that there is a there's a lot of room to improve [in hiring diverse teams and making these small changes within games]. Hopefully that will happen because it will in the long run help.
GH:
Yeah, the little changes add up. The little way something looks can have like such subliminal impact on the way that the whole game feels. So that makes a lot of sense.
Do you have anything else you want to say that I didn’t ask about?
JJN:
Yeah. Something that I do like to mention as far as women in gaming that I see is that especially in the narrative department, there are many women. I don't know the numbers, but it at least feels like there's quite a lot of female writers and narrative designers, which I think is great. As I said, I've been quite right lucky that I haven't seen too much adversity myself, but I know at the same time that it's probably been easier for me, as a female writer with some experience, to get into that specific part than it would be to be, for instance, a female programmer. So I feel really lucky to be in this realm where there's more women and I really hope that we can spread that experience.
GH:
Do you feel that working in a field where you saw other women there already was important to making it feel like a comfortable place to join as a narrative designer and writer? Do you want that for other departments within gaming?
JJN:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And that's also why I think that it's important to be visible. For instance, I've worked in companies with like 200 people, and there might be two women on my team, but there might be another team where there's only one. Being visible to each other and also to the outside world, I think, makes it a lot easier, especially for women and non-binary people, and basically let's say everyone who is not a cis white male to be able to at least feel slightly more welcomed. It's hard if you're if you are the only one coming into group. So having that visibility, like you said, the fact that that I've seen more women in my departments, has made it easier.
GH:
That makes a lot of sense, and it’s something we continue to return to within our community at the*gameHERs, and part of why we’re interested in doing these kinds of interviews. Thank you so much for sharing some of your thoughts and experiences with us!
Follow Jedidjah Julia Noomen:
Twitter and Instagram: @julianoomen
Check out her website at www.julianoomen.nl!
Missed part one of this interview. Read it here!
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