Kate Edwards works to foresee blind spots — and help video game developers steer clear.
Kate Edwards, 57, a Seattle-based cultural and political consultant working in the video game industry, makes it her business to foresee these kinds of criticisms — and help developers address their blind spots or steer clear entirely.
“If you’re going to be making a mainstream game, like ‘Cyberpunk 2077,’ you have to be mindful of the fact that there’s a lot of different, diverse people playing your game,” Edwards said. “Your particular viewpoint as a game designer or narrative designer, that viewpoint, unless it has an explicit narrative reason to be there and you can justify it within the world building that you’ve done, it needs to be basically logically consistent with the world you’ve created.
In 2004′s “Halo 2,” a Covenant character had its name changed from the religious term “Dervish” to “Arbiter” to reduce similarities to Islam and avoid creating the appearance that the game was about the United States versus Islam, according to Edwards. She said she argued for the word change given the game’s references to Islam, the religious nature of the Covenant and protagonist Master Chief’s mission to stop them.
In 2012, she took an even more involved role in the video game industry: That year, the International Game Developers Association, or IGDA, offered Edwards the role of executive director, where she worked until 2017. She also served as executive director of the Global Game Jam from 2019 to 2022.
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