In late June, Shadow’s Edge was at the Brazil Independent Games festival in São Paolo, Brazil. Since our team has an above-average participation of women compared to gaming industry standards (yay!), we were invited to speak on a panel about Women in Games.
One of the things we talked about was the creation of characters, because, have you SEEN how female characters are represented in most games? One interesting question was whether characters in general and female characters specifically could be role models — and if so, how we can build better role models into our game characters.
In fact, that’s exactly what we tried to do in our free game, Shadow’s Edge. The game helps players explore three “stages” of dealing with illness — Disruption, Disillusionment, and Discovery — and each stage is guided by a character that we call a “Guardian.” Our Guardians have their own stories, portraying everyday heroes with their own struggles that our players help empower our players to take an active role in their health.
At the conference, we also led a presentation titled Graffiti & Guardians: Can a Game be a Cure? This was a chance to help others in the game-design community learn to make games jointly with their players. We also spoke about our ongoing research, which hopes to explore the growth of resilience and posttraumatic growth in Shadow’s Edge players as they use the game as a piece of recovery from illness. Judging by the 30 minutes of questions after the speech and still more on the conference floor, the presentation went well!
Part of the conference was also a business forum — a whirlwind of short business meet-and-greets to help game design teams find business partners. In all, there were 630 business delegates attending from all over the world, generating 4,810 meetings in two days of the event. Over the weekend, the festival was open to the public, with about 20,000 people including school groups attending more than 125 talks and panels with Brazilian and international experts covering a wide range of topics of interest to the industry.
The result was excitement! Our new partners are excited to help us get the word out about Shadow’s Edge. And we were empowered to find overwhelming support for the idea that technology, gaming and entertainment can make a positive impact around the world.
Thanks to Apex Brasil and Brazil Games for sponsoring our presence at the conference. Not only did they host us, but they also helped us get press coverage for Shadow’s Edge in five major news outlets. A BIG thanks to the organizers of the festival. It was a great event!
Technology entrepreneur and game producer. Rosy concentrates on working in social and environmental change and philanthropic projects. She uses her ‘techspertise’ to produce content she is passionate about, focusing on impact messaging in entertainment and gaming. She regularly blogs and writes screenplays. She is an investor and mentors young entrepreneurs. More info on: www.lokhorst.ch
