Lauren W.:          00:09          Welcome back to Playability, where we hold conversations at the crossroads of gameplay and accessibility. I'm your host, Lauren Woolsey, and I'm here today with Elizabeth Hargrave to talk about her game Wingspan and how it has changed her role in the community. Hello Elizabeth. [Elizabeth: Hi there.] So we normally start each episode with a whole lot of backstory about how the game developed and how it plays and Wingspan's a little bit more well-known, uh, internationally [laughs] and award-winning. So I want to focus instead on the backstory and then get into, um, how you viewed your role in the community. So can you give us a brief history of the game from inception to now?

Elizabeth H.:       00:52          Yeah, so I started working on Wingspan, I want to say like 2014-ish. I had already been playing hobby games for many years at that point in time. And, it really came out of a couple of conversations we had with friends and with my spouse about, um, just not being super excited about the themes of any of the games that we were playing. And you know, being excited about the mechanics and the gameplay, but just like not really loving castles or spaceships or whatever, that's just not our thing.

Elizabeth H.:       01:23          So you know, started thinking about a lot of the, a lot of the games we were playing, you know, have sort of economic systems and thinking about sort of how there are similar economic systems in the natural world and in terms of supply and demand and you know, shifting availability of resources and things like that. And what would a game look like that took some of the sort of familiar mechanics from the board games we love, but put a theme on it that was something that I really cared about. [Lauren: Right.] And so I started working on a game about birds!

Lauren W.:          02:00          [Laughs] And I met you, I met you several years back at Unpub when the game was, [Elizabeth: oh yeah] was somewhat new when I met you there, you were one of the only other women in the room. And that was kind of something that, that really stuck out to me. [Elizabeth: yeah] When you first started playtesting it - hah, yeah - when you first started playtesting it, how did that fit into your, your early process?

Elizabeth H.:       02:25          Yes, so I went to Unpub and then there's, there are a couple of groups here in DC. The first one that I got hooked into is called Break My Game, which meets at a local board game cafe once a month and then different store like once every quarter-ish. And it's an amazing resource, but I would go for months at a time without seeing another woman at one of their events. And it's... Over time as I got to know everyone in the group, I don't like now if I go and I happen to be the only woman, it's rarer now. But yeah, if that does happen, I don't feel it in the same way as when I was first starting to go. But when I didn't know anyone and I was the only woman at an event, you feel, [Lauren: oh yeah.] It feels awkward, you feel like the odd one out and like everyone's kind of looking at you in surprise that you're there. And you know, for me, I was passionate enough about what I was working on then I kept going. But I'm not convinced that that's true for everyone that has that experience.

Lauren W.:          03:23          It can be a big barrier to entry.

Elizabeth H.:       03:25          Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so I, I got hooked in with that group and with Unpub was just, you know, play testing the heck out of it for a couple of years and eventually took it to Gen Con and pitched it to a few publishers back in the summer of 2016 and got it signed with Stonemaier and then did development for another year or so with them. And then, you know, the art and the actual printing took awhile so that it didn't actually come out until the beginning of this year.

Lauren W.:          03:55          It's been a long but useful and, and successful journey. [Elizabeth: Absolutely.] Now before we get further into the episode, I want to ask the question we ask all our guests: what does accessibility mean to you?

Elizabeth H.:       04:08          I think people use it in several different ways. I was just looking, so there's a, an organization called Quantic Foundry that had this like gamer motivation quiz that was going around a couple years ago.

Lauren W.:          04:23          Oh, I remember that one. Yeah.

Elizabeth H.:       04:26          They got like tens of thousands of people to fill this thing out. Right. And one of the main motivations that they focused on out of like 10 things that they had, you know, it was like, do you care about theme? Do you care about, you know, winning, what do you care about? One of them was accessibility and the way that they use it was in the sense of like how easy is a game to learn, um, and teach to other people, which I think is a big part of accessibility, but I think other people use it in completely different ways. In terms of like, if you have vision issues or hearing issues, can you still play the game? So accessibility that people with, um, certain challenges or limitations and then there's all kinds of other accessibility I think in terms of like, do I as a player feel welcomed to play this game? [Lauren: mm-hmm] So like if the artwork on the cover of the box is off-putting to me in some way, like I would lump that into accessibility as well as like the game doesn't feel accessible to me. I feel like the box cover is sending me a message that I'm not meant to play this game.

Lauren W.:          05:33          Right. That it wasn't aimed for me. Yeah. [Elizabeth: Yeah.] So as you have gotten more into the design realm, how have you kind of interacted with these, with these ideas and kind of focused especially on that third of the sort of core ideas behind accessibility?

Elizabeth H.:       05:53          I mean even before Wingspan came out, just cause I had been going to Unpub for years at that point and sort of having the experience we were just talking about of like walking into a room and being the only woman I was starting to be pretty vocal about like trying to get people to think about things that can be done proactively to change that instead of just waiting for it to change naturally. Which I do think it is changing naturally over time. It's just going to take a long time if we wait for it to just happen organically. [Lauren: Right.]

Lauren W.:          06:24          So for example, this year at tabletop network, and I have no idea whether this was influenced by the conversation that I started months earlier about like, wow, Unpub is still only, you know, whatever percent women well below 50% like can we look, can we do about this? [Lauren: mm-hmm] At tabletop network, they actually did a um, scholarship for 10 people and the event's only like a hundred designers. So it was like 10% of the population of tabletop network and it was for women and people of color and other underrepresented groups as, as designers. And I feel like that noticeably changed the makeup of the room. Like if you think about those 10 people not being there, it would have been super "white, middle aged men"-heavy demographic.

Elizabeth H.:       07:11          And so I think that's one example of the kinds of things that I was, I was just trying to like, Hey guys, what can we actually be actively doing? If you agree that you would like to see the, the demographics of game designers reflect the demographics of general population better. Because another thing that I've been saying a fair amount is that I really feel like, um, if you have game designers that are all from a pretty narrow demographic band they are going to be making games that really speak to their personal experience and are about things that they're interested in.

Elizabeth H.:       07:52          And to the extent that people's interests and experiences correlate with their demographic profile, they are by definition not making games that may speak more to other demographics. [Lauren: right.] And so you get sort of this self perpetuating situation. Um, and so actually it tabletop network, I gave a talk because one of the things that I realized sometime this spring was that the makeup of the Facebook group for wingspan is radically different from the makeup of, I don't know if radically it might be too strong a word, it's like 30% women.

Lauren W.:          08:30          No, I mean that's a big difference, yeah.

Elizabeth H.:       08:31          It's, it's high. I have learned. So for my talk, I went out and like asked a bunch of the top games on board game geek. If they had a Facebook page, what was their makeup? And the only other game that I came across in sort of the BGG top 50 that would give me their data that was at 30% was Pandemic. So like the thing that made me look at this was, um, in other Stonemaier Facebook groups that make up is like 9% I think for size, maybe a little higher for Viticulture or somewhere in the teens, but nowhere near 30%. And that was consistent for a bunch of the other games that I found. Like some of them were as low as like 5% [Lauren: yikes] women in their Facebook groups. And that's just like, if you are a women entering that Facebook group, it's gonna feel weird. You feel when you were in a 5% minority. [Lauren: Oh yeah.] And I, I don't know that we can put our fingers on like his wings being different because it was made by a woman probably in some ways. Does it help that the graphic designer and artist were women? I don't know.

Lauren W.:          09:39          I think, I think that helps people find it. Yeah, for sure. Right. And and as you noted, you know, the, the box art is a lot more engaging to not just women but just a wider audience of people who might not even play that many games, but it looks welcoming in a way that other game boxes don't.

Elizabeth H.:       10:01          Yeah, possibly. And it's like it's a, it's a lighter color scheme though. I think there's a lot of different things that go into it that people haven't even really looked into a lot in terms of what different demographic groups find inviting. I think there's a whole field of research that can be done on that within board games it's probably been done tons within like other corporate marketing type fields and, and we just don't, I think take advantage of some of what's known in, in other fields in those ways.

Lauren W.:          10:36          Yeah, that's a good point. I mean we could really learn from those kinds of things.

Elizabeth H.:       10:40          Probably. And mostly because a lot of board games are passionate projects. Right. And it's like, I want my vision on the box, but again, my vision out in the box is gonna be different from someone with a different background and a different taste? And to the extent that all the, you know, the companies are being run by men and publishing games by men and umm, and mostly white men. Is that skewing, it's a mix of games that come out in a way that perpetuates the fact that fewer than 50% of gamers are women. And you know, some definitely smaller proportion than in the population for people of color as well.

Lauren W.:          11:21          Yeah. [Elizabeth: So...] Yeah, I think it's important to have these conversations and at some point, and it seems like we're getting there, we'll start to get this critical mass of voices saying everybody really needs to be taking a look at this and, and figure out what we can do to make this progress happen faster. Because as you've said, there's, there have been changes. It is slowly getting better, but slowly isn't, isn't really fast enough.

Elizabeth H.:       11:51          Right. Especially if there are things that we can think of that are easy enough to do. I think some of what's going on, and it's also larger structural issues, like women get stuck taking care of their kids more often than their husbands do. And I think that's part of the skew of the population of designers and gamers too, at least certainly within my friends is a dynamic that I have seen as they have had children. [Lauren: yeah.] And that's something that right, that's going to be a much harder nut to crack. But for the things that we can see, like just getting people to conventions, um, that's a pretty easy problem to solve for a handful of folks and then having more people in the room just normalizes it and makes it easier for the next wave of folks to come in. I think.

Lauren W.:          12:40          Yeah, definitely. And the fact that Wingspan has now gotten such wide acclaim allows you to be a face that people can, can associate with the name. And I think it is really important to have role models like that for, for both younger people but also younger designers who might've had that barrier to entry where the one time that they tried to go to, to a design meetup, they just kind of were like I don't feel comfortable with this. They can see that there is, that there are people in the, in the industry that um, that look like them. And, and I think that's important.

Elizabeth H.:       13:19          Yeah. And one of the other things that I tried to do this year 'cause I kept getting interviews where people were saying like, Oh you're one of the only women game designers. I was like, I'm pretty sure that's not true. Like I can name at least a handful off the top of my head. And I started digging in like creating this list to refer people to. Um, cause that was another thing I was trying to egg people on of like if you have a podcast you should be inviting more women on your podcast and things like that. Right. So you started the list up and eventually it's, it's like over 200 women now with published games [Lauren: yeah.] That I just put up on my website for partly for like podcasters and whoever to find people to invite, but also for me personally, it still has that feeling of like I just feel good scrolling through the list. Like it still it, it helps me feel like I belong in a way that I didn't always when I was starting out and it's still sort of gives me that warm fuzzy feeling to see all these other women that are in the industry that aren't always visible on that day that you show up, and it's all guys and you.

Lauren W.:          14:27          Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You're, you're certainly not the first designer. I think the visibility thing is a, is a big factor and then when people find you and find your website, then they can find that list and we'll have that link to this episode. But I have enjoyed looking through that and seeing a lot of familiar names that I just never really kind of focused on. And then of course a lot of unfamiliar names that I had never had a chance to come across.

Elizabeth H.:       14:53          Yeah. It was fun to pull it together and people are still sending me new folks all the time, so [Lauren: that's awesome.] It's growing more slowly than it was at the beginning of the year, but, but it's, it's fun. We're still uncovering people and, and people are having new games come out, so. [Lauren: Yeah.] Yeah, it's been great.

Lauren W.:          15:09          Well this has been a really great conversation. I don't want it to last too long, and I appreciate you coming on. And uh, Wingspan's in, in everybody's friendly local game store, but how can people find you online?

Elizabeth H.:       15:20          So the website I was just talking about is eLizhargrave.com I don't make people spell out my entire name, just E L I Z Hargrave and that's my Twitter handle as well, @elizhargrave. I'm pretty active on boardgame Twitter.

Lauren W.:          15:35          It's a good place. [Elizabeth: It is.] Well, thank you so much and have a wonderful day.

Elizabeth H.:       15:40          Thanks, you too. Thanks for having me.

Lauren W.:          15:42          For more information about the topics that we discussed in this episode and the links that we just mentioned. We'll have those in the about this episode section on our website at playabilitypod.com and if our listeners have any questions or comments that you would like to share with us, please email us at playabilitypod at gmail.com and find us on major social media platforms as @playabilitypod. Thanks again for listening. Play with a new perspective.