Name: Catching Up with Electronic Arts COO Laura Miele
Uploaded: 2021-10-28
Duration: 4 min 53 s
Description: Miele discusses how EA is ensuring representation in games and company culture, as well as some of the challenges the company faced during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Miele discusses how EA is ensuring representation in games and company culture, as well as some of the challenges the company faced during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Catching Up with Electronic Arts COO Laura Miele

Tech

EA game creators use an inclusion framework for scripts and other elements to ensure diverse stories and characters are represented.

Electronic Arts COO discusses representation in gaming

Watch: Electronic Arts COO discusses representation in gaming

many of our games last year that we're working on. We have been working on for three or four years and so we finished a lot of games last year to get them out to market. And one of our games with Star Wars squadrons were working on and we partner with Disney and lucasfilm, as you would imagine rightfully. So they're very particular about quality, particularly around sound and music. And so we were here, we were april we had didn't have the score done and there is no world in no scenario that we're going to be bringing an orchestra together to finish this score. And so our sound designer and music directors um pulled together and they recorded one instrument at a time and then they brought the score together. And not only did we get an approval from Lucas, we just won an award for this music that they created. It's just unbelievable the perseverance and the resilience that the team demonstrated. We had other scenarios where we have these very large stages where we gather animation data, movement and motion. Happy little balls that go on people's joints and it captures the data and the motion capture. Well of course, we couldn't be in these stages and people didn't have these in their home. So we had these X suits that we would send to people's homes and they were able to put them on their kids, on their spouses, on their answer, whatever and collect their data from the motion from people wearing these suits to put in the game. So they got very creative about how to keep the train on the tracks to get the game's done well, diversity and inclusion is Super important to us. Very personal for me. We created a women's ultimate team ERG. About five years ago in the company and we have 2200 members in the organization. And that organization created an inclusion framework for our game creators to use and what it is essentially as we were so inspired by the Gina Davis Foundation and the work that she has done to audit gender representation of characters. So we created something similar to be intentional and to thoroughly evaluate how representation is showing up in our games. And it's been an incredibly powerful tool for us to evaluate really early on in our game development and our game creators essentially take the inclusion framework and they run their dialogue scripts, characters worlds through the inclusion framework. We haven't necessarily set quotas or numbers. I just want I just want to creators to be intentional about what they're creating and how we're showing up in the world. And it's been incredibly powerful. I think we've progressed in advance far faster than we would have without the inclusion framework. And I also believe we have done more than we would have if we have had set numbers. And so I think I think the creators are so inspired by inclusion diversity equity um that they use the framework to evaluate how they're how they're showing up in the world. Mhm. I think culture matters a tremendous amount were very clear about a zero tolerance policy around harassment, misbehavior in our culture. And we created a very robust framework around communication and if you see it, Speak it, what's happening to you, having someone else until we have many avenues that people can communicate to us, what's going on in the company. I also believe that it starts with leadership, 50% of my team that we're running studios where women and I believe that you have to set the standard of the example and two of those women on my leadership team, half of their leadership team where women, if you can see it, you can be it. I wanted to start there and so I think it's incredibly important for that to cascade into our organization. Okay, okay, Those platforms are providing a service that I think is meaningful to our players over the pandemic. I have twin 17 year olds and they spent a lot of time in their room and I would go into my son's room, open the door after the shock and horror of seeing his messy room. I would notice that he was playing games with his ipad, you have Facetime up and then his iphone, he would have just called up and then you have the game up and it was just staggering to me that he didn't have an experience, it was all integrated in. And so I just see so much opportunity potential for us to streamline and integrate, that it's an area that we're spending a lot of time in the focus of streamlining social interaction and social experience, that you can visually see your friends, you can communicate outside of the game about the game and then have the in game experience. I think there's a significant opportunity and path ahead for us to bring this together and make it more seamless for players. Mhm.