Get up – Game Informer

When Manveer Heir left BioWare in 2017 after working as a senior gameplay designer on the Mass Effect franchise, he was burned out. He had been playing games for a dozen years, scheduling time during the crisis and enduring the wrath of gamergaters for his beliefs. As sometimes in his career, he thought about not playing video games anymore, but he knew he was not done yet.

He took a break in New York to rethink his next move, and rejoined the deep-rooted ambition to set up his own video game company – a dream he’d had since he was in tenth grade when he did set up his own business plan.

To invent the kind of stories he wanted to tell and address some of the issues he had in the video game industry, Heir set up his own studio. Heir’s experience with the Mass Effect franchise and with companies the size of Electronic Arts has exposed him to systemic issues that affected his goal of bringing stories of colorful characters and different backgrounds created by different developers ,

From left to right: Manveer Heir, Founder, Chief Visionary Officer; Rashad Redic, Founder, Chief Creative Officer; Bryna Dabby Smith, Founder, Managing Director

Heir turned to Bryna Dabby Smith, a veteran veteran with many years of experience in managing projects like Sleeping Dogs, to get help with doing business.

This prompted Rashad Redic, previously environmental artist at Bethesda, to contact Heir. A six-hour conversation later, Heir had cemented his core for Brass Lion Entertainment among the three and given the go-ahead for the company’s first project: Corner Wolves, a game in which the personal effects of the self-proclaimed war were investigated the 90s Harlem.

Brass Lion is designed to tell stories that you do not get from most studios as it’s not set up like most studios. Brass Lion wants to be actively engaged in developing color and other backgrounds, consciously countering the trend of male whiteness.

A 2017 International Game Developers Association (IGDA) developer survey found that 71 percent of respondents were white or multiracial white, 79 percent male and 86 percent heterosexual. While 81 percent said that diversity is important in the workplace, only 42 percent felt that diversity actually increased – compared to 47 percent in 2016.

The change is slow, as the institutions are inherently structured to maintain their status quo. There may be individuals or even entire departments who agree with the hiring of developers from different backgrounds, but there is an obstacle in group selection that slows down progress.

“What people say is,” Well, we hire only the best people, “Heir says,” but if you look at the research, you find out that meritocracy is a kind of lie, people are really hiring people, who they look like, and they use words like “culture fits” or “no culture fits” to crowd out people who may not fit, but have a variety of ideas. “

The attitude of people with different backgrounds has a positive effect on the quality. Erbe mentions Harvard Business Review articles, which are based on research stating that mixed teams produce better results because of course they are more in doubt and have fewer group minds that can inhibit innovation. “They start to check each other’s prejudices,” Heir explains. “They do not just nod their heads and say,” Yes, that first idea is the best. “

From these different experiences results a different kind of game. The story of Corner Wolves is about Jacinte, a young Afro-Latina who lives in Harlem and works in her father’s winery. One evening Jacinte comes back and finds him murdered in front of the shop. The game is an attempt by Jacinte to find out who killed him and why, but the underlying issues go deeper.

If you imagine how racism works in the real world, it is embedded in all of our real systems.

Manveer heritage

Harlem was particularly affected by drugs in the 1990s, when the game took place. Both community leaders and politicians called for action to eradicate the drug problem, but increasing approaches to law and order did not care about the problem or the common good. In the 1970s, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who once advocated rehabilitation, turned to an approach that put criminality to the test. President Reagan signed statutory minimums and cemented them with an urban crack epidemic. President Clinton’s 1994 Criminal Law increased the incarceration of even minor offenders.

The impact this had on Harlem and its ethnic communities exposed the systemic racism of the US justice system. Research into the environment of the game and countless studies have since clearly shown that there are racial differences in the rate of arrest and conviction, as well as the length of the conviction of blacks, as opposed to whites committing the same crimes.

A prominent example of racial disparities with regard to the war on drugs is the infamous 100-to-1 rule of 1986, which sets mandatory minimum penalties for certain amounts of cocaine. This meant that the distribution of five grams of crack led to a minimum sentence of five years in federal prison, while 500 grams of cocaine powder caused the same minimum penalty, although the chemical composition and effect of both forms of cocaine are significantly different. Blacks were specifically targeted as they were more likely to use crack than wealthy whites who consumed cocaine powder.

This large-scale history lesson is not relevant to either Jacinte or the player, but has been proven to affect the world of the corner wolves and their lives. Heritage and Brass Lion believe that the themes and lessons that this story reveals are things that video games can deal with in their own way.

“I think you create the systems so that they support your thesis, the themes and motives of the game and the story,” says Heir. “And then make sure it’s embedded in all the different systems of the game. If you imagine how racism works in the real world, it is embedded in all of our real systems. It is already embedded in the school system. It is already embedded in the police work. It is already integrated in job applications. “

Thus, Corner Wolves’ Harlem is a world in which players can move and participate, but it is also one that is already defined by forces outside of Jacintes direct control. “I think that this overall view and control (player) is not there – I think that’s what people should experience,” says Heir. “You will not always be the hero in our world because the rest of the world literally will not let you.”

The chips can be stacked against Jacinte, but she is not powerless. The game is based on close combat (but without weapons) and a conversation system that gives you the freedom to choose, while realistically representing the world and the situations around you. He likes to explore the gray area beyond right and wrong – which is what RPGs are all about – and that hopefully the players will draw conclusions at the end of the game, even if they are not necessarily able to show power up to a comfortable one , Happy end.

Jacinte, a 20-year high school graduate who has not attended college, is not part of the drug dealing community in the neighborhood. However, she is aware of this, not only because of her father’s death, but also because people in affected areas need to be, simply to ensure their own survival.

Her status in the world allows her to switch between different groups. This can be done, inter alia, by switching the code or changing the way you speak, depending on who you are speaking to with. This could easily come to fruition if Jacintes’ background is both black and Dominican, moving across the language between the two facets of her identity, as well as speaking with police and officials.

“We definitely want this authenticity,” says Heir. “It allows us to write many different characters with many different backgrounds, so we can have many different lenses for the same problem, leaving the player with a choice of which angle to approach or how to approach his thoughts develop how to solve these problems. “

The game touches filthy policemen, drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and even bigger forces, but it has to do so in a way that still makes Jacinte look realistic and does not let the narrative and gameplay elements drift too far apart.

The team is working on gameplay prototypes to create a demo for publishers (the game uses Unreal Engine 4), but they have not covered all aspects. With Heir’s background in Action / RPGs, the game is likely to move in that direction, but everyone involved knows that much will likely change until it launches in a few years.

Brass Lion Art Director and Chief Creative Officer Rashad Redic is responsible for building the game world. The team wants to set authentic accents for the mixed background of Harlem and Jacinte, but filtered through an anime-inspired look. Not only is Anime a personal touchstone for Redic, but it also has a meta-resonance, as it is popular in the black community.

Hip Hop is another strong current for the title, not just for the sake of nostalgia, but also because it adds its own larger commentary. “Part of the appeal of hip-hop,” says Redic, “was that you could get an idea of ​​what life was like as if someone were telling you a personal story, all we have to do is figure out how to do it If rap was the kind of genesis for the inner city and the urban communities that had a voice and gave people a window into their lives, then our game for us could be the beginning of it as an art form. “

Brass Lion has signed a contract with Just Blaze (DJ and Jay-Z producer), although his dedicated work will later feed into the project. Redic says they are not sure if they will use licenses for certain songs or even fashion brands, but the goal is certainly to give the game an authentic vibrancy.

As much as Corner Wolves still needs to be defined, that much is firmly anchored and drives the project forward. Bryna Dabby Smith, CEO of Brass Lion, knows what it takes to create a good foundation for a game and keep track. As Project Manager for Sleeping Dogs at United Front at Activision, this was the key. “One of the things that I think they did very well was the story element, and they’ve really invested a lot in the narrative design,” she says. “It was not just the feeling of the world, they were actually writing something that actually sounded correct from a cultural point of view, that it actually had roots in something that went beyond mere,” Hey, this is going to be a damn good game. “

There is a big shift going on and I think the parties are too late.

Bryna Dabby Smith

Brass Lion is currently working on Corner Wolves as a game and is open to appearing on as many platforms as possible. The developer also believes that the property has great potential for other media, be it films, comics or any other form taking place in the world.

So far, the reception of Corner Wolves and Brass Lion has generally been positive by the people the trio has met. “There is a big shift going on, and I think games are too late for the party,” says Dabby Smith. “I think movies have already started going there, and if you talk to someone in the bigger entertainment area, someone with a Hollywood background, they get that because they’ve already seen Get Out and they’ve seen Black Panther, and they have all seen Crazy Rich Asians all incredibly good because they tell compelling stories. And the fact that they focus on characters of color and marginalized voices does not hold them back, because people are hungry for them and are looking for different types of stories. “

Especially for Brass Lion and Corner Wolves, these stories are not black and white. They may not have a happy ending and are too big to be solved by a video game. But they are what people need and want to hear, and now is the time for them to know.