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With stints at EA and Microsoft Game Studios, Tara Mustapha has an impressive CV – as you might well expect of someone who’s been in the gaming industry for more than 20 years. What marks hers out however isn’t so much the games she’s worked on, but the accolades she’s amassed, including two global Women in Games Awards and two from MCV/DEVELOP, including the big one earlier this year for Outstanding Contribution.
The accolades have come about largely through her early advocacy of underrepresented groups, subsequent to which was the founding of Code Coven (itself a persistent award winner), which for the past five years has worked to bring learning, finance and support to those who might not otherwise be able to access it.
How did you get started in the industry?
I’ve always loved games. My dad was an early adopter when I was a kid – we had a Commodore Amiga – and he was always tinkering with games and programming, such as it was back in the 80s, and I was always really interested in how that all happened.
Later I was living in Montreal [studying art] and flunked out of university because it just wasn’t my thing. Then I ended up doing two diplomas, one in Montreal and one in Vancouver for game design. Both courses were pilot programs for their colleges to do games. Then from graduating out of Vancouver Film School, I went into working at Backbone Entertainment as a game designer and scripter.
The first half of your career was very much in the trenches of game development, working at places like EA and Microsoft. Do you miss that aspect?
My experience with Code Coven, while fantastic, has made it clear that I miss designing games. I think my passion will always be getting into the nitty gritty of building and making. It has just always been that as a designer you tend to wear the production hat as well – which is probably a recipe for disaster to be honest. But, yeah, my love has always been making things feel good in a design sense.
When I started, my ambition was to make the next Call of Duty or the next World of Warcraft, or have that kind of impact and influence. Those are the games that I was playing, the games I loved… Or Football Manager… If Sports Interactive had come along and said ‘Here’s a football manager title for you!’ I’d have been like, ‘Oh, yes. Heaven!’
Can you not indulge those ambitions any more?
Only in a really annoying way. No, I joke. I mean, in a games sense, not as much as I would like to. The beauty of Code Coven is that we do get to see many different teams and so many different games. I hope that the programs that we create have a small part to play in their development and in their greater success. But the way I now have my design fun is taking how I designed video games in the past and that thinking, ‘How do we apply that to how we work and develop games as organisations.’
So how did Code Coven initially come about? Was it something that grew out of any particular experience you had in the games industry?
I think it was really out of cumulative experience and just being observant to what was happening to me and my peers – more so my peers who were at the top. Like, when I started Code Coven, my understanding of gender and diversity and inclusion was quite basic, because in 2018, culturally we weren’t having these conversations about what happens to women or people of racial diversity in the games industry.
I’ll always remember in Vancouver, where I didn’t get a job at a certain studio, but two of my peers from Vancouver Film School did. I know that my work from the interview process ended up being used in the game, but we’ll put that aside. But what will always stick with me is the image of five of their design team – because Vancouver’s a small city where everybody knows each other – walking down the street and they were basically five white men with black leather jackets and loose, light denim jeans, and they all looked the same, even the guys that they hired. It was the first time I had that pivotal awareness that there was an “other”.
I had another experience where somebody I was very close to ended up getting the same job in the same company, and it was a couple of years later that I realised that they earned 30% more than I did. And then the realisation that all of these senior guys around me were being invested in, not only in education, but in media training, in stylists, in leadership coaching and all of these things that turned them into these guys who walk around with a certain swagger and a certain ego. This is a curated thing that has been designed and built through outside investment, and that’s how the idea of Code Coven came along. If I can provide all that, as well as the technical training and support in a remote place, then I can dismantle a load of those obstacles and try and level the playing field.
So how would you characterise Code Coven? It’s not like some early D&I initiatives, in that you’re not just trying to get people over a superficial line, but to go beyond it, correct?
Exactly, yes. That’s one of the reasons why it’s been so hard to articulate what we do, and, I hesitate, because I don’t want to sound like one of those tech valley bros, but we are trying to fundamentally be a catalyst for change in the whole pipeline. Like, it’s not enough for me to say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna get all of these marginalised junior people jobs in the industry. Yay, job’s done’, because we know in the grand scheme of things that isn’t actually the problem.
If people aren’t staying beyond five years and they are not making it to the upper echelons of the hierarchy in the industry, then there is no encouragement for anybody of marginalised backgrounds to stay around. Sure, we’ve got the introductory game making courses which does bridge that gap of knowledge in a safe environment, but our focus is also on accelerators, because only 2% of VC funding goes to people of marginalised backgrounds. The greater amount of diversity in studios means the greater opportunities there are for marginalised people to then be hired and grow in an environment where they’re going to be seen and heard.
Finally, it is providing that leadership training or that specialised training that can help marginalised people to be promoted and to have a seat at the table. A lot of this stems from unconscious bias, so, again, we’re trying to undo that unconscious bias, bring a consciousness to it. But also provide the tools to then create a better, safer, more holistic, diverse workspace and change the industry to that level.
What are your ambitions for the rest of your career, or to what degree would you like the industry to change in the years ahead?
I often think about the games industry as being really quite new and that it’s taken a lot from other industries that have been established for a longer time, whether that’s software development or the entertainment industry, and I think that’s been a missed opportunity. Like, we have the tools and the design thinking and the growth mindset to redesign how we work to incorporate fair and equitable practices.
At the end of the day, I think we can create a system where the games industry can be a beacon. We’re able to be agile and adapt and I would like to see us as an industry being able to inform the world that this is how you do it. Of course, as a result of that, have the gender pay gap in the industry not be there, with fair representation and authenticity across the board, because this is such a magnificent industry.
