Did you know that our brains have two ways of thinking? One is conscious and slow, and the other unconscious and fast. This means that we think about a lot of stuff which we’re not even aware of!

We evaluate situations, assess people and make decisions that are based not only on conscious arguments, but even more so on biases. This is where our brains go unconscious: a bias is an unconscious factor influencing how we evaluate people, things or situations. We are biased every time when we don’t base our decisions and assumptions on objective and sound evidence, and we often don’t even realize it (if you don’t get it yet, no worries, we have some real-life examples for you a bit further down)!

Being influenced by things that go beyond our conscious control is nothing we should beat ourselves up about because it’s simply how our brains work! We’re all biased and we need to acknowledge that. We should also educate ourselves and learn about the ways our brains trick us.

So what is the most actionable and effective way of mitigating bias?

Recognizing it! It’s good to know that there are different types of unconscious bias (the academic term for that is “implicit bias”). As we’re celebrating Women’s History Month, we want to highlight the biases that particularly affect women. Within that, we’ll be focusing on the individual and on what happens inside each of our brains that leads to unfair assessments of women, their work and their achievements.

Gender bias

This bias happens when people have outdated ideas about what women are capable of or interested in. Consider this situation: A man and a woman are considered for a lead role that requires direct communication and fearless decision-making. Who’ll get the job?

Motherhood penalty

This bias occurs when people assume that women won’t be as committed to their jobs once they become mothers. This can lead to women being paid less, overlooked for promotions, and not given the support they need to succeed in the workplace.

Appearance bias

This happens when the way women look affects how they are perceived. Beauty, weight and height can influence how we evaluate women and can lead to us making a decision that is completely unfounded. Take, for example, an athletic, tall man – people tend to evaluate him as more disciplined and thus generally more capable.

Affinity bias

This occurs when people tend to prefer working with others who are like them, which can make it harder for women, who don’t fit the traditional mold, to get ahead. Example: a group of male game developers excluding a female team member from social gatherings because she wouldn’t be interested in their discussions anyway, right?

Confirmation bias

This happens when people only listen to information that confirms what they already believe, which can make it hard for women to be heard in decision-making situations. Imagine a situation where a male game designer dismisses a female colleague’s ideas for a game, because he assumes that women are not interested in those types of games. Someone who thinks this way might have been tricked by their confirmation bias!

Social desirability bias

This bias occurs when people say what they think others want to hear, instead of being honest. This can impact women’s ability to be authentic and effective leaders. For example, a person might not feel comfortable to speak up when their colleagues reinforce stereotypes about female characters in a game. They might not want to speak up as they don’t want to rock the boat and be seen as difficult.

Status quo bias

This happens when people resist change and prefer things to stay the same. This can make it hard for women to challenge the way that things have always been done and introduce new ideas. When a game development studio resists incorporating more diverse perspectives and backgrounds into their game development teams, because they believe it would be too difficult or risky, status quo bias is stopping them from doing amazing things.

Now you know what are the different situations which might bring your unconscious bias out of its cage.

And let’s not stop here: Think about which of these biases might apply to you? Write them on post-its and stick them somewhere you can’t miss, like your desk or monitor. Setting up visual reminders about our brains tricking us is us tricking our brains back 😉

Have you noticed that any of your colleagues might be affected by these or other biases? Help them out! We have way more influence on our thinking habits than we might think.

To tell immersive stories, you not only need the creative brains inventing and designing the narratives. What’s equally substantial are the architects bringing these stories to life – through tech! This is why we’d like to shed a light on our awesome Content Tools Team. They’re the unsung heroes responsible for optimizing story content flows and processes within all of our games. In this article, we’ll walk you through the contributions of this team–the internal and external team(s) structure, challenges, and examples of strategies and tools that allow us to create captivating and interactive gameplay.

Creative Tech Core

Known by various names–Creative Support or “Chris and Friends” (with Chris as the team lead)–our Content Tools Team forms the creative tech core of Lily’s Garden and other games in our portfolio. Their primary responsibility revolves around everything related to the game’s story, from crafting and fine-tuning the story workflows to addressing bugs and developing tools.

Their main focus is to ensure that storytelling within our games is not only engaging and fun, but also produced in the most efficient and seamless way possible, from both production and programming perspectives. One example of this is the MapActions tool, used by Cinematic Artists to author storylines and apply cinematics. It basically allows you to easily add and edit all the things that make a good cut-scene. It’s part of a larger tool called MapEditor, as most of the tools the team builds consist of several smaller tools, creating a modular building block system that increases simplicity and speed. As an example, in the below GIF, on the right, you see a mailbox crashing, some zooming in and out, and Lily’s verbal as well as non-verbal reaction to it happening – all easily and granularly adjustable with the tools that you see on the left.

The Tech

The Content Tools Team works within the Unity Engine, using C# for coding. This tech choice is key to maintaining a uniform and efficient game development process. They swear by consistent language, terminology, and Clean Code for effective communication, within the team and beyond. For instance, the terminology for storylines in Lily’s Garden is Story Arcs, whereas in Penny & Flo, they’re called Seasons – a seemingly minor detail that can mess with the game codes in unpredictable and problematic ways. Hence, uniformity and alignment are a big focus for the team.

Areas of Responsibility

Comprising a team of four, good collaboration between team members is the key to success. They work in rotations where they take turns addressing requests from other teams. This is how they make sure that requests from many different teams within Tactile working on the story are dealt with quickly and accordingly. 

And then there’s technical debt, an inevitable part of software development where teams are constantly reiterating on programmed solutions and making sure the technological infrastructure is on a par with current standards. It’s a big challenge that the team faces regularly, but they meet it head-on, making sure it doesn’t hinder our games’ evolution. Proactive and diligent, they clean up the codebase, keeping it fresh. 

To ensure fresh and clean code, team members participate in recurring refactoring workshops. Particularly new team members, coming with new perspectives and knowledge, are great to take on such refactoring tasks. The process is then for a (new) team member to take on an old feature and, put simply, update it and make it better. They make it better by going into deep focus mode for a period of time where they clean up the code, talk to relevant stakeholders and discuss improvement suggestions; is there anything that needs to be added? Removed? Improved? After having gathered all this information, they update the code and ultimately make sure it’s up to current industry standards.

The above image is an example of a recent update. On the left, we see the story flowchart tool that writers use to design and write the narrative. The Content Tools team did their magic and automated this process by building a tool that parses the diagram and inserts all the information directly into Unity. This creates the starting point for the Cinematic Artists to go ahead and fill in all the cinematic details like adding motions, facial expressions and items, as we can see down below. The highlighted area on the left image is the so-called “Dialogue Map Action” which was built by the Content Tools team to simplify the generation of visuals around a dialogue, like facial expressions and text. Thanks to the automation tool mentioned above, the text is filled in automatically and character expressions can be easily picked from a variety of options.

When they’re not juggling requests, the Content Tools programmers work on individual or joint projects. Collaboration isn’t just about tasks and projects, it’s also about having each other’s backs. With regular code reviews they ensure top-notch code quality, consistency, and adherence to the pre-agreed Tactile coding standards.

Story Content 🤝 Story Architecture

In this dynamic world of mobile game development, the Content Tools Team emerges as the story architects, weaving seamless story flows and tools and crafting captivating gameplay experiences. They’re vital contributors to the narrative architecture of our games that keep us engaged, enchanted, and coming back for more.

When I moved to Denmark back in 2018, I didn’t really have any expectations. I just packed my things, booked a flight from Warsaw and went, all by myself. I didn’t have Copenhagen on my travel list nor on my list of countries I would like to move to. I think this is why the city made such an impression on me from the first day and that continues to this very day. I joke that my relationship with Denmark is a bit like a marriage – we made a mutual decision to be together knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses. One of these strengths is definitely the working culture here.

⚒️ So, what’s it like to work in Denmark

Work constitutes 37 hours of our week and whilst we often say that perhaps a job doesn’t matter so much, this is still a lot of our time! Luckily, the work life balance in Denmark is very strong. 

This is not a joke. Danes care deeply about their private life. I was shocked to see that almost none of my colleagues stayed at work past 5pm. In Poland, it tends to be quite normal to work after hours and generally take all your other commitments outside of the work hours. Here, in Denmark, your doctor appointments happen during the day and your colleagues will support you in that regard. 25 days of holiday and good parental leave policies are quite similar to both countries I lived in, but I can definitely see a lot of my international network appreciating how big the paid leave allowance is. There is also a lot of focus on resting – if you are on holiday, you don’t work. If you take a sick day, you are told to switch off.

👌 Trust is the group mind

The whole educational system in Poland focuses a lot on individuality, individual results and praise, and this kind of approach, of course, has its good sides. In contrast, in Denmark, both the schooling system and the workplace put a huge focus on how you cooperate as a part of the team. You will see people being very transparent, sharing knowledge with you and genuinely supporting your growth. As a person who loves sharing ideas with others I could never go back to the individualized way of thinking about my job.

🧑💼 Micromanagement is rare

The same goes for your manager and the leadership of your company. People leaders in Denmark aim at trust, collaboration and partnership. You will receive a lot of autonomy which can sometimes seem surprising! (Do they really trust me to do it, all by myself?!)

Your leads also expect you to come to them with your challenges and feedback, rather than micromanage and check on you every other hour. 

You are the one to track your own results and progress, and they are there to help you and support you when you need them to jump in. Do not be afraid to challenge your lead. They will appreciate your opinion on things and this will not be treated as a lack of respect for their authority, as it might come across in other countries. 

💰 The salaries are not “high” – they are equal

This is a point I really wanted to mention here as it often gets misunderstood. Denmark puts a lot of focus on equality. There is a common perception that salaries here (or in Scandinavia in general) are high. I don’t think that’s the way it works. The salaries here are well regulated and therefore the majority of people – no matter their profession – can afford a sustainable, good quality life. I only have the other perspective of Poland, where the compensation gap between the IT/tech sector compared to other fields is huge. That then leads to inequality which is of course for the benefit of the high earners, but perhaps not so much for the people working in other areas. I would say that all in all, moving to Denmark solely for the financial upgrade or gain does not make much sense – I would recommend it only if you are passionate about the country, culture and a great standard of life based on equality. The taxes are high but thanks to them you can enjoy many great investments, like a robust bicycle infrastructure, and not to mention the free healthcare and free education 🙌

✅ The system just works!

I must admit I was positively surprised (in my individual case) about how well the public healthcare system works. I haven’t had a chance to try this myself, but I can see from my network that there is also a big safety net for job seekers, which makes people go for jobs that actually make them happy. If one is affected by layoffs, there is quite a lot of resources to support them, including their union. The salaries are paid out for a longer period of time and if you have also insured yourself with the unemployment benefit, you can receive support for even longer. The education is free which makes it accessible for most and universities work a lot with employers to ensure employability after graduation. If you are a member of a union you can count on help in regards to, for example, reading your contract before you sign it, brainstorming about your offer or getting tips and tricks on how to plan a successful parental leave.

💗 It can be hard to make friends, but inclusion is important

It is true that it is hard to make friends in Denmark. There are more and more international groups and initiatives to be involved in though. Signing up for classes or activities is always a good idea. The one thing that I always appreciated besides that is that inclusion is very important. There are heaps of initiatives in terms of DEIB in Denmark. The good thing about people overall is the general feeling of safety that for me as a woman moving countries alone was extremely important. I feel safe on my commutes and at social gatherings and that means a lot!

♻️ Sustainability and the environment

Denmark is a global leader in sustainable development. The country invests heavily in renewable energy, green technologies, and environmental initiatives. You can feel it in your day to day. Companies recycle and try to cook green for their employees. There are a lot of ways in which as an employee you can feel like you’re contributing to saving the planet.

If you’re curious about learning more about life in Denmark, here’s a few more resources you can look through 👇

• On the Danish Welfare System
• Before Moving to Denmark
• Life in Denmark overview (before moving, during and after leaving)
• A guide to Copenhagen neighborhoods