Evolution of Video Games
Based on an episode with Javiera Cordero 🇵🇷🇵🇪🏳️⚧️
Welcome to Latinx in Power, a podcast aiming to help to demystify tech, the way we do that is by interviewing Latinx and Caribbean leaders all over the world to hear their perspective and insights.
We talked with Javiera Cordero (sher/her), a Quest Store Operations Manager at Meta and a well-respected figure in the gaming community. She has a passion for design, art, and video games, and uses her expertise to enhance the lives of game makers and support those trying to break into the industry. Javiera is dedicated to making a positive impact and inspiring others in the field.
In this episode we talked about the gaming industry and the inspiring journey of Javiera. The episode aims to provide advice for those seeking employment in the gaming industry, whether they are seasoned professionals or just starting out. The show will explore Javiera’s personal experiences and offer tips and advice for success in the exciting world of games.
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What does it mean to be a Latina for you?
This is such a loaded question for me. I feel all of the things that make me irrevocably Latina are my resilience and my hope and my presence, and my passion. I’m someone who went through a very violent poverty and economic displacement when I was growing up. I didn’t get to grow up among Spanish-speaking communities and both my parents, my father’s from Peru and my mother’s from Puerto Rico, but I was born in New York City and always kind of survived in white dominant communities where we were the outsiders. I think that persistence of joy despite adversity is my most Latinidad quality.
It’s so funny because I feel the most Latina when I’m around people who are not. Only then I understand a lot of my cultural habits and behaviors and proclivities or how loud I talk at a natural volume or there’s just things that I never think about when you grow up around people who look and talk like you, you can’t really see yourself in other people’s eyes. But in contrast to whiteness is when I feel the most Latina. I wish that the qualities that I have ascribed to Latinidad, I think that they’re qualities that everyone can enjoy, but I think that it’s just a habit of a collection of people that are fundamentally mixed to their core and have survived imperialist violence and oppression for thousands of years. I think it makes sense that we do have some defining traits.
How did your passion for video games start?
Video games are the most important thing in my life. When I was growing up, we were really poor. We moved around over 30 times before I was 12. I didn’t have very many things in my life that were consistent or that persisted across time. But my memory cards did, my progress in my games did. And the worlds that games allowed me to inhabit, the characters that I met in those games, like those were constant characters in my life and I got to.
Ilearned how to read through playing video games. I gained a lot of skills around communication and literacy by playing games. For me, games allowed me to access a lot of my own raw appetite for learning and it just gave me a lot of tools to support myself. I feel simultaneously indebted to games and then also just deeply fascinated by what people can create. I do write some, but I’m not a writer and I’m not an artist and I’m not a designer. But when there is this wholly convergence of audio and art and animation and design and being able to make your presence matter in a world and have the world echo back to you, that you, the player, also matter. I think that games are just such a beautiful and personal experience.
For me it was always that. It was always a means of having my agency as a person honored. I think for a lot of people, games may not be that, it may just be like a fun hobby of pressing A and watching XYZ happen and that’s where the joy lies in it. But for me, the magic is that games can help disarm me and other people who play them of our preconceptions. I like to call them “empathy machines,” where you can use games and the interaction that runs on to tell unique stories and to create authorship where normally in any other medium, it would just be a passive observer experience. I love that when you stop paying attention to a game, you are not able to proceed. Games are inherently consent-based.
For me, games gave me a very rich, fertile playground where I could test out a lot of my own theories and ideas and it was just oftentimes the only place of empowerment that I experienced growing up.
When you use that vocabulary and you think about games as a consent-required medium of storytelling, I think that’s really powerful because it means that the player is culpable in the events that happen or at the very least, the events are driven by their actions. On some level, it feels like a fundamental kindness to acknowledge the agency of the person who is engaging with the art.
What excites you the most about now?
What is really exciting to me about the evolution of games as a medium is that when you look at other mediums in the early stages, there is always a lot of resistance. I think that to a certain extent, like marketing machines and capitalism and having predominantly white men in the design and approval board sections of game development means that only certain kinds of stories get told.
For a long time, it wasn’t that women weren’t playing video games, there was zero defense for them. And that game communities often just express to women that they are not welcome here and game designers express to women that they are not welcome here and that they are just bodies and meat. Now we’re seeing the medium mature and the people who are empowered with the knowledge and the techniques and the infrastructure and the support and the work opportunities. There’s so many more diverse voices out there.
I hope that the video game industry engages in an era of atonement for several decades of just a lot of real harm and just really negative stereotypes that have been perpetuated. Like games like any other medium of art, responsible for the value systems that it espouses, and especially games that reward the player for a certain set of actions, when a game decides to choose what kinds of actions it’s going to reward the player with, it is creating a value system. I think that as we mature as storytellers and as we become more aware of the impact that games have, we can just ultimately tell better stories.
Which advice would you give to someone looking for a job at the moment?
My advice is get organized, use a calendar. If that’s the only thing I tell the person listening to this podcast that will serve you so far. When I was looking for work in games, I say that I was looking for work for eight months, but I wasn’t really engaging in any kind of meaningful strategy. I didn’t know the questions that I should have been asking at the time.
I think when people are searching for a job in games, they have this illusion that it fundamentally comes down to a lack of empathy for the person who has to look at applications for a job. If a company says we are looking for XYZ skills and then you show up and you just submit a random template cover letter that does nothing to acknowledge the explicit vocabulary, taxonomy skills, the tools that discipline relies on, you are essentially expressing to them that you have done zero research, that you don’t actually understand what your role entails, that you don’t have any industry awareness, and fundamentally, you’re just wasting and disrespecting their time.
The greatest thing that can help someone who’s looking for a job in games is to really establish a community, a rich community. If networking is a word that doesn’t vibe well with your spirit, then reject it and use the word community because when I look at my LinkedIn now, where I have close ties with thousands of game developers. My LinkedIn feed is just nonstop job opportunities. People who work in games are so passionate about what they do and they want to work with great people. When you build relationships with every single game developer, that person becomes an extra repeating network of opportunities that come their way. There’s this twofold step of understanding what is expected of your role and the seniority level that you’re looking for and understanding what tools that you have to show up with. It’s okay if you didn’t go to school, it’s okay if you didn’t get a degree, but there’s still so much work that you can do.
There’s a lot of power in people’s hands to establish a community, to ask questions, to write those questions down on paper, and start engaging in a linear process of slowly filling in the gaps in their knowledge. I think that’s the thing that I see people struggling with is that I see a lot of people saying, “Oh, I applied to 400 jobs.” I’m like, that’s actually not a badge of honor. That doesn’t mean that you’re doing it well. What that means is that you are shooting applications. You’re not taking any time to express any level of meaningful exchange with a company that expresses that you understand what’s important to that company and that there’s actual alignment between your values and the values of that company.
I think that there is an authentic way to write a meaningful cover letter that expresses to a company the kind of work that you want to do and the kind of workplace that you want to inhabit. When you allow people to see your values and what’s important to you, it allows other people to find you. There’s a lot of people who are engaged in this work of finding jobs in the game industry and they’re doing it alone. And so, my message is to stop doing it alone and to start learning from your mistakes.
Do you think LinkedIn is the place where you should connect with people and build this community?
I would use a multiplicity of tools. I think step one is that you need to establish a consistent and clear persistent image of who you are as a person. If you are using some silly username for your Twitter or you have some joke Twitter handle, knock it off, get your real name on there. If a real job is going to hire you, they’re going to need to know your real name. I understand that with trans people there is an extra layer of consideration. But if people do not see a consistent image of who you are, it makes it harder for them to do that initial assessment of who this person is and what they need. I think focusing on clarity and I would hit all of these platforms at once.
I would at the very least have a Twitter account. If you say that you want to be a combat designer, I would challenge you to go out and follow hundred people who actually have the job that you want so that you can slowly start to immerse yourself in the lexicon and the language and in the terminology that that discipline relies on to do its job. The more that you understand your discipline, the greater that you are able to ask better and better questions. Initially, your first question might be like, “Hey, is this a good resume?” And that’s kind of a worthless question because the better question is, “Hey, does this resume look like it is an appropriately prepared candidate for this specific job?”
Getting away from this concept of resumes as your life history and more as resumes as an immediate, clear, and well-organized presentation of how you understand the kinds of problems that your discipline is going to be responsible for solving and communicating how you’ve actually solved those problems before. That’s a little bit about resumes, but having a clear and consistent presence through Twitter and LinkedIn, and having your LinkedIn be linked to your Twitter, and having your Twitter be to your LinkedIn, and then going on LinkedIn and finding out what companies do you actually want to work for. You get to answer that question. You get to ask yourself, “What kind of companies do I want to work for?”
You do not need to just target the AAA companies out there. The PlayStations and the EAs and the Ubisofts of the world and the Riots. They are large companies, they have a lot of visibility and there are people who work in the game industry for six years and they still try to get a job at that company. You don’t need to work at Blizzard for your first job in the game industry. If anything, I want you to learn from me, and that my first job in the game industry was at a company called Beamable and I’d never heard of them. They were a technology startup that made the back-end software that Unity Game developers rely on for live services.
That company paid me as a starting salary, $80,000 a year with full benefits, a full-time employee not a contract. And that was at least 20 to 25 grand a year more than what PlayStation would have paid me. I think that having real clarity about what you’re looking for and understanding your discipline and having done the work and the research and established a community of peers of people who have the job that you want. So that they can help you validate whether or not you’re actually prepared for the role that you’re applying for because there may be certain aspects to the role that you’re looking for that you just don’t know because you haven’t had the job yet.
The game industry is really special because there’s a lot of people out there sharing knowledge and it’s all for free and it’s on YouTube and it’s in panels and podcasts and so, it’s like growing your awareness through community tools. Discord is a really special place. If you have a list of companies you want to work at, go to that company’s LinkedIn page, find five people that have the job that you want, and follow their LinkedIn account because when they have job opportunities present, they’re going to be sharing them and they’ll come up in your feed.
That’s an opportune time for you to reply to those posts and be like, “Hey, I’m actually really excited for this post, and I feel like I’m a strong candidate, I just wanted to let you know, I’m applying.” Any little edge that you can get to help people see your humanity beyond just, “Oh, here is another job applicant that did not read the job description.” I think being clear in your communication and helping reduce the friction that a hiring manager experiences when they have to go through a stack of 800 applications.
I think that people underestimate what is actually going on psychologically when you ask someone a vague question. When you ask someone a vague question, it’s actually really threatening for that person because when a person genuinely wants to help and then you set them up for failure by asking them a question that you haven’t even given them enough information for them to feel empowered to answer that question, it signals that really subconsciously, they’re going to feel like you don’t respect their time. But if you show up and you’re like, “Hey, I’m looking for jobs in production and these are the job titles that I’m looking for.”
There may be other job titles in this discipline that I’m not aware of. And if there are, I’d really love to know. And also I’m applying for these five jobs and here’s my notion page where I have the applications all cataloged. Do you have 30 minutes anytime over the next few months where we could chat on Zoom for just 30 minutes. I’d really love to get to talk to a person who has my dream job and learn a little bit more about what’s expected of a candidate.
How do we stay organized?
This is perhaps the single most important thing that has changed my life over the last two and a half years, is understanding how I can leverage tools like a calendar to work in my favor. So, if I’m looking for a job in games, I might be in a precarious situation where I don’t have a job at the moment. If you don’t have a job at the moment and you’re trying to get a new job in a new industry, that’s really challenging. For any person that’s in that situation, I would counsel you to get as much peer feedback as possible and get a strong understanding if you are ready if you have done the work, to demonstrate the skills that are translatable for that job because if you’re trying to get a job and you’re under a time crunch, that’s going to be really hard.
Even then, when you don’t have a job, I think I’ve gone through long periods of unemployment myself, sometimes as long as like six months or eight months without a job and it can be really challenging on the soul and can feel really threatening and we have grown up in this society where we are taught that our value is tied to our ability to produce and so it can be really discouraging for our spirit. This is why community is so important because there’s other people as well that are suffering through job loss or layoffs or all sorts of reasons or maybe the company folded or the project was canceled or their contract didn’t get renewed. This process of looking for jobs, getting good or getting effective for yourself at managing your time and attention and your stamina when you are going to engage in this research to have a clear understanding of what’s expected of you, that’s a really arduous effort.
The first thing I do with a calendar when it’s blank is I try to eliminate as much blank space as possible. If I’m going to sleep seven to eight hours a day, I’m going to make a recurring calendar invite. I’m going to block out that time. If it takes me an hour to wake up and get running in the day, I’m going to block off an hour after that sleep schedule. If I’m going to eat lunch, I’m blocking off that time. If I’m going to go get ready for bed and brush my teeth and shower, I block off an hour, and then before you know you start to eliminate that white space that is just pure ambiguity and you start to get a clear sense of what is your budget that you are working with and then maybe you have a day job. So, you put that on your calendar, get it into a recurring calendar invite so that you have to think about it.
This is where calendars come in really helpful, where if you know that you want to work at these 30 companies, maybe right now those companies don’t have an opportunity open for you. But what you can do is if you use a tool like Notion and you use a template like I have a template called Job Manager. If you use a template like Notion where that is a place where you can catalog where the communities that you’re going to be touching base are. You can put a link to your Notion in your calendar invite and block out a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there, make it recurring so you don’t have to think about it.
Then you have designated and protected the time required to do the research. If you do not protect the time to do the thing that you say you’re going to do, almost guarantees you as someone with severe ADHD, it will not get done or you will burn yourself out because you’re going to be spending three hours, four hours at a time. You’re not understanding that. You may be asking the wrong questions you may not be asking in the right places. You may be applying to jobs that you have no business applying to because you are lacking that peer review is a situation where someone who has the job that you want, who knows you as a person, can look at what you’re applying to and tell you this makes sense.
If you don’t get invited to interviews, that’s okay. But if you apply to the same level of job and you’re putting in the work to do the research for the company, and you’re getting that application that you’re going to submit and validated by people who have the job that you want and you’re still not getting the job, then that’s where it’s important to check in with your community to start talking to recruiters and start talking to people who hire for the job that you want. And that’s where you can start to build up that empathy.
I was saying before about how maybe this list of companies you want to work for, maybe they don’t have a job opening for you right then. But you can just set a recurring calendar invite that repeats once every three weeks. Once every three weeks you have an hour protected on a Saturday, a Sunday, or some other evening where you’re going to open up your Notion and you’re going to one by one, open up the career pages of all the companies you want to work for. Once every three weeks you now have a habit where you are casting your radar and checking, are there opportunities available?
That’s a great way to regiment your process so that you know that’s your protected time where you’re going to look for jobs. This hour is when you’re going to do research about your discipline and maybe you’re going to watch GDC videos or YouTube videos that talk about your discipline. What’s the minimum requirements? What are the minimum things that a portfolio for your discipline needs to communicate?
Every game developer has suffered through this process and some of us have had more privilege than others. But in general, like 9 and a half people out of 10 want to share with other people and they want to see other people succeed. But also, if you show up to them and maybe you meet with them and you ask them for advice, don’t let that be the only time you talk with them. You can end that conversation with a clear process of always asking these contacts for the opportunity to speak with them again after you’ve had time to work on your resume or after you’ve had time to research. And you can say, “Hey, would you feel comfortable if I reached out in a couple of months to get your feedback on some other job applications that I’m preparing for?” It’s a very open invitation and most people will be willing to make time for it, but it’s about providing a specific clear actionable task.
That’s where a calendar comes into play. If I meet with you, Thaisa, and I’m trying to get a job and you give me feedback and you say, “Okay, you can make XYZ changes on your resume.” Then after that call, I’m going to immediately plan out my calendar. I’m going to page forward throughout the next few weeks and I’m going to dedicate space throughout my day that is protected to actually do those changes. And then when I show up for myself and I protect that time, then that helps me with the follow through. Maybe I have another reminder for myself in five weeks to reach out to you. This time when I’m reaching out to you, I’m showing up as someone who has done their homework and I have demonstrated that our last call brought me value. Here I want to show you how I’ve applied the knowledge and wisdom that you’ve shared with me as a means of both demonstrating respect and gratitude for the time that you took to share your knowledge and also as a means to ask you clear and better questions. In that way, it gives both parties a sense of purpose.
For the folks who want to help another who is currently looking for a job, what’s the advice you would give to this person who wants to help?
I would counsel you to think about what is sustainable. That like creating a sustainable relationship and establishing clear expectations about what that relationship is and what it is not. That if you want to meet once a month for three months, give yourself some end date of that support so that encourages the person to make the most out of that time, instead of having it be this ongoing relationship where they can just, “I’ll do it later,” and they can kind of take it more casual. I think that people can make real progress, but it does take accountability, it does take negotiating what those expectations are.
When I first meet someone and we’re having a conversation to determine if we’re going to have a mentorship relationship, I tell them that, “Okay, so I want to help. Here are my goals. This is how I know I’m doing a good job. If I give you advice and you don’t follow it or if you are not teachable, that provides a lot of friction for me and it makes me feel like maybe you don’t trust me or you don’t respect things that I’m saying.” Sso I think vulnerable and transparent conversations with the mentee about what is in your capacity and establishing the expectation that like, “Hey, here are calendar invites. Please show up on time. Please don’t cancel at the last minute. Please honor the time agreement that you have made with me so that I can feel confident that I’ve planned my day to the fullest.” So, there’s a lot of ways that the mentor can encourage a positive relationship by being clear about their expectations to the mentee.
That’s the really beautiful thing too is that if you’re someone who’s looking for work in the game industry, there are people out there who look like you or have had similar shared life experiences with you. If you’re trans, there are dedicated communities where trans game developers support each other. If you are black, if you are Latinx, if you are a woman, there are communities, there are rich, vibrant communities that check in with each other each day. And so, you creating a consistent schedule for yourself where maybe at this hour on every Sunday, you’re going to show up to the community, you’re going to do the emotional labor of scrolling up and reading what were the last things people said and showing up to community events and making it clear that you are a person who is in need and what your needs actually are.
Even just getting things out of your head and stop being so disorganized and actually writing down your questions. Then every time someone gives you answers, write down their responses to that question and pretty soon you will find that you don’t need to ask that question anymore. You’ll also find that as you talk to people who have the job that you want, they may say things or give advice or suggestions that doesn’t mesh well with what you intuit is what you should do and that’s actually okay too, that you may find that you actually have a clear idea of what you need to do or you have a way that feels authentic and true for how you’re going to function. I think that’s also a really beautiful thing that comes out of these kinds of conversations is that other people may not have all the answers and that’s okay.
When you ask a variety of diverse people who all have the job that you want, you’ll start to fill in these contextual cultural gaps about what is this discipline? What teams do they work with? What tools do they rely on? What do interview questions look like for that discipline? If there were three top skills that discipline needs to have, what are they? Writing these questions down on paper and getting them out of your head is so important.
If you could turn back in time and talk to your 18-year-old self, what would you tell her?
Use a calendar. Just use a calendar. Just fucking do it, please. I resisted using a calendar for so long. I didn’t get it. Imagine this scenario where you are working at a day job, you’ve blocked off your sleep, you’ve blocked off your lunch hour, you’ve blocked off your working hours. You start logging on your calendar where your time is going. And then in three months, if you’ve marked out all the times that you’ve spent time doing research, maybe you find that you’re only actually doing like two to three hours a week of research and maybe you can afford to do more. Or maybe you’re doing too much and you need to dial it back or you need to take a break. But having calendars at all means that you get to have living visibility into where your time is going.
Calendars are so useful too because you can put address information in calendars so that at the last-minute people aren’t going, “Oh, where’s the address? Or where are we meeting?” It’s like, “No, it’s all in the calendar invite.” And if you’re meeting with someone who has a job that you want, you can put a link to Zoom in the calendar invite, and you can already put an agenda and a list of questions so that your conversation is focused and so that both parties feel safe and secure about what they can expect out of that conversation. And you’re going to have more impactful conversations. So, calendars are a beautiful way to be accountable for your actions.
Which resource helped you in your journey?
The thing that helped me the most was Notion. I struggled for a long time where I would be applying for jobs and the content that I was submitting for that job lived and died in the moment and only that employer had the record of what I submitted for my cover letter or the kind of language that I used in my resume. So, getting away from that and allowing you to preserve a historical record of what you are applying to and where you are applying, that’s where you can start to build up a real functional archive of not just what one job is asking of the discipline that you’re working for, but what are 30 jobs looking for? And then you start to develop a strong functional fluency for the kind of language that shows up in those job descriptions. After a certain amount of time, you can write your own damn job description for your discipline.
That’s been a really powerful tool for me, and it’s a tool that I use every day with my mentees where I encourage them that if you’re applying for a job, I need you to copy the text of the job description because that job description will not always be up. I guarantee you that after you’ve preserved the list of like 30 job applications over the course of however long that you’re applying for, pretty soon the act of applying to that job, that turnaround time is going to become quicker and quicker because you already have a clear understanding of what people are asking for.
When you preserve that job text, you’re also able to highlight and bold and highlight and comment on it and ask specific questions. It’s not all living in your head. So, really getting out of your head and using the digital tools that are at your disposal as a functional workspace, that’s what changed my life. That’s what’s changed the lives of my mentees. And I think that’s what can really change other people’s lives for work.
The thing I want to tell you is just nourish your stamina. Do not lose hope. It just takes one yes. It just takes one yes. And then you’re in. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that just because you got in once that you’re going to be able to stay in. It’s going to be a challenge to stay in. But it’s possible. And I cannot express how powerful it is to have the labor that you do to survive in capitalism align with the thing that brings you spiritual fulfillment. So, it’s worth it. I want you to remember that you are worth it.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx leaders the first Tuesday of every month. Check out our website Latinx In Power to hear more. Don’t forget to share comments and feedback, always with kindness. See you soon.
Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
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