At Bungie, we want everyone to feel that their identity is welcome. It’s one of our core values and manifests in the things we make, in the ways we communicate and interact with our fans, and crucially, in the way we run our studio. It means recognizing and welcoming different points of view and lifting up underrepresented voices. This is an ongoing concern and not something that is ever “complete.” Rather, it’s an effort that we strive to improve over time and through input from Bungie employees from all over the company. The latest example of this effort is the introduction of Inclusion Clubs as part of Bungie culture.

Earlier this year, the first Inclusion Club – Black at Bungie – was formed. With the goal of celebrating and uplifting Black employees at the studio, the Black at Bungie Inclusion Club has been on the vanguard of not only setting an example of what Inclusion Clubs can be for Bungie employees, but also helping to facilitate and navigate vital conversations during a pivotal moment in modern society.
Created and powered by Bungie employees, Inclusion Clubs (ICs) are groups that exist to connect those of similar cultural backgrounds and those who wish to connect as supportive allies. ICs are also a resource within Bungie, there to provide culturally relevant perspectives, advice, and ideas on everything from organizational culture to the products we create.

The concept of Inclusion Clubs came from the Bungie Diversity Committee (BDC), which is dedicated to improving upon Bungie’s standards for all matters of diversity and inclusion. While the BDC is dedicated to addressing broader issues of diversity, Inclusion Clubs were created to support the goals of specific underrepresented groups, and to provide employees with resources and budget that they can use to support the causes that matter to them.

Kareem Shuman is a technical dialogue designer working on Destiny 2. He’s been involved in a leadership role with Bungie’s Diversity Committee for more than two years and is a founding member and leader of the Black at Bungie IC. He says that, while the problems of racial injustice sometimes seem insurmountable, it’s groups like Black at Bungie that can make a tangible day-to-day impact.

“Racial injustice is a really big boss to try and fight,” Shuman said, when asked about the kinds of conversations that the IC has undertaken in recent months. “[So] let’s break it into chunks and look at the things we are good at and that affect us on a daily basis here at our work. What can we be doing better at Bungie? What can we be doing for our peers? What can we be doing in our game and the content that we make and that millions of people play around the world? Those are things we have control over, in some ways very directly and in some ways there’s systems in place that have been around for a while and we need to poke some people and some things to see if they can be improved.”

The launch of Black at Bungie preceded a groundswell in the ongoing discussions around racial equality and justice, both in the United States and elsewhere around the world. Following the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery earlier in 2020, cities in the States have seen protests and demonstrations demanding policy and societal change. Black at Bungie has been an important part in helping to inform and shape the studio’s public statements and actions, such as the support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Though the club is only a few months old, the group has been busy. They funded a sponsorship of the recent Game Devs of Color Expo (https://gamedevsofcolorexpo.com/), which was held online in September. In addition, the recent addition of the Be Heard pin and emblem on the Bungie Store came as a result of collaboration with members of the Black at Bungie IC. All profits from the sales of the pin and emblem are benefitting the Equal Justice Initiative (https://eji.org/), which is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive judicial punishment in the United States, to challenge racial and economic injustice, and to protect basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.

“The club is still building,” says Phyllicia Majors, Bungie’s office manager and a member of the Black at Bungie IC. “We’ve been talking a lot about how we can support other groups and show our faces and represent Bungie.”

“[I’m] very proud to see the Black Lives Matter pin,” Majors said. “I’ve seen it in the game where they put the [emblem] [and thought], ‘Wow, they’re standing behind what they say.’” In addition to Black developers, the Black at Bungie IC includes allies like Z Schleif, who works as a narrative lead in the studio. “I have no role in the day-to-day of the club itself except to observe, and to provide solicited feedback and support when requested by my Black peers,” said Schleif. “However, I strongly believe that being an ally doesn’t stop at the day-to-day of the club. As an ally, I am committed to helping create an actively antiracist studio culture at Bungie and to promoting active antiracism in the media we create.”

Looking at the future, Black at Bungie plans on furthering its mission to uplift members of the Black game development community and continuing the ongoing dialog around racial equality and justice, both in the game development world and beyond. Bungie fans who are interested in learning more can look forward to hearing more from Black at Bungie here on Bungie.net and on existing Bungie social media platforms.

Black at Bungie is just getting started in its ongoing mission of uplifting underrepresented voices, sharing diverse perspectives and championing a more diverse and inclusive game industry. In a momentous year, where social change has been at the forefront of so many people’s mind, Shuman says the very existence of Black at Bungie is an important step for the company to keep making meaningful changes in this space.

“I never thought we would see companies making official contributions to the Black Lives Matter movement like we did for [LGBTQ] Pride in previous years,” said Shuman. “But when injustice keeps stacking up, eventually it becomes too much for people to ignore, even those who are not themselves a target. Seeing so many stand up and protest, donate, and actively support these causes has been a huge inspiration. We have allies both at home and abroad and it’s a beautiful thing to see.”

Informa Tech, the organizers of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2021, are now accepting submissions to present lectures, roundtables, and panels for the Core Concepts section of the event, spanning Wednesday through Friday of GDC week.

The organizers of GDC 2021 would like prospective speakers to know that it is their goal to hold a safe and productive conference, and are taking comprehensive steps to ensure that is the case. As the first in-person/virtual hybrid GDC, speakers now have the opportunity to pitch remote presentations in addition to the traditional in-person format.

Proposals will be open from now until December 16 at 11:59PM PT. GDC 2021 will be the 35th edition of the conference, and is set to take place as a hybrid event, both physically at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, July 19 – 23, 2021 and alongside a robust virtual offering.

For the 35th edition of GDC, organizers are looking for Core Concepts topics for Wednesday through Friday of the show across these disciplines:

• Advocacy
• Audio
• Business & Marketing
• Design
• Production & Team Management
• Programming
• Visual Arts

For developers looking to discuss other topics, Summit submissions will open at the beginning of the new year. Summits cover content on Monday and Tuesday, and include the Indie Games Summit, the Narrative Design Summit, the AI Summit, and more. Submissions for GDC Summits, VRDC, and Game Career Seminar will open on January 12.

Those looking to submit Core content should first review the submission guidelines and track topics prior to submitting. They should also know that the submission process is divided into a three-phase system:

• Phase I – open call for submissions and initial advisory board review
• Phase II – submission declines, acceptances or conditional Phase 2 acceptances sent, pending the submission of additional requested materials for advisory board review
• Phase III – review of Phase 2 resubmissions and final acceptances and declines sent

The GDC Advisory Board will review and determine submissions based on the criteria of concept, depth, organization, credentials and takeaway. GDC organizers aim to achieve diversity of voice, experience and perspective. When considering who would be best to speak on behalf of your company or department, it is strongly encouraged to take this goal into consideration.

For more details on the submission process or GDC 2021 in general visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook or Twitter. The GDC Vault website – www.gdcvault.com – offers access to a wide variety of free past GDC  slides & session videos, and GDC All Access Pass holders and individual Vault subscribers get access to hundreds of video content from this and previous GDC event.

GDC and Gamasutra are sibling organizations under Informa Tech.

You’d think that game credits would be simple.

It’s just a list of names and roles, after all. How hard can that be to get right?

But credits are rarely simple, because neither is game development. And yet credits are an invaluable, underappreciated aspect of game making.

They’re our best — and often only — record of the human labor that goes into game development, serving not only as a reminder that games are made by people — sometimes lots of them — but also as a tool for developers to advance their careers.

For studios, crediting can be a tool for leverage; amid the recent furor over Rockstar’s bad labor practices, for example, we were reminded that the studio has long maintained a policy of not crediting people who worked on a game unless they were present when it shipped, to encourage the team “to get to the finish line.”

For historians and journalists, meanwhile, they’re a way to begin to peel back the layers. To uncover the stories of the people and companies behind the games.

Despite their importance, however, it’s not unusual for the credits published with games to be inaccurate, incomplete, overly vague, or even (on rare occasions) downright misleading. This is a problem with many causes, but one of the big reasons, Fun Bits CEO Chris Millar told me in an interview earlier this year, is simply that credits in games aren’t standardized.

“While they’re much better than they used to be we’re still not anywhere near the movie industry,” he said, “in terms of giving people credit for all of their work on creative endeavors.”

Indeed, the IGDA published the last version of its crediting guidelines back in 2014 — after multiple high-profile instances of bad crediting in the decade before, including an entire team of 55 people being wiped off the credits for Manhunt 2, and a years-long discussion about the importance of credit standards. But those guidelines are hard to find and with no union agreements in place they’re for publishers to follow (or not) at their own discretion — provided they’re even aware that the guidelines exist.

“[Atari not crediting game makers] was an attempt to dis-empower designers by removing the bargaining power associated with explicit authorship.”

In order to get a proper understanding of how credits can help, hinder, contort, and otherwise affect games history and archiving, and to start to puzzle out how much of a difference credits standardization would actually make, I asked four historians and a few developers about the issue. Their stories reveal a complex relationship between labor, authorship, ownership, and recognition in game development throughout the history of the medium — and no doubt long into the future.

A (flawed) record of authorship

“The fact that credits exist in games reflects human concerns about authorship and ownership with regard to creative production,” notes Laine Nooney, an assistant professor of media industries at NYU Steinhardt who has spent years researching and writing about the history of Sierra On-Line. The role of credits is to provide a factual record of this creative production but, as Nooney argues, they are also political.

“When Atari management made it policy to not list designers’ names on their games, this was an attempt to dis-empower designers by removing the bargaining power associated with explicit authorship,” she explains. It backfired. Warren Robinett hid his name in a secret room in 1978 Atari VCS game Adventure, and five other star programmers soon left in protest of the policy to start Activision — ironically taking power away from Atari as a result.

Warren Robinett’s famous hidden credit room, tucked away in Adventure

Games historian Jimmy Maher, who runs the Digital Antiquarian blog, points to other examples: “Radio Shack was also notorious for refusing to credit the people who made the TRS-80 games they carried in their stores,” he says. “Even at a progressive publisher like Infocom, there was a lot of debate over whether and to what extent the authors of the games should be highlighted, as opposed to the Infocom brand and the so-called ‘matrix’ of genres and difficulty levels.”

Some, Maher explains, thought their names should be on the box. Others “really couldn’t care less, and just wanted to make the Infocom brand successful.”

The historical relationship between credits and branding gets more intriguing as you dig deeper. MicroProse head Wild Bill Stealey — acting on a comment by the late comedian/actor Robin Williams about the games industry lacking recognizable stars — was responsible for Sid Meier’s name becoming a branding tool. The Sid Meier’s prefix soon came to decorate not only the titles of games that the Civilization designer led creatively but also the ones that he barely more than consulted on.

Maher adds that Origin’s Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire similarly included Richard Garriott’s name in the credits as an executive producer “despite having absolutely nothing to do with the game that I could discern.” (And meanwhile Warren Spector was left off the credits despite reportedly creating the concept, setting, and plot outline for the game.)

Politics gets in the way

Credits can be as much a reflection of internal politics as they are of actual project and company roles. While this gives historians interesting threads to explore, they must first become aware of which names are omitted or included because of politics.

This can result in history vanishing, as in the case of Arthur Abraham, who developed the prototype scripting language and game logic for Sierra’s King’s Quest and what would become the Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) engine. “Abraham was fired part way through the development of King’s Quest,” explains Nooney, “and his name was left out of the credits of every King’s Quest port (with the exception of the Apple IIe version), as well as every future Sierra release that used AGI.”

Because of this, it took several interviews and extensive archival research, spread across several years, for Nooney to discern that Abraham was a key figure in AGI’s development. “He died in prison before I could make an attempt to contact him,” she continues. “Had I known at the start that he was foundational to AGI, I might have been able to correspond with him earlier and shed some light on the development of King’s Quest — a game which is shrouded in misinformation about its development.”

Many publishers have (or had) set policies of not crediting developers for their role on a project if they leave before it ships. I learned while conducting interviews for an Assassin’s Creed oral history at Polygon, for instance, that several people who appeared in the credits under the title “additional” were in fact core team members who left before the game’s four-year development concluded. Starcraft‘s original designer Ron Millar was similarly relegated to “special thanks” in the game’s credits when he left to join Activision (which ironically now owns the entire company) while it was in testing.

Sometimes entire studios go uncredited for their work on a game. Games journalist and author of the Untold History of Japanese Game Developers book series John Szczepaniak notes that Namco does not allow anybody in Japan to disclose the names of staff who worked on any of its games. (Szczepaniak, however, has nothing preventing him from sharing those names outside Japan, and as such he has obtained a spreadsheet listing credits for the Pac-Land arcade game.) The original Castlevania was likewise published without credits, he adds. After extensive investigation, the best Szczepaniak and his colleagues can gather is that the main creator was Hitoshi Akamatsu — who they’ve been unable to contact.

Meanwhile, the practice of “white label” outsourcing — whereby companies are contractually-bound to keep quiet about their work on a game — has been around for decades. One Japanese studio, TOSE, reportedly works on 30 to 50 games per year and only receives credit for a handful of those (curiously, this only happens at the request of their clients — they have business reasons to want to stay anonymous).

[embedded content]

A clip of the Castlevania credits

Szczepaniak, who wrote about this world of “ghost developers” like TOSE for The Escapist back in 2006, believes there should be some sort of international regulatory body preventing this from happening. “Every staff member should be credited for their work,” he argues.

Even tiny indie and amateur games can wind up with names omitted entirely. “For small independent games, like fangames or freeware, one of the most difficult things is a total lack of credits,” says Phil Salvador, a librarian and digital archivist who runs a blog about little-known and forgotten games called The Obscuritory.

“Sometimes developers will only go by a pseudonym or a company name, or they’ll intentionally leave their name off. That’s an understandable problem without much of a fix. Not everyone wants to use their real name on all their work or to be associated with a weird game they threw together when they were 14.”

But when they do this — whether we’re talking commercial efforts made by professionals or non-commercial games by amateurs and hobbyists — they also cause a huge headache for historians, who might want to learn more about how/when/why a game was made or to build up a more complete catalog of games released. “Even minimal credits can be helpful for asking around and starting the research process,” notes Salvador. “With the companies often gone and their records presumably lost, anyone listed in a game’s credits is a potentially helpful source.”

Lost in translation

If it seems like a tough challenge to use credits as a jumping-off point to uncovering more of the history behind Western-developed games, spare a thought for the people digging into the Japanese industry. “You cannot even begin to imagine the Herculean task of disentangling Japanese credit listings,” says Szczepaniak. “And once you find a thread and follow it down the rabbit hole, you just bring up more questions than answers.”

“Naoto Ohshima said Sega wouldn’t allow staff to attribute their real name since it meant Sega had a stronger hold over the rights to any work created in-house.”

Like the other historians interviewed for this article (and in my anecdotal experience, nearly everyone else), Szczepaniak uses MobyGames as a key reference guide for checking game and individual developer credits. He says its quick cross-referencing capabilities are invaluable for research, and it’s been making great strides with both listing kanji for Japanese names and disentangling different people with the same name.

But it’s an incredibly complex problem. Any fully-accurate staff crediting system for Japanese games, Szczepaniak argues, needs to have support for native kanji, phonetic hiragana and furigana (phonetic symbols that appear above kanji), and correct romanizations of these symbols, plus a means of differentiating between first and family names (in his book, Szczepaniak chose to put surnames in ALL CAPS) — as Japanese convention puts the surname first whereas Western convention is to put it last, but neither culture is always consistent.​

Szczepaniak points to Naoto Ohshima as an example of problems with naming conventions. “There’s actually three people with the same phonetically pronounced name, all in the games industry, who all worked on different series at different companies,” he explains. “The Sega guy [who designed Sonic], another at ASCII who worked on the Wizardry series, and a graphics guy at Konami who worked on Silent Hill. And for a very long time a lot of websites mixed up the Sega and Konami, thinking they were the same person.”

Even Sega-16, one of the leading sources on all things Sega. This then had knock-on consequences. The misattribution spread to Wikipedia and then across the Internet.

“This misattribution is due to lack of consistency with regards to listing kanji for non-English names,” says Szczepaniak. “All three men have the same phonetic name, ‘Naoto Ohshima,’ but the OHSHIMA part uses different kanji for each of them — that is, different Japanese symbols, which have different pictographic meanings, but all sound exactly the same.”

It gets more confusing. “This problem can also be inverted, with different people having exactly the same kanji symbols, but in each case using a different phonetic pronunciation,” says Szczepaniak. Shigeru Miyamoto, for instance, was miscredited as Shigeru Miyahon in early NES games. And Szczepaniak adds that even Japanese people find this pronunciation issue confusing — to the point where many business cards use hiragana to explicitly state the pronunciation of someone’s name, and at least one developer, Masatoshi Mitori of Human Entertainment, asks that the kanji for his surname not be listed because his family name uses archaic symbols that nobody recognizes.

Then you have the lack of gendered pronouns in Japanese conversation, which means interviews that mention a colleague named “Suzuki-san” could be referring to a man or a woman with the surname Suzuki — and if it’s an archived interview then you can’t necessarily just ask for clarification. As if that wasn’t enough complexity, Japanese credits also have sometimes had nicknames in lieu of real names in them.

Szczepaniak explains that this was not always a case of programmers trying to be cool. Sometimes the publisher ordered it. “Sega was especially notorious for this, and Tecmo as well,” he says. “The reason was to ‘prevent headhunting,’ since companies were terrified that skilled programmers would be snatched up by rivals, and also to prevent later copyright claims for work they had done. Naoto Ohshima said Sega wouldn’t allow staff to attribute their real name since it meant Sega had a stronger hold over the rights to any work created in-house.”

The failure of credits

The reality is that credits, even as a snapshot, could never properly encapsulate the messiness of games history — the complicated power dynamics that form within companies and teams and between individuals, as well as the collaborative nature of the medium and the vast formal and informal support structures that lie beneath each company and project.

Roles are often fluid or informal. One person might start out on programming but finish as a writer or composer, or something else. When I was researching my book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, I learned that the final design of the very first Mac game, Alice aka Through the Looking Glass, owed as much to the informal requests and complaints of Macintosh marketing rep Joanna Hoffman (who was the best player in the office) as to the work of its creator Steve Capps.

Similarly, Salvador gives an example where the de facto director of 1994 game Millennium Auction “was actually the company’s vice president of business development, and they only received special thanks in the credits.”

Millennium Auction in action

Nooney says that informal cross-pollination of roles was common at Sierra, too, whereby people with specific titles pitched in with work on other aspects of a game but weren’t credited for that additional labor due to interpersonal politics.

This can go both ways. People might get a “thanks” credit for non-development labor, or perhaps benefit from a role title that oversells their actual contribution, then try to leverage that to get ahead in their career. Veteran developer Noah Falstein has come across the full spectrum of crediting issues during his 30-plus years in games, and he says he even once received a resumé from someone who said they’d worked on Sinistar — an arcade game project led and co-designed by Falstein.

“I didn’t recognize his name,” says Falstein. “I asked others I knew who had been at the company at the time, and it turned out he had helped load the games onto trucks, so technically it was correct, but had nothing to do with the role he was applying for.”

The truth of the matter is as Maher says, sadly, that because of their inconsistencies and lack of standardization across the breadth of games history, credits must be looked at skeptically. They are a wonderful resource, no matter what, but their failures to properly document the history of labor perhaps reveal a need for something more than just credits as a high-level document record.

“It would certainly be interesting, and helpful for future historians, for companies to credit the entirety of their staff,” says Nooney. “But I think a more provocative way to think about this issue is to recognize the limitations of the ‘authorship model’ as a basis for historical research on games. What else is worth knowing about the game industry beside who worked on a game?”

For Nooney — and indeed for anyone else doing macro-level histories of the different parts of the industry — internal organizational charts are often more valuable than credits because they provide insight into company-wide power relations. More valuable still, she says, is documentation of large corporate or economic events such as mergers, buyouts, layoffs, key hiring decisions that trigger internal re-organization, stock market crashes, and IPOs.

“We tend to miss this critical historical phenomena when we look at the game as our primary source of knowledge about the industry,” she concludes.

In short: Credits matter, and we need to get them right, but if we want to have a good understanding of the history of this medium, and the industries built around it, they’re actually just the tip of the iceberg. We need to do better, across the board, at documenting how we make and sell games.

This tutorial explains NumPy’s shape() function.

numpy.shape(a)

Return the shape of an array or array_like object a.

Return Value: shape — a tuple of integers that are set to the lengths of the corresponding array dimensions.

Examples

The straightforward example is when applied to a NumPy array:

>>> import numpy as np

>>> a = np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4]])

>>> np.shape(a)

(2, 2)

You import the NumPy library and create a two-dimensional array from a list of lists. If you pass the NumPy array into the shape function, it returns a tuple with two values (=dimensions). Each dimension stores the number of elements in this dimension (=axis). As it is a 2×2 quadratic matrix, the result is (2,2).

The following shape is another example of a multi-dimensional array:

>>> b = np.array([[1, 2, 3, 4], [5, 6, 7, 8]])

>>> b

array([[1, 2, 3, 4], [5, 6, 7, 8]])

>>> b.shape

(2, 4)

>>> np.shape(b)

(2, 4)

The shape is now (2, 4) with two rows and four columns.

np.shape() vs array.shape

Note that the result of np.shape(b) and b.shape is the same if b is a NumPy array. If b isn’t a NumPy array but a list, you cannot use b.shape as lists don’t have the shape attribute. Let’s have a look at this example:

>>> b = [[1, 2, 3, 4], [5, 6, 7, 8]]

>>> np.shape(b)

(2, 4)

The np.shape() function returns the same shape tuple—even if you pass a nested list into the function instead of a NumPy array.

But if you try to access the list.shape attribute, NumPy throws the following error:

>>> b.shape

Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#9>", line 1, in <module> b.shape

AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'shape'

So, the difference between np.shape() and array.shape is that the former can be used for all kinds of array_like objects while the latter can only be used for NumPy arrays with the shape attribute.

Do you want to become a NumPy master? Check out our interactive puzzle book Coffee Break NumPy and boost your data science skills! (Amazon link opens in new tab.)

References

• Implementation: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/numpy/core/fromnumeric.py#L1926-L1969

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