Vanessa Capito

email: capitov@gmail.com

Associate Producer at Beamdog

Vanessa is an Associate Producer at Beamdog, a local game studio in Edmonton. Her daily work consists of a mix of project and people management. While part of her work managing the project’s scope and schedule, Vanessa ensures development happens smoothly by empowering and supporting her team, navigating them through obstacles.

Her inspiration for working in the games industry started months before she was set to graduate high school where some of her game club members got a chance to visit the BioWare studio here in Edmonton after raising money for cerebral palsy. While completing a Bachelor of Communications at MacEwan University, she created and served as the MacEwan Game Development club president and was responsible for creating a successful annual conference called Press A to Start that would bring together the local game community. It was this dedication and leadership among other pursuits which landed her an associate producer role out of school.

A Woman in Games

The game industry has had a lack of ethnic and gender diversity over the last few decades. However, there has currently been a real effort to pave the way for more diversity and inclusion. Vanessa mentions that up until the previous studio she worked at, all her mentors were men. While she speaks highly of those experiences, she found being in a studio with women in senior positions added a new dynamic to her professional expertise. “It’s really nice to see people that look like you and have had similar experiences to you and in senior positions, even if they aren’t in the same discipline as you. It gives you something to strive for, it gives you more role models to look up to, and it means that there are nuances in your experiences that you can relate on that you might not be able to with some of them being a different gender, or a different skin tone, so its nice having the representation.”

Diversity and Inclusion

With the lack of diversity in professional settings, there is often an added pressure for minorities in contrast to their colleagues. “Often we feel this pressure to excel… you almost feel like you are going to be pointed to as an example whether you want that or not. So, if you screw up, you feel like you’re not just screwing up for yourself, you’re screwing it up for any other woman or person like you that might be trying to get to your position. Because people that don’t have the best of intentions can point to your screw up and say, ‘well, this is why we don’t want you doing it. Because look at what happened the last time we put a woman in this position, or a person of colour in this position.’ so even if your goal is not to be a role model, you still will be held up as one. Because when you succeed, it gets held up as another example, again.”

While having diverse teams will promote less of these pressures faced by woman or people of colour on a team or position, having more aware leadership and teams who can empathize with this point of view can go a long way in supporting diverse employees. “That’s why it’s really important to have different voices at your table, and why it's really important to uplift those voices into positions of authority because that’s how you can better diversify your teams and also ensure the people on your team want to stay because they feel that they’re getting the support that they need.”

Advice for other women

Vanessa believes there is still a systemic issue among hiring diverse candidates. “Until people are more willing to take a chance on a candidate that have all the qualities they are looking for, but not enough experience, we are going to be stuck like this.” A way of solving this is for women to build a network and support each other in finding opportunities. “I think that there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of uplifting women, other gender minorities, and people of colour into positions of authority. All we can do as we work to get to that point is support each other as much as we can. That can look like passing on job opportunities to others when they come across our radar and providing them with recommendations.”