Montreal-based developer Brie Code cites The Colonel's Bequest, a point-and-click adventure game designed by Roberta Williams and released in 1988, as the reason she got into games as a career.

The game stars Laura Bow, a college student and amateur detective investigating a Clue-like murder case in southern Louisiana. Code describes Bow as "a quiet but strong and inquisitive smart young woman."

Code has been circling the globe since late 2015, after leaving her position at industry heavyweight Ubisoft, where she worked on major action-adventure titles for seven years. While her original plan was to rent out her Montreal apartment and purchase an open-ended airplane ticket, she scaled her strategy back a bit – but not much – to attend international video-game conferences, with occasional stops home to unpack and reconnect with friends. So far this year, the self-described workaholic has been to Austin, Beirut, Berlin, Istanbul and Stockholm, to name a few.

Brie Code (Tru Luv Media)
Known for: Child of Light, Assassin’s Creed series
Working on: #selfcare
My choice is Quadrilateral Cowboy. More than any other game this year, Quadrilateral Cowboy surprised and delighted me. It did so on many levels – the storytelling was of course fantastic, and the gameplay played with convention, and there were just so many lovely little unexpected details. Must play.

Earlier this month, game designer and programmer Brie Code wrote an interesting opinion piece for GamesIndustry.Biz. Entitled “video games are boring”, the article questioned pretty much all our assumptions about what games are, how they work and what they can do. Her argument was that a huge number of people are locked out of playing games because of age-old conventions, mechanics and assumptions.

QUOTE | “There’s a psychological effect where an individual in a group of similar people will have fewer good ideas than the same individual in a diverse group. If there is any workforce full of people who are similar to each other, it is the video game industry workforce. We are mostly men, mostly white, and even more importantly, we are mostly gamers. Could it possibly be that maybe, just maybe, we could be missing something?” - Tru Luv Media founder and former Ubisoft lead programmer Brie Code, suggesting reasons why video games are in a creative rut.

Montreal-based programmer Brie Code has set up a new studio called Tru Luv Mediathat aims to make videogames with the help of people who don’t like videogames. The reason being that she wants her friends and people like them to care about games. These are people for who videogames do not resonate at all, mostly because they draw from the same cultural references time and again, use the same design principles, and are primarily made for people who already play videogames—there’s nothing there for anyone else.

"The change I've seen in the community over the last year is that more and more women are sharing their stories and creating connections and building supportive networks. A year ago I could only speak in hushed whispers about some of the more egregious incidents of sexism in my career for fear of loss of allies and influence, and now I can use them as examples in talks at schools and conferences to hundreds of people and build connections across the industry. 

"There is a greater awareness of the underlying causes of the lack of diversity in the tech and games industries and with that they can start to be addressed. It won't be an easy road and it is not fixed yet."

Brie Code worked for many years at Ubisoft Montreal, managing programming teams on games such as Child of Light, Assassin’s Creed III, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and Assassin’s Creed II. She was often on teams where she was the only woman or just the oddball in the group.

“It’s sad for me,” she said. “It’s also sad for the industry itself."

Elle est la programmeuse en chef du très beau Child of Light d’Ubisoft et a collaboré à la conception d’Assassin’s Creed. Brianna Code – mieux connue dans le milieu sous le nom de Brie Code – a un cheval de bataille : la diversité.

This week we sat down with Brie Code (@briecode), Lead Programmer at Ubisoft Montreal, who has also worked at Relic Entertainment and Pandemic Studios on the Assassin’s Creed franchise and games like Child of Light, and is helping to launch an exciting diversity initiative at Ubisoft Montreal.

Brie Code

Ubisoft's Lead programmer on Child of Light and a voracious curator. If she's recommending an article it's absolutely worth reading. "I want a game where the eyes look perfect and everything else looks like crap."

"What do women want?"

It's a question the game industry asks itself with great frequency, and it's one Child of Light lead programmer Brie Code answered in a presentation today at Toronto's final Gamercamp festival. Well, sort of.