In this monthly series we invite brilliant people from the game industry to curate their top 5 videos from the GDC YouTube archive.

For January, we bring you the top picks from Eline Muijres, producer at Mipumi Games, an independent game studio based in Vienna, Austria. She is a board member of the Games [4Diversity] foundation, an organization in the Netherlands focused on improving the representation of socio-cultural minorities in games and the game industry by organizing events.

Eline also worked on a number of games, most notably the IGF-nominated ballet game Bounden, and is currently working on a secret new game.

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A Geographer's Guide to Building Game Worlds - Kate Edwards

"I'm an admirer of Kate's culturalization work. In this talk, she explains the things developers should consider when building game worlds - and how seemingly harmless elements could be inappropriate or politically sensitive in other places in the world. Truly eye-opening."

Get Journalists to Cover Your Game: Lessons from Online Dating, Praying and No Man's Sky - Thomas Reisenegger

"Thomas Reisenegger from Future Friends Games shares his ideas on how to improve your game's PR strategy. Through analysis of the game market and game coverage, he provides a structural approach to pitch your game to media. Thomas regularly shares his marketing expertise on Twitter as well, so definitely check that out for the latest, up-to-date PR insights."

Everything I Said Was Wrong: Why Indie is Different Now - Liz England, Lisa Brown, Daniel Cook, Rami Ismail

"In this session, developers talk about bad advice they gave to others. What people said in the past may not be relevant anymore in this fast-changing industry. A good reminder to be aware of the context and time when advice was given (this goes for everything in this list!)."

Why Fashion in (Most) Games Sucks, and Why You Should Care - Victoria Tran

"This talk by Kitfox Games' Victoria Tran is about a topic that I was never aware of before: fashion in video games. Fashion is so much more than just nice clothes, and she provides a super interesting overview of fashion do's and don'ts when designing characters, as well as fashion's marketing power."

Brenda Romero: A Lifetime in Games

"I love to hear Brenda's talks: down to earth, witty, funny, and always inspiring. I originally wanted to pick the first #1reasontobe panel (GDC 2013) for this list, since it left a huge impression on me. Unfortunately that one's not available on YouTube, so I chose this talk because it's about a lot of similar things that were said there. What is it like being a woman in the game industry (spoiler: we don't know), and the importance of female role models."

URLs

Website | @ElineMuijres https://www.twitter.com/ElineMuijres  https://elinemuijres.com/   https://www.mipumi.com/   https://gamesjam.wordpress.com/  http://gameovenstudios.com/bounden/