“We’re making creative games for creative people, so there’s no specific target market,” says Siobhan Reddy, director at Media Molecule, the studio behind lauded games LittleBigPlanet and Dreams. “There’s no ages, genders, or ethnicities. It is people, it is human.”

For some, that might be a surprising approach. For decades, the “teenage-boy-in-his-bedroom” stereotype has dominated mainstream understanding of who games are for. But as Media Molecule’s whimsical output has proved, games have the potential for incredible variety. Media Molecule has carved a gaming niche centred around user-generated content, and its latest project, Dreams, is a game about making games. You could build a level filled with pianos, an elaborate first-person shooter, or spend hours sculpting the smooth yolk of your own fried egg – which other players can snaffle for use in their own projects.

“When I first went into a games studio the thing that struck me was all the different types of people,” says Reddy. “The animation area was full of movement, the sound area filled with people buried in headphones, and the programming area was quiet and intense. [It’s] like walking into a dance studio, and there’s a floor where students are learning jazz, and the next one ballet, and you get this sense that everyone’s there for a similar thing but they’ve got different ways into it.”

Reddy mused on how gaming combined technology, art, literature, theatre and more into one melting pot, and it was then she realised her studio needed to be a melting pot too. Only by having a team made up of men, women, different ethnicities, and all sexualities would Media Molecule be able to create projects that speak to gaming’s varied nature and audience.

To do so wouldn’t be straightforward. While 48% of mobile gamers in the UK are female, current statistics suggest that women make up just 21% of game developers globally. Across the world, development teams don’t reflect their player base.

But statistics can change with the right push, and so she set out to build a broad church to create visionary games, in a process that would involve much self-reflection. Reddy recalls how in the studio’s early years meetings would often last hours, so she’d ensure her small team was well-fuelled. As everyone settled in their chairs, she took it upon herself to carefully pour steaming tea into nine mugs.

Until the day she didn’t. There was no real reason, she just decided not to. There was a pause as the rest of her mostly male team waited patiently for her to perform the daily ritual. “I got a bit annoyed about it,” Reddy remembers. “But then afterwards I realised they had never expected me to pour the tea. I had set this behaviour in motion that I had to change.”

This got her thinking about other mundane “invisible work” that the women around her are silently assuming – picking up the phone, answering the door – on top of their contracted jobs. As Media Molecule grew and Reddy hired her producers, who were mostly women, she frequently told them not to “pour the tea” as a way to ensure they didn’t take on labour that could be shared among the team. “It’s really important to figure out why we behave the way we do, and to understand it doesn’t have to stay that way,” she says. “Behaviour is malleable.”

Thirteen years later, Media Molecule stretches across two floors. Its 74 employees pick their way around potted plants to get to their desks strewn with Funko Pops, Lego bricks, and papercrafts. By the time you get to the entrance countless awards can also be seen, including eight Baftas. It’s neither a masculine nor feminine space – it is simply “creative”.

It may sound like a utopia but any woman who worked in gaming throughout Gamergate is aware how fragile peace can be. The 2014 online movement ostensibly founded to protest poor “ethics in games journalism” became a smokescreen for systematic abuse of women in the industry. Female developers were doxxed with their addresses posted online, their social media barraged with rape and death threats, and some even left the industry altogether as a result. This was the aim of Gamergaters, who sought to “make games great again”; a return to traditionally male-marketed games, where conversations around sexist tropes, artistic equality and progressive storylines didn’t exist.

But Reddy is pragmatic. “Gamergate wasn’t necessarily about games,” she says, explaining that it was simply a reflection of other societal conflicts and tensions. Indeed, Steve Bannon has said on record he used lessons from Gamergate as part of Trump’s presidential bid.

Reddy believes the games industry isn’t a separate satellite where things such as Gamergate play out removed from the mainstream. Instead, it’s a petri dish, a microcosm that’s fed by wider culture. To truly remove the barriers facing women entering the games industry (“game experiences not representing women, Stem subjects not being encouraged, and a lack of role models”), we need to first examine society’s behaviour, and how it affects games. Who’s pouring the tea? And why?

As #MeToo galvanised change, the games industry was also driven to action. “The experience of Gamergate stirred me to make positive changes where I could,” says Reddy. “Since 2015, we have seen greater collaboration across minorities. Women in games groups, BAME in games, mentorship programmes, discussions about representation in games, or talking at conferences.”

One of these positive steps at Media Molecule is its hiring process. The studio is 33% female, and Reddy is emphatic that it is not enough. “The funnel coming in through school and university is small.” If the studio wanted more women to work there, it would have to figure out the behaviour problem: why aren’t more women graduating with the skills needed to work in games? She went right back to the source. Media Molecule runs frequent tours for schools and refuses to let classes in unless they have a 50/50 gender split. Students get to meet female role models within games, and some have bagged work experience placements from it. By demystifying game development and presenting it as a valid path for women, these tours plant a seed in girls’ minds that might grow into a career.

“Maja and Emilie have been a fantastic influence on the whole studio,” Reddy says of the two female interns who joined the art team that was, at the time, mostly male. “The characters they built were women. They didn’t necessarily set out to build them, they just did. In the same way that a lot of our male employees build male characters – they don’t do it to be annoying, it’s people creating things from their own experience.” While everyone can pitch in and give feedback, in all industries there’s greater nuance when “women design women”, says Reddy.

Ultimately, that creative freedom is the goal of Dreams. Men and women, young and old, can use the platform to create whatever they want. “We have to be OK with the fact that people will make messy choices,” Reddy laughs. “Like us!” Games are amorphous and shifting, and Media Molecule has created an experience, a tool, to reflect that. If Dreams feels hard to define, that’s because it is: it’s a place where gaming is whatever it means to you.

“There are so many challenges ahead of us,” says Reddy. “But learning how to make a game is a way of bringing people together, and that’s one of the aspects of games design we forget.”

“More voices don’t push out the people of the past, it just means that we make more interesting things, and that’s the exciting bit.”