DePass was a fan of tabletop and video games from her early childhood. She has written articles on topics of diversity, feminism, and race, for publications including Polygon and Vice, and provides diversity consultation services to game development studios and organisations. She is the programming & diversity coordinator for OrcaCon and GaymerX. DePass is the editor of Game Devs & Others: Tales from the Margins, an anthology of essays from games industry professionals and players who felt marginalized by the industry. Additionally, she is a 2020 Annenberg Innovation Lab Civic Media Fellow at USC. DePass is the co-developer for the Fifth Season RPG, based on N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has been featured in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Design/Play/Disrupt exhibit. Online, DePass goes by the username Cypheroftyr. She is a streamer on Twitch, where she has faced harassment. In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, DePass ran a charity stream to raise funds for The Bail Project—the stream raised over $140,000 USD in a single day. She also plays Dungeons & Dragons in the Rivals of Waterdeep actual play livestream, which features a cast of people of color. The show began in 2018 in Chicago as an official Wizards of the Coast production, broadcast on the official Dungeons & Dragons Twitch channel.
I Need Diverse Games
In 2014, DePass used the hashtag #INeedDiverseGames while responding to a statement from Ubisoft claiming that it would not be feasible to animate female characters for the upcoming Assassin's Creed game. DePass has said she is "sick of games where I don't get to be the hero". Despite pre-dating the controversy, the hashtag became particularly popular during the Gamergate harassment campaign, when it was one of several used in anti-Gamergate tweets. Tweets using the hashtag were primarily those sharing positive messages about a desire for increased diversity and broader representation in video games. DePass founded a non-profit using the name I Need Diverse Games in August 2016. The organisation, based in Chicago, aims to support visibility and access for underrepresented people within the video games industry, and is funded through Patreon and fundraising campaigns. One of the organisation's initiatives is to provide financial support and passes to video game conferences such as the Game Developers Conference. As of 2020, I Need Diverse Games was sending about two dozen people to the Game Developers Conference each year. The organisation also runs seminars on diversity at other games industry events, and highlights the work of underrepresented people.
