Tanya DePass
Tanya DePass, also known by her username Cypheroftyr, is an American journalist, activist and streamer. She is the founder of the non-profit organization I Need Diverse Games, which she established in 2016. Early life. DePass grew up in a poor family in Chicago. She has been a fan of tabletop and video games from her early childhood. Career. DePass 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 organizations. She is the programming & diversity coordinator for OrcaCon and GaymerX. DePass  is the editor of "Game Devs & Others: Tales from the Margins" (2018), 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 (2020). 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. She is also the creative director of the Cortex actual play series "Into the Mother Lands". "Fireside Magazine", for which DePass was the special features editor, was nominated for a Hugo  Award for Best Semiprozine in 2019. In 2020, the Diana Jones Award was devoted to "Black Excellence in Gaming", with the committee awarding two dozen black people in the industry specifically, including DePass. "Kotaku" named DePass one of their 4 "Gamers of the Year" for 2020. In 2021, DePass became a player in "The Black Dice Society", a Ravenloft themed "Dungeons & Dragons" actual play show on the official Wizards of the Coast channels. Her work to make the industry more inclusive has been highlighted in Game Changer, directed by Tina Charles, WNBA star & olympian as well as filmmaker. The short  documentary premiered at Tribeca 2021, as part of the Queen Collective; an initiative started by Queen Latifah, supported by Proctor & Gamble in an effort to get more Black women into filmmaking. She was also featured as part of BETHer's 2021 Juneteenth Programming on 19 June 2021. 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