Becoming Gamesworkers: Diversity, Higher Education, and the Future of the Game Industry

Abstract

Higher education qualifications and the training of talent have become increasingly important in game industry and policy discourse in the United Kingdom. This heightened rhetoric and dedicated pots of funding referencing the significance of the games talent pipeline may represent the opportunity to cultivate greater inclusion in the workforce, which continues to be largely homogenous in terms of gender and race. Drawing on qualitative research with stakeholders in five case study institutions, this article highlights the ways in which the production of gamesworker subjectivity by institutions, instructors, and students hinders this possibility. Transparency about the exploitative working conditions and exclusionary norms of the game industry instead becomes the grounds for aggressive and conservative performances of labor bravado, foreclosing collective action, moral arguments about addressing inequalities, and creativity. The article closes by addressing the tension between team-based collaboration and competitive individualism as a site of potential intervention.

Student Perspectives on the Purpose of Peer Evaluation During Group Game Development Projects

“…Instead, learning opportunities should be structured [44]. However, this can be challenging to establish, especially for those contexts still tackling exclusionary norms [20]. Peer evaluation offers one form of structure which could accommodate these challenges.…”

Passion, Pipelines, and Precarity: Working Lives in Games From the Perspective of Higher Education

“…As a complement to these professionalizing or 'employability' activities, students also describe learning about the less favourable elements of gameswork such as crunch, gender pay gaps, curtailed career lengths, and harassment from news media and online discussions. Beyond these increasingly mainstream narratives, instruction within games programmes often overtly refers to the punishing realities of both 'getting into' the industry given the highly competitive nature of most open positions and the brutal expectations normalized for workers once they are in the role (Harvey, 2019).…”

“…The existing scholarship indicates that these formal sites of training tend to cultivate the still-largely young, male, and passionate fanworkforce on which games depend (Deuze, Martin & Allen, 2007;Consalvo, 2008;Chia, 2019). Furthermore, these contexts are vital in the formation of future gamesworker identities that are conservative, uncritical, and risk-adverse, despite pervasive discourses of creativity and innovation linked to them (Harvey, 2019). Vitally, however, the question of how these norms relate to shifting work realities has yet to be explored.…”

An empirical study of Q&A websites for game developers

“…The game development industry is growing (Koksal 2020 ) and hungers for experienced developers that can produce high-quality games (Harvey 2019 ). This high demand for skilled game developers needs to be satisfied by the training of new developers in game development-specific abilities, and those seeking to develop games need ways to acquire the knowledge they need to hone their skills.…”