With recent waves of layoffs, high-profile workplace harassment cases, and a notoriously short career length for gender minorities and people of colour, the transition of new workers into the game industry involves navigating a spate of barriers to equity and success that have been understudied in academic research. This panel talks about "The First Three Years", an ongoing longitudinal study of graduates of game programs in Canada and the United States, following the journey of 207 students as they move into the game industry.
Watch the highlights:
Meet The Panelists
Kenzie Gordon is a PhD Candidate in Digital Humanities and Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Her work examines gender and violence in video games and equity issues in the game industry.
Dr. Sean Gouglas is a Professor in Digital Humanities and Co-Director of the Certificate in Computer Game Development at the University of Alberta. He conducts research on university curriculum related to video game design and study, as well as the relationship between postsecondary institutions and the video game industry. He has consulted with government on tax and investment policy as it relates to video game production and has published reports for SSHRC and HEVGA on the state of the video game industry and higher education game programs.
Dr. Alison Harvey is Associate Professor in the Communications program at Glendon College, York University. Her research and teaching focuses on issues of inclusivity and accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on gender and labour in digital games. She is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context (2015, Routledge) and Feminist Media Studies (2019, Polity). Her work has also appeared in a range of interdisciplinary journals, including New Media & Society, Games & Culture, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Information, Communication & Society, Social Media & Society, and Studies in Social Justice.
Vishal Sooknanan is a PhD student at Western University in Industrial Organizational Psychology. Vishal studies issues of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace with a focus on the lived experiences of marginalized and minoritized groups and subtle discrimination. This work has been focused on various workplace settings including the games industry as part of the First Three Years project. His work can be found on Scholarship@Western and https://igda.org/dss/.
Dr. Johanna Weststar is an Associate Professor in the DAN Department of Management and Organizational Studies at Western University and cross-appointed to I/O Psychology and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Johanna specializes in labour and employment relations with a focus on the video game industry where she is interested in issues of workplace citizenship, representation and unionization, working conditions and the labour process, project management and occupational identity. You can find her work at Scholarship@Western, igda.org/dss and GameQoL.
Dr. Jennifer Whitson (she/her) is an Associate Professor in Sociology & Legal Studies and at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. She studies the “squishy” side of software development and has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork with game developers since 2012. You can find her work at: IndieInterfaces.com, first3yearsproject.com, and jenniferwhitson.com.
Key Terms
| Marginalized people in games programs: With a significant portion of students from graduate programs expressing that their identities and physical/mental differences have an impact on their careers, and the pronounced drop-off in employee satisfaction especially for minorities, games programs must do what they can to center marginalized people as they transition into the game industry. |
| The “meat grinder”: Issues of poor working conditions and discrimination and harassment in the workplace have helped create an idea of the games industry as a “meat grinder.” As games programs prepare students to enter the workforce, games programs should be careful not to reinforce this ethos and should raise questions about what can be done to change these issues in the industry. The “meat grinder” metaphor helps us see the problems in a different light than the “leaky pipeline” traditionally used to describe how game workers drop out of education and the industry. |
Summary
While the number of post-secondary programs in games has increased tenfold from 2010 to 2020, the games industry itself can be a difficult environment for graduates to work in. It’s not uncommon to hear about mass layoffs, sharp drop-offs in employee satisfaction, and stories of people, especially those in marginalized communities, leaving the industry quickly. Considering this, “The First Three Years” is a study on new graduates from games programs in Canada and the United States seeking to:
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Find out what happens to games program graduates in the first 3 years of being in the games industry
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Understand what kind of challenges grads face going from academic to work environments
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Assess claims made by post-secondary programs that they adequately prepare students for future success in the game industry
The study involved reaching out to over 200 graduates in post-secondary grad graduates in games programs giving them a preliminary survey for demographic information, followed by an interview. Each of these grads are then interviewed again every year for the next three years to understand their career trajectory. From the initial interviews, the study found that:
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47% of the participants believe their race, gender, or sexual orientation would potentially impact their ability to establish their careers in the games industry
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60% of the participants believed that their physical or mental differences have a negative impact on their career
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About 45% of participants expected their salary to be less than $50,000, indicating that they generally had reasonable salary expectations for new graduates
The researchers reached out to the participants again to check on their post-graduate experience after a year and found that:
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About 50% had found work in the games industry; some had found work in parallel tech sectors but others had not been able to find secure employment in the games industry yet
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Participants applied to an average of 46 jobs each, with 30% of the participants applying to over 100 jobs. The study found that the number of job applications sent was not actually a predictor of whether a participant would be able to have said job; Kenzie Gordon notes that “applying to 100 jobs does not seem to have guaranteed you will get a job any more than applying to two jobs.”
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About 25% of participants returned to a company they had previously done an internship with for a contract or full-time position, indicating that many participants used previous connections to find work rather than apply to jobs directly
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A large portion of the sample were making close to $30,000 a year
The presenters note that they are not trying to make a case that games programs and educators are bad as a whole. Many students had overwhelmingly positive experiences with their programs in preparing them for industry. The aim of the study is to find out what can be further improved within these programs to enable students to find greater success within the game industry after graduating.
Reflection questions: What should games industry employers be doing to ensure that physical/mental differences do not have a negative impact on career success? What can games educators and education programs do to mitigate negative impacts based on identity? Should games programs make more connections with employers in these parallel tech sectors if these organizations are where some their graduates are going? What other ways can both games programs and game employers help streamline job application process for new graduates?
Discussions
The First Three Years team led discussions in breakout rooms to further discuss the key themes of their findings so far:
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Networking & Industry Connections: Many participants either found it difficult to build tangible connections in the games industry or did not know how to. Participants discussed how this problem varied depending on location, faculty members’ limited connections to industry, and games programs’ own lack of built-in connections.
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Mirroring Industry Practices: Participants were largely split on the usefulness of games programs attempting to create ‘realistic’ game studio experiences to mimic industry practices, with some finding that it helped them feel prepared and others experiencing burnout. Participants suggested that programs can set up expectations for students and can help change ideas around game design by using lo-fi tech like Twine, learning about alternative work structures like co-ops, and discussing the importance of mental health in the game development process.
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Labour Issues in Curriculum: While almost all students were talking about labour issues in the games industry with their peers, games programs often addressed these issues indirectly and without providing possible solutions. Participants discussed how games programs should emphasize collaboration over competition and bring in speakers with more recent industry experience than professors to address these issues better. Some brought up the idea of the “meat grinder” ethos in the industry, which can sometimes be adopted by games programs that condition students into thinking that they should expect poor working conditions in the industry.
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Extracurricular Expectations: Participants noted that students were being told that their games programs school projects were not going to help them find work, but that their extracurricular projects would, and that artists found their class projects less portfolio-ready than programmers. One participant shared that 20% of a job applicant’s ‘value’ seemed to come from their school while the rest came from work experience.
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Experiences of Discrimination: Some students note that they did not experience discrimination in their programs while others note that gender and racial minorities were frequently spoken over. While some white male participants talked about the importance of allyship, others reported not being worried about discrimination since it didn’t affect them. In the breakout room, participants discussed how programs should have a greater diversity of faculty in terms of demographics as well as philosophies, and that faculty should include people with experience in issues of representation in the industry to facilitate these conversations.
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Program Promises: Some students reported feeling that their games programs had promised outcomes that weren’t necessarily delivered, and that many students who chose their games programs because of connections to companies or industry hubs were frustrated to find the connection wasn’t as close as expected. Participants discussed how programs should be more explicit about what industry they are oriented towards, and how students have found jobs through research networks as well as industry hubs.
Reflection questions: Given the popularity of the internship pathway for games program graduates, how much should internships and co-op experiences be embedded into games programs themselves? How involved should games educators be in pushing against the “meat grinder” ethos by pushing for unionization? What other ways can games educators advocate for a more just games industry?
Conclusion
The presenters stress again that the games industry is not a bad place, and that one of the common connections across the participants was that they were motivated to enter the games industry out of a personal love of games. Throughout the study, when participants were asked why they wanted to make games, “almost without fail they would say that it was because this was a medium they had loved since they were kids… they wanted to be a continual part of sharing that with other people.”
The researchers plan on continuing to interview more people who graduate from games programs and will work on sharing more papers on interim findings. To keep updated on new findings from The First Three Years, you can follow the project on Twitter and see the project’s official website at: https://first3yearsproject.com/