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.