

In the end, you might only be attracting overconfident candidates rather than the best candidates for the job. The games industry is known for spec sheets that are needlessly intimidating, but all industries could think more carefully about what to include in a job posting. Of course, this is a generalisation (there’s no way to be exact about such a statistic, or to get a sample size big enough to be truly illustrative of every man and every woman) but the report does rely on reliable data, and suggests that on the whole, women are more careful about the jobs they put themselves down for, in part because they’re more likely to “play by the rules”.

“Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.” A report in the Harvard Business Review via Hewlett Packard revealed the following: Studies show that women are more cautious about replying to job ads. Talk of an office culture where staff were monitored and encouraged to work entire weekends was just the tip of the iceberg.Ī flexible (and realistic) approach to 21 stcentury working could only improve things. Perhaps even more galling were the revelations that came to life afterHouser’s comment. Dan Houser, lead writer on Red Dead Redemption 2, was reported to have said that the team had been “working 100-hour weeks” several times in 2018 to get the game finished. People of all walks of life juggle their jobs with other priorities, like starting families, but the 9-5 grind is a barrier to this.Īnd if you think the 9-5 is bad, that’s what you get when employers play fair. When they don’t, stories emerge like the one that came out of Rockstar Games. Not everyone has the means to commute to an office every day, or the desire to do so.

2) Consider flexible working for staffįar too often, an emphasis is placed on having bums on seats in an office. Ultimately, no matter what industry you’re in, diversity will only come if you give diverse voices the chance to be heard. But of the 14 writers credited with working on a game in the top 10, only two were women, and both were situated in a supporting capacity. In other words, narratives are being created to draw you in. Several of these games tell stories that are attempting to mimic the feeling you get watching a blockbuster movie, or a television series. Let’s put the 10 best-selling games of 2018 on the table. A very obvious reason for this is that writers are almost always white men. What we’re seeing are the same stories time and time again. 1) Give women and minorities a voiceĪgain, we’re framing this debate in the context of videogaming, but point number one could just as easily be applied to Hollywood.
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What follows are a series of tips the gaming industry would do well to heed but tips that apply to any business that’s struggling to diversify at its highest levels. But it’s high time it adopts a more progressive attitude. Gaming is a billion-dollar entity that’s growing in popularity and helping to shape culture as we know it. Or if publishers backed real artistic voices, instead of pumping money into the same sorts of stories we see time and time again? Five ways gaming needs to be more progressive Imagine if games actually represented the audience playing them, or if they told progressive stories for one and all, not simply concentrating on an imagined pool of “core” players. The ten heads of the ten largest publishing houses are all male.
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