Episode 038: Alison Harvey
Dr. Alison Harvey of York University studies digital games from a communications and culture perspective. Her research looks at issues of inclusivity, justice, and accessibility in digital culture. The multibillion-dollar electronic games industry blurs the line between work and play, exacerbating the exploitation of workers. This makes it an ideal site for Dr. Harvey to study contemporary employment practices.
Transcript
Cameron: My guest today is Dr. Alison Harvey, from York University’s bilingual Glendon campus. Dr. Harvey studies digital games from a communications and culture perspective. Her research looks at issues of inclusivity, justice, and accessibility in digital culture. I hope you enjoy our conversation.… Alison, welcome to the podcast!
Alison: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
Cameron: I’m glad you’re here, too. This topic is fascinating to me! You look at the digital game industry and the experience of gaming, the experience of being in the gaming industry – all these different aspects. And, you know, as an older guy, I still think of computer games as something we did as teenagers and it was just entertainment. It’s become big business and it’s become an important part of the culture. Tell me what makes this such an interesting place to do academic research.
Alison: You're not alone in having that idea about games as maybe a subcultural interest, maybe something purely a leisure pursuit, but as you mentioned, and a lot of times, people in my field will say this, the reason to study them is that they are a bigger media industry than music or film. Their profit margins are astronomically high and they're growing every year, too, as we see that it's become a more popular, ubiquitous activity. So, I mean, I guess that's one reason alone, and a purely economic one. But my interest is from a different standpoint. It comes from the work of Nick Dyer-Witheford and his collaborators across two different books where they did their in-depth study of the video game industry in the 2000s and made very compelling argument for how the video game industry acts as a sort of, as they say, “canary in the coal mine” for trends and how labour is being organized. And we've seen shifts in how employees are treated, how work is coordinated in this kind of economic time that we're living in. And a lot of those shifts were visible and happening in the game's industry from an earlier moment. So studying the games industry can be really interesting for making, maybe, predictions, or things to look out for in the future.
Cameron: Tell me about some of these labour practices that you see in the gaming industry that are now more widespread: the gig economy, the immaterial labour that people give to the gaming industry, both paid and unpaid, this idea of being “passionate” about your work. All of these things are kind of commonplace, particularly for me teaching in an MBA program, we hear this stuff trotted out all the time: “you’ve got to be passionate about your work, you’ve got to be an entrepreneur of yourself,” you know, and you’re seeing a lot of the origins of this stuff in the game industry.
Alison: Or yeah, the perfection of some of these strategies for engaging labour. You can see it from the early days. I think it's very common to talk about doing what you love now and the passionate labour, as you said, this kind of affective connections to paid work and unpaid work. The side hustle, getting by, as doing work like “influencing” and things like that. But you saw it happening very early on in the games industry, pulling on the consumer passion that was cultivated, and articulating that around work to justify what in the games industry has been well-known to be quite exploitative labour practices, like this phenomenon of “crunch.” I think we see that in other industries, but it is almost trademarked in the games industry, working under immense pressure for timelines, tight deadlines, innumerable hours in a day to meet those deadlines. And that being a regular part of the production practice, even though we know that you have to deliver games by a certain deadline. But it’s just the way that games are made. It's normalized that, at a certain point, people will have to give all of their time and well-being to finish that project. And the justification is, “But you're doing what you love! You're doing what you love, you're working on the thing that you're most passionate about.” And so that narrative, I think, is really interesting. And of course, it is tied to those other things that you talked about – the precarity of labour, the individualization of risk, and getting at the unpaid labour bit, too, right? Because a lot of work in the games industry has that dual role. You think of people working in the industry itself, but a lot of people who got into the game's industry historically have come from the modding community, which is unpaid work, making modifications of games – whether it’s new characters, new maps, new levels, or even full conversions, which is making a game from another game. And that work is obviously unpaid. And it very much bolsters the game's universe – the product that's being made by that company – by circulating it within the games community more broadly. And there were these stories told, almost these urban legends of, “Well, if you do that, it could get you into the games industry. It could get you a well-paid job.” And there were these people that were held up as examples of that storyline. So there's this real incentivization of doing free labour for the games industry as a way in, as well.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. And it kind of mimics the idea of the heroic entrepreneur starting up a company like Steve Jobs at Apple or Bill Gates at Microsoft. The idea that they would work passionately, tirelessly, for years and years, and suddenly it would all come together. And to translate that model to people who don’t have a share in the company, right, who are simply employees, and to get them to believe that if you contribute to this company, too, you’ll be a part of something … because it’s almost like a religious expectation around this, a religious mindset around this. Belonging to something.
Alison: Yeah. Yeah. Like the cult of the company almost, right? You see that a lot in hiring practices for working in a given company. In the job postings, it'll say things like demonstrate your passion for games, demonstrate your culture fit for this company, demonstrate specifically your attachment to our products in our services.
Cameron: Yeah. Demonstrate your willingness to work for less that what you’re worth.
Alison: Yeah. And that's why it's really important. I think people think of work in the games industry as well-paid, and it's really interesting because the kind of skills and background that people bring to doing this work, it's very, very specialized work. If you were doing that job in an industry like FinTech, for instance, you'd be getting paid much more. So the games industry isn't as well paid as people like to think it is, but it's paid through the idea that this is fun work, or this is passion work.
Cameron: Right. And your skills are incredibly obsolescent in a very short time frame as new programming languages come out and new programming platforms come out. The skills that you had before can often be translated but you’ve got a lot of learning to do to keep up, and if you don’t, you’re out the door.
Alison: And that's the same across games companies, because they all use their own specialized tools and technologies. You might think like, "Oh, you just need to learn Unity” or whatever it is, whatever package. But a lot of... Because I did some work with students in games university programs and they would learn something there, but part of onboarding for a games company is learning the very specific technologies and tools they use. And, so yeah, that movement can be difficult because of that required onboarding training.
Cameron: Your research looks at the intersection of this technological industry and gender, feminism, those intersectional components. How do these kinds of labour practices play out differentially for people who are not straight white males?
Alison: Yeah. And when I said I got interested in the games industry because of how it acts as that canary in the coal mine, I was looking at the time specifically at questions of inclusion around gender. At the time, I was looking at actually people who play games. It wasn't the games industry that initially pulled me in, but looking at exclusionary patterns in games, which is that we see games becoming more mainstream, more popular, more ubiquitous. And the division on gender lines is almost 50-50, but that doesn't map onto our cultural understandings of games, the way that games are designed and developed or marketed. And that really drew my attention to the games industry, which is strikingly homogenous despite its growth, despite its global nature. You do not find a lot of diversity in the workforce of the games industry, historically. It tends to be highly educated white or East Asian men that work in the games industry, particularly in creative and technical roles. Of course, there's lots of occupational segregation, so if you include other kinds of roles like management or human resources or those kinds of things, the numbers shift a bit, but when you're getting into who's making the thing, that's a very homogenous place.
Cameron: Let’s turn to some of your papers that you’ve done on this, and one of them deals specifically with this idea of the technology platform that games are written with. It’s called, “Twine’s revolution: democratization, depoliticization, and the queering of game design.” And that’s from 2014. So Twine is a game development tool?
Alison: Actually, the people who created that tool don't define it as a game development tool, but they're very open to different uses for it. In a way, it probably would be most reminiscent of... Do you remember these Choose Your Own Adventure Books when you were kids?
Cameron: When my kids were kids.
Alison: Ah. But you're in a dark cave, do you go left, or do you go right? And then you make those choices and there's a branching experience that comes from your choices. That's the very basic level of Twine. That's how it works. I became very interested in this because when I started looking at game development and thinking about how could the industry become more inclusive or how could the practice of making games become more inclusive, I found there was quite a lot of policing going on around, or gatekeeping going on around, appropriate tools for making, and appropriate methodologies I suppose or processes for making. And the places that I was studying, these community groups that were attracting women and people of color and people who'd been historically excluded from the games industry because of that homogeny that I mentioned, they were coming to games from more radical back... Well, they're coming to games from backgrounds that don't really map onto a scientific or technical trajectory, like hardcore games programming, necessarily. But they were coming from a range of backgrounds and thinking about games in very different kinds of ways. And from that making really interesting and almost avant-garde and experimental kinds of games. And that had partly to do with their disciplinary background. I'm thinking of people who are fiber artists and coming to games. But also, it was these tools that they were picking up, which were much less technologically inaccessible, and that could be picked up and used by someone who... For instance, like me, have no coding ability, whatsoever. I mean, if you get into the coding, you can make Twine do a variety of more complex things. But at its base level, if you can write, you can use Twine. And at the time that I was looking at these community groups that were trying to get more women into making games, there was this growing community of people who were talking about Twine as a radical tool of inclusion. And they were primarily trans women that were evangelizing Twine and talking about the potentiality of a radically different kind of game scene. Not quite independent but something actually beyond that, like I said, more of an avant-garde of games, something that we haven't really seen so far. We talked a bit about the mainstream AAA, like those megaliths of the global games industry. There's of course also a variety of independent companies where you might see a different kind of profile maker. But a lot of times they're still trying to play with that same industry that same... Get onto Scene, make your game visible, sell a lot of games, make it big – the “auteur” discourse, these people whose names we know that create these very recognizable texts. This scene or community was so different from that, it's way outside of that kind of discourse. The purpose was not to get rich. The purpose was not to get famous. The purpose was to radically open up who could make things and have their voice contributing to conversations.
Cameron: Is this a little bit like fan fiction in the Star Wars or Star Trek universe?
Alison: I'm not sure if it is, because I don't know if these people would be necessarily fans. I don't think any of them are huge lovers of those big... I just keep thinking about like FIFA and Call of Duty and stuff. The things that they're making are so different. A lot of people call them “personal games,” so maybe it's like thinking about the publishing industry versus journaling. But of course, in digital culture have opportunities for dissemination, and sharing, and getting our personal texts out in the world in a very different way. So it was about making, but it was also about these online spaces for sharing and talking about those texts as well.
Cameron: You wrote that these Twine games avoid a lot of the norms and assumptions of “normal” digital games. Things like winning conditions, having opponents, balance and challenge in the game experience. All of these things get kind of loosened as part of the game experience.
Alison: Yeah. I guess it's like with every media form or artistic form, there are formal kinds of definitions that go into like, what makes it a thing, a normal or good thing or not. And this kind of creators were very much breaking or challenging those limitations and definitions. And I think for a very political point, like how we define games as about competition and win-lose conditions, that's only one form of play. If you look at the philosophy of play, the very early texts that talk about playing games, there are other forms of playing games. There's chance and there's competition. There's also, for instance, role playing. And there's also, for instance, the feeling of disorientation and the pleasure of losing one's body in space. So the idea that games only have to look one way or be experienced one way is actually I think an industry construct that we've come to expect. But lots of people who don't play games who are turned off by games, it's very much that that they're reacting to. Like, I don't really enjoy picking up a digital gun and shooting digital enemies. I'm looking for a different kind of experience. And the kinds of games that these people were making were the kinds of things that would make you cry, the kinds of things that are so absurd and hilarious that there is no ending to it. It's about the experience of being inside. It's games that you weren't really sure what was going on, but it was like poetry, almost, that you're just going along with the words and trying to understand what world you're in. And there are games about very serious topics like depression. What is the experience of living with depression? There's no win condition on that. It's about just trying to understand the kind of greyed-out life that you can lead when you're living with depression.
Cameron: Right, so when you use the word “queering” in the title, you’re not simply talking about being more inclusive of gender and sexual orientation. You’re also talking about something deeply counter-hegemonic, something that is actually subversive about the concept of games and about the game industry.
Alison: Absolutely. It's very much from Jack Halberstam's work, The Queer Art of Failure, which is to argue that to fail is a very powerful response to capitalism because there's such an emphasis on the win condition, the succeeding, the leveling up. Yeah. It is very much a political statement. But of course, I don't want to overlook that the people who were really leading this movement were the most precarious people in, mostly they're living in America. Like trans women and trans women of color. And they weren't making any money doing this, too. So I do have a tension in that paper where I'm talking about there's nothing really radical about people being poor.
Cameron: Let’s talk about your second paper, This is from 2016. The title of it is, “When passion isn’t enough: gender, affect and credibility in digital games design.” This was one that you co-wrote with Tamara Shepherd from University of Calgary. You’re looking at the gendered game industry, you’re looking at labour and consumers. You’ve got a very interesting way of approaching this, because you’re actually getting involved with the participants in the research yourself. Can you tell me what this paper is about and how you went about gathering the data for it, or researching it?
Alison: I'm afraid, Cam, that it's not a very short answer. Is that okay?
Cameron: That’s fine.
Alison: Okay. As I mentioned before, for my dissertation, my doctoral study, I was doing a traditional interview observation-based study of play in the home. So to suddenly be involved in a community group that is about game making, it's a big leap. But that happened actually initially in the Toronto context where I just happened to be invited to a dinner where I met someone who was running this community organization here in Toronto, the Hand Eye Society, which was for independent game makers. And they were running a series of incubators to try to get diverse people into making games. And by diverse, I mean, they did one for comic book authors to make games. And one of them was called The Difference Engine Initiative specifically to get women into making games. And I was talking to this guy, and it was a man. And I was like, "Well, how are you going to be able to really understand why these people were excluded to begin with?" And he was like, "You're right. Maybe we should have..." He called us embedded researchers participating to get that greater understanding of where the participants were coming from. So I did that with my colleague, Stephanie Fisher, and that was the origin of the paper that you're talking about. We did those two, six-week incubators where we were participants, as you said. And that was a very interesting thing because I am actually really bad at making a game. I couldn't make a game myself, but it was a really incredible experience for getting to know people in a much deeper way than an interview or participant observation would be like because you're in their shoes. Actually, you're worse off than they are because they were all so much more talented and skilled than I was. And what we got from that was, we had been put in there from the perspective of the organizer to assist in the organizing. But when we got there, we heard from the participants about what they were not enjoying about being in an incubator. The way that they were being treated as participants, as though they didn't have any skills or background, as though they were completely naive to creative processes, and it was a top-down model. You'll use this particular tool to make your game. This is how you'll talk about it. This is how you'll present it. Not out of any ill will, but there was like a real blowback from the participants. And what we learned from that is that the best way to do research is if there's a problem that's brought to you by a community. And that was just happenstance, but we heard a problem there. And I mean, I won't go into too much depth, but it did completely change how the second version of that incubator was run. And it did result in the formation of a community group that still exists in Toronto called DMG Toronto, previously Dames Making Games Toronto. And based on our work with that, seeing the formation of something more permanent than an incubator could be, we were thinking, what would it be like if this model could go elsewhere? There's no reason for it to just be a Toronto-based initiative. There's huge game industry activity, for instance, in Montreal. And so, there was a bit of funding and we used that to give money to some people in Montreal to say, "Would you like to do an incubator and see if that would take off somewhere?" And it did because the conditions were absolutely right. There was willing people to run those activities. There was a lot of interest in games in Montreal. There was a lot of people who were interested in participating. So that became Pixelles, which has now been running for 10 years. And the paper that you mentioned was us doing participant observation of the first incubator run by Pixelles. So this new organization in a different city, and trying to get a sense of how people talk about the game making process. And the limitations I think of community groups in a way. Not that -- I love community groups and we'll talk about that more -- I don't think there's no point to them, but they really come up against a lot of barriers in this culture of gatekeeping around what appropriate game making is.
Cameron: The word or the notion of “affect” comes up a lot in this paper, not just in the title. You talk about the whole notion of labour in the game industry as somehow paralleling but excluding the caregiver role of women. If you think of this notion of the creation of affective experiences in the game industry, you’re trying to create this emotional, immersive experience for the gamer. And looking after people’s emotions is something that women do all the time in their role as mothers and in their roles as caregivers to elderly parents and so froth. And yet there’s this kind of barrier, this separation between what’s allowed to be affective labour in the gaming industry and who is allowed to fulfill that role as a game developer.
Alison: Yeah. Because there's almost like “correct” affects. We're supposed to be passionate. We're supposed to be committed to fun, but at its core, these activities are feminist. Not everyone who participates in them identifies as feminist. There's also conflicting definitions of what feminism is and how to live it or enact it in your practices. But even just the very idea that like, we are going to aim to get more women, or now Pixelles says marginalized-gendered people, into making games, whether that means they go into the industry or they're just making games as they want to in various formats. For some people, that is the incorrect affect. That to believe that something needs to change.
Cameron: Tell me more about that.
Alison: I guess it's the different resonance of affect in participating in games. And the reason why I was mentioning the feminism element of it is that feminists get coded as angry, as wanting to tear something down, as wanting to undo all the pleasures that people have for something. And this became like a real moment in games culture around 2014, where there was a coordinated harassment campaign against people who are participating in Twine game making, for instance, and people who were participating in these community initiatives. And it was to do, at its core, with what is the correct... Well, not at its core, but one of the themes that was really interesting there was, what is the correct affect of attachment to games? And it's a really narrowly defined thing for some of these people. And any other kind of approach is seen as a threat to the identity or a threat to the culture, rather than, I know, something to be happy about in terms of widening accessibility. It's seen as potentially threatening those things that people love and taking them away. Although I've seen no evidence. These games continue to be made. There's still quite a lot of investment in those, what I've seen as core hegemonic types of games and gamers, but there was a real fear that these kinds of initiatives had the wrong kind of affective connection to games.
Cameron: An ironic attachment to games is profoundly threatening to people who are extremely committed to it and have their identity bound up in a game.
Alison: Yeah, yeah. Or even one that is like, "This is fine, but it maybe could be better." I would say that's quite serious, it's not even ironic. Some of the people who participate in this absolutely love games. There's no ill will, it's just this desire to do something different. And to get back to the question of industry, to also potentially organize games labour in a different way. So some of the people who are involved in Pixelles have gone on to form their own game studios, including cooperatives, so a different model of labour. And some of them have been involved with the games labour movement that has sprung up in the last couple of years. So that's not part of those organizations, specifically. They're not labour organizations, but there is an interesting parallel or symmetry between conversations about exclusion and conversations about exploitation, I think.
Cameron: The third paper that we’re going to talk about is called, “Making the grade: feminine lack, inclusion, and coping strategies in digital games higher education.” You just mentioned the incidents in 2014, I think you were referring to the Gamergate harassment campaign that went on. Can you tell me first of all about Gamergate and then how your paper ties into that?
Alison: I guess, this is like a spectre that underlies probably a lot of people who work in my area. Because it was a very visible moment of something that happened all the time in games, which is the outright online attacks of women who participate in games, overt statements of exclusion and denial of their relevance to the area and to the culture. And the thing about that, it was very interesting because it brought it to widespread attention and people understood that there was stuff going on in games. But I think it's important to note that kind of overt sexism, and misogyny, and racism, and homophobia, and such, is not the only form of exclusion that happens in games. And that's what the paper that you mentioned does talk about. Because what I saw when I was doing all this work on communities and the kind of making that happens outside of games and people getting into making games is that there's still this ongoing discourse, including around Gamergate, about “these are not real games.” The flash point at the beginning of Gamergate was about this game that Zoe Quinn had made in Twine called Depression Quest, that I mentioned earlier. So there was also this element of, “You are not doing it right. You're not participating in the correct way. You're illegitimate as a game maker. This is not a real game. This isn't doing what I want a game to do, and you're not contributing to games in the way that you should be.” And part of that was also about this technological credibility. Remember I mentioned earlier that you don't need to have coding abilities to make Twine. And there was this real, even non-harassment kind of discourse going on at the time that these are all well and good, but they would never get women into the games industry because what you need is computer programming or this kind of coding or really high tech skill set, which belies the fact that in games there's, for instance, art and music and other kinds of creative skills are required. So this is why I started looking at formal games education. Because I was like, if people are saying that the problem is women are in these informal spaces, I'd like to know what's going on in the growth in games, formal games programs in universities and colleges. It's a huge market. A lot of universities think this is a great way to make some money. There's a lot of people who are interested in games, a lot of young people. We’ll get them into our programs, and they'll be taught, and they'll go and work in the games industry. Someone in games industry refer to this as a pyramid scheme. Because even in the UK alone, which is where I was doing this research, there are way more graduates coming into these programs than there are jobs in the UK. Most jobs in the UK are actually in things like localization, which is converting games so that they can be sold in different markets. And these are students that are studying games programming and games design, not training for those particular roles. So I was really interested if formal education is the way into the games industry, what is that experience like for people who haven't been historically represented in the games industry? So that study, I recruited saying, “I'm interested in diversity in the games industry.” And I did get a lot of white British males participating because diversity does mean everyone. I learned a lot about the contours of things like disability, for instance, things that are not necessarily visible when we're talking about inclusion. But for that paper, I focused on the very small minority that were identifying as women who participated. A very small number of 49. I actually talked to 50, but I lost one of the interviews. Forty-nine participants. And what I found there is that we talk a lot about with inclusion getting in, get the entry point. And what I saw here is that that's nowhere near enough because what are we getting into? The experiences of the women that I talk to in these games programs required them to engage in quite a lot of, what I call coping strategies to try to stay in. Because when you just get into a place where the culture is not particularly friendly, then it's hard. You see this with everything. Like retention is a real problem. And some of the people I talked to were not planning to stay and didn't stay, and that includes the female instructors that I talked to. There was a lot of investment being put in by universities to attract more diverse student bodies. The instructors that I talked to said it was really important. But the women that I talked to just explained to me all the different ways that they had to frame themselves and deal with other students to continue to get by in that program. And I think, this is a real problem when we're talking about inclusion, if we're just talking about the entry points. Because we're not talking about the institutional or cultural structure of factors that shape participation, once someone is somewhere. And how that can affect getting people in? Because people hear about things like Gamer Gate, they're like, "No way. I would never do that." Why would I try to go into the games industry when that's the kind of discourses that circulate? And then when people do say, "Okay, maybe things are changing." I'll get in and they get into these places where people just talk about how girls don't have the right brains for making games or there's no girls around at all. And you're just have to say “I'm one of the guys” over and over to everybody so that people don't isolate you. Those kinds of things. We have to think about that. And that's just at the education point. When we talk about the pipeline, everyone says, "Just get them into education." Think about how difficult it will be for those people then to get into the industry and what kinds of experiences I'll have there too. So for me, it was really important to break down that space that we often talk about as the solution to the problem.
Cameron: You talked about the coping strategies of women in these education programs. One of them is exceptionalism, which I think, if I understand what your saying, is about the fact that “as a woman I would bring something new or necessary to the gaming industry and therefore I’m valuable.” Does that capture that?
Alison: I think that's true. But what I really picked up on when I was talking to these participants was also this exceptionalism. “Those things that we're talking about might be a problem for some women but not for me. Because I already had a Computer Science degree and I've been through this before, so I know how to handle it or I understand why some people might think that's threatening or discouraging, but I'm exceptional so I can make it through.” And that is, I mean, that's very common for women in the tech industry but it doesn't change the conditions. And I think the participant that I talked to that talked a lot about exceptionalism, she participated also in one of these women-in-games initiatives, that was like an incubator, sorry, a “game jam” just for women. And she had a completely different affective resonance with that, where she talked about how welcoming it was, how inclusive it was, how safe it was. And it really, for me, illustrated how there's costs to just surviving or just making it like, "Yeah, you can do it, but is it an enriching experience for you? Isn't it? Is it more exhausting for you because you just have to bear what goes on around you?”
Cameron: Right, and that leads to the isolation, avoiding contact with abusive people, limiting your emotional engagement in the industry and in the job that you love.
Alison: That was another strategy that I saw, like this kind of self-sufficiency discourse. Where people were like, "That's fine. There's this culture, there's these social things, but I don't need them. I don't need to participate.” So people withdraw and just do the bare minimum. But that makes it very difficult for them to succeed because so much of games requires teamwork. And so much of getting into the games industry is about a portfolio that requires you to be doing this kind of extracurricular things like game jams and doing more than minimum. So a lot of these strategies are really harmful to the self, actually. They don't allow you to really fulfill what you need to do to succeed personally and professionally.
Cameron: So it becomes a case of you either find a way to conform to this expectation which is very much defined on the male prototype, right, that default is the masculine programmer. You have to find a way to accommodate yourself to that in some way, or you die on the vine, right? You just wither away. Or you leave, and then you end up with what you refer to as the leaky pipeline. We bring all these people in; they don’t stay around.
Alison: Yeah. Yeah. And what I try to argue is a following Mel Gregg's argument that these leaks are leads. They tell us something. The woman who talked to me about leaving, she was the most honest. Because a lot of people under capitalism, we want to tell a strong, powerful story about ourselves. We can understand exclusion, but we don't necessarily want to frame our experiences through that. You want to be powerful. And this woman was like, "Let me just tell you about all the stuff I've been through and why I'm going to be leaving the games industry." From the very beginning, there was a female as they call them in a UK “course lead.” Someone who's in charge of the program. And on these open house days was intentionally going to women who are at the university being like, "You should think about the games program. I see you're looking at illustration, but those skills are appropriate here.” And hand-getting people into the program. And she was responsible for having a program that was 50% female. But there was kind of then issues when people were in those things. Like. That student's skill set was often seen as strange. She was more into things like augmented reality and games for good and bringing games into things like pop-up books and she was always an outsider in things because her skillset didn't seem to align with the standard way of making games. And she was like, "I'm leaving." And her leaving really is showing why this is a problem. When people stay it reaffirms that the culture is okay, even if it's toxic. But those leaks, where did she go and what did she do after? It's like for her, a much more healthy place to be more of an independent artist than it is to get into the games industry. So I think, yeah. I think it's an interesting point that Mel Gregg makes to follow people who leave. It's hard methodologically to find the people who leave, but I think it's a good point.
Cameron: In the games industry is there any kind of a response to these labour practices around collective action or unionization?
Alison: Yeah. I mentioned it briefly. There's been a movement in the last couple of years called the GWU. Games Workers Unite. And of course, this is a struggle because unionization has fallen out of fashion. But we're seeing it happen in various kinds of digital work sectors, and media sectors, and creative sectors now.
Cameron: Saw it happen at Amazon.
Alison: Yeah, it happened at Amazon... What's interesting is that the games industry is obviously not interested. There was actually some anti-union statements made at a big games conference, but this is happening in clusters and spaces around the world. A small grassroots level to think about collective action and to educate people. Because I think because it's been out of fashion for a long time, there's a lot of education work to do about like, what is collective labour practice? What does it mean to be in union? What does it mean to be a workplace union versus a industry union versus a national union? And those kinds of models are still being figured out right now. But what's on the side of the people who are trying to organize this is that basically, no one is unscathed in the games industry. There's differential experience for instance women, their career lengths tend to be shorter due to care taking. But women are not the only people that want to have families. Women are not the only people that want to have to work-life balance. Women aren't the only people who get older and get tired. Women aren't the only people who get burnt out in the games industry, that start to feel the toll taken on their mental health and on their physical health, right? Sitting at a computer programming for 12 hours in a day is not healthy. It doesn't matter how much pizza and donuts there is around you. So there has become more of a discussion. Even the students I talk to are like, "Yes, crunch is a problem. Yes, exclusion and sexual harassment is a problem." The next moment is how do we find our power in such a space to push back on those things, especially when there's such a reserve army of labour. All of these students going through the games programs that are 21, and they're saying to me, "I know the games industry will kick me in the balls, but that's okay. I'll get back up." That's a direct quote. So that's the challenge because there's always fresh, fresh bodies.
Cameron: You were kind enough to send me a list of your research grants that you are working on or have received, and I’m wondering where you see your research going next. This funding provides you with kind of a runway to go do something new. Where are you headed with your research?
Alison: So I was really fortunate, Stephanie Fisher and I who, as you might recall, worked together all those years ago on the Difference Engine Initiative, got some funding from SSHRC for these partnership engage grants, which I think are really cool in terms of doing impact work. And the way that things work is that Stephanie continued to be involved with Pixelles all these years and is one of the co-directors of Pixelles, so she's very much on the inside of that organization and knows what they're doing. And what we wanted to ask is we know that this has been successful because it's been around for 10 years, it's had hundreds of people go through it in its live programming, in its follow-along online programming. It's helped people form studios. It's helped people get jobs. And we wanted to know about like, how do we talk about that kind of impact in a way that isn't just about satisfying funders or justifying itself on the basis of the industry itself like that we know is problematic. So thinking about what is a feminist methodology or community based methodology for understanding the influence and the impact of an organization like Pixelles and also visualizing that outwards to, not just the people who sponsor the organization or the industry, but researchers and teachers and people who are interested because obviously, something has gone right. We're in the middle of doing those interviews now, but we don't want to do that in a way that isn't safe because Gamergate, we talked about that earlier, it was part of... It was like postulating that there was a feminist conspiracy and making these maps of networks. Like this person work with this person, who worked with this person, which is like how communities of practice work. But you wouldn't want to create something that then gave people the information they need to harass other people. So we want to think about doing this in a way that it's consentful, that is careful. And that also represents different ways of thinking about success of an organization. So that's something that's interesting to me because as far as I can tell, no one's actually done that work of assessing, I suppose, like what a community organization has done? And Pixelles is probably a special example because it's worked really, really well for the last 10 years on the back of volunteer labour. So that's something I'm really excited about. And then you maybe can tell that something that inspires my research is when people say that something is the solution to something. So getting more women in is the solution. I'm really interested always in being like, "Okay. So, what does that look like?" So one of the things I've seen circulating quite a lot, and when you look at the literature, it's been around for 50 years or more is the value of mentorship for inclusion. And there is mentorship everywhere. You can't walk 10 minutes without seeing mentorship in any kind of creative or technical industry. So a project that I'll be starting soon with Tamara Shepherd is looking at those mentorship schemes and people who participate in and understanding what mentorship does for them. What is the value that they find in mentorship? What kinds of concrete and maybe intangible benefits do they get from it? And why do mentors do it? And what do they get out of it as well? And then possibly, because this is what the findings have been from other sectors, is there a kind of homophily that is supported by mentorship. Like people mentor people that they see themselves in. And does that actually transform exclusionary structures, or can it play a role in perpetuating them? I hope not, but I think it's important to cast a critical eye on the things that are seen as solutions. And I think mentorship's an interesting way of getting at maybe more mid-career stuff, because I said, there's been a lot of emphasis on the entry, the pipeline, just getting things in. And I'm really interested in when people are there, how are they maintaining or challenging the structures that maybe were difficult... that made it difficult for them to get in.
Cameron: This is a very involved model of research. You’re not simply sitting way back looking at things from a distance. You’re actually in there talking to people. How does that translate into change in the industry? What’s your role and how do you envision what happens next after your research?
Alison: With the projects that we propose, we always try to think about doing the work in a community way. So for instance, with the mentorship project, there's an internship stage as with the impact project with Pixelles, but then there's also community events or workshops or places where we come together. Because I do think that one of the impacts of this work is actually opening conversations. I don't think that the majority of people that are working in these places actually want to be exclusionary. I don't know, maybe there's some. But I think the majority of people really do want positive change. They do want to see the spaces that they're operating in be more inclusive, be more accessible. So having these conversations, I think makes the difference and then having these spaces where the community can tell us, the people who are most involved in these things can tell us, "The problem is actually this, not this." Because participatory action research, which is where my projects have gone sometimes (not all the time), is that's the starting point. It's that you don't define the problem as a researcher that you come to understand the problem in conjunction with the people who are experiencing the problem and then work from there. That's a hard research to do. I'm lucky. I'm in a position, I can do it. And the first time I did it, it was completely happenstantial. You can't make it happen. There's plenty of more standard interview-based projects that I've done where that isn't possible. But I always try to send participant summaries and share the work that I write with my participants. And I think it makes a difference because I have good relationships with everybody that I've done research with. They tend to be like, "What are you doing now? What's going on now? Where's the work at?" So I think people are really interested in the same goals. Not necessarily the same routes to those goals, but that's still really productive conversation, but yeah. To do that work, you do have to be very involved with different communities and it takes longer for that reason. You build trust, you have to work out whether you have the same vocabulary for things, whether you have completely contradictory value systems, sometimes that happens too. And the best way to do it is with others. So you can see, I have long-term collaboration with Tamara Shepherd and Stephanie Fisher. And that's because, yeah, we have similar kinds of approaches to doing this. And we also don't just want to... currently we don't feel like just writing papers about how problems are perpetuated. We're really interested in what can be different.
Cameron: Well, I look forward to seeing what happens as a result of these things. It’s something that is, as you say, kind of like the canary in the coal mine. If there can be a transformation of labour practices in this industry, then maybe we should be a little bit more hopeful.
Alison: Yeah. I mean, it's not easy. There is a tendency with hegemony or dominant ideology to consume resistance and package it. So you see a lot of optics around things like EDI and organizations being inclusive. Recently, a games company was patting itself on the back in the blog post because they created a matrix for diversity characters where it was... Of course, just trying to make diversity in games, a matter of data points. Well, this character is female, so she gets a five out of 10 for gender. I don't know what a 10 out of 10 for gender would be, anyway. So there's a lot of blowback on that. But still the conversation is radically different than it was 10 years ago. And so, we got to take our incremental wins, I think, if you want to not become burnt out, I think.
Cameron: Take your incremental wins until they get monetized by the industry and they you have to come up with some new wins.
Alison: They are always 100% monetized by the games industry. But if in the meantime people can live better lives, that's good too.
Cameron: Well thank you for sharing your insights. I wish you all the best in your research, Alison.
Alison: Thank you. It was a pleasure to talk to you today.
Links
Alison Harvey’s faculty page at York University
Twine’s revolution: democratization, depoliticization, and the queering of game design
When passion isn’t enough: gender, affect and credibility in digital games design
Making the grade: feminine lack, inclusion, and coping strategies in digital games higher education
Credits
Host and producer: Cameron Graham
Production assistant: Andrew Castillo
Photos: York University
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Audacity
Recorded: May 18, 2022
Location: Toronto
