This year’s Game Developers Conference packed a lot of action into its five days. From March 20 to 24, San Francisco’s Moscone Center saw attendance top 28,000, “Elden Ring” win Game of The Year and “Betrayal at Club Low” take home the grand prize at the Independent Games Festival Awards. The conference’s full return after the pandemic was a roaring success of robust events, huge attendance and multiple reports of harassment and roofieing. Oh, sorry, did I forget to mention that part?
After GDC, several allegations of assault and drink spiking began surfacing on social media, with at least four women and two men being roofied at various events and two women being “lured up to a hotel room by a man in a position of power for a ‘pitch,’ where he then assaulted them.” These incidents largely happened at offsite networking events, and they are not the first of their kind to come out of GDC in recent years. But we should be used to this — women have been abused and endangered in the video game development industry for years now.
There were reports of roofieing at PAX East in 2018 and 2020. Activision Blizzard made headlines in 2021 when the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against the video game holding company for promoting a “frat boy” culture and subjecting female employees to “constant sexual harassment, unequal pay, and retaliation.” Bobby Kotick, current CEO of Activision Blizzard, was known to be both aware and defensive of perpetrators. In 2018 Quantic Dream — the studio responsible for “Detroit: Become Human” — was accused of supporting a sexist, homophobic and racist work environment, and it was reported that studio head David Cage made extremely misogynistic comments. Oh, and who could forget Gamergate, the 2014 online harassment campaign that saw female game developers doxxed, harassed and threatened with assault and death?
So how did we get here? Well, it’s no secret that the programming industry has a reputation as a boys’ club. In the United States, approximately 30% of currently employed programmers are women, while the remaining 70% are men. Despite women historically pioneering programming, men, around the end of the 1960s — in a bid to advance the field and their own careers — began excluding women in the career by creating new educational standards to enter the industry. This exclusion has translated over to video game programming in similar waves. As of 2021, about 24% of game developers in the U.S. were women, and 71% were men — despite women making up 46% of the U.S. gaming demographic. Unfortunately, this exclusion lends itself to intensely sexist and hostile work environments for female developers.
Let’s take a look back at the aforementioned Gamergate as an example of what these environments mean for women in the industry. At a base level, it makes it difficult for women to enter the game development sector. Okay, fine, certain careers have always been difficult for women to enter — that’s unfortunate, but not new. Gamergate started, however, when an ex-partner of Zoe Quinn, developer of “Depression Quest,” alleged that Quinn slept with a games journalist for good reviews of her game. It was later proved that the journalist never reviewed or mentioned “Depression Quest” at length while with Quinn. Okay, fine, an angry ex spread a rumor about a woman — that’s unfortunate, but not new. This soon sparked the Gamergate hashtag on social media under which users could dox, threaten and harass women in the gaming industry under the guise of defending journalistic ethics. Okay, fine, women got harassed online — that’s unfortunate, but not new. Then, online forums composed mainly of men began forming to systematically dox and plan attacks on outspoken, feminist opponents of Gamergate. And given that Gamergate began in 2014 — two years before the election of Donald Trump — the movement was systematized, public and political. Mainstream media, however, failed to take it seriously because it occupied the gaming niche, and Gamergate soon “gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.”
Okay, fine — that is unfortunate and new. The waves of Gamergate have not stopped, but the original movement paints a fairly comprehensive picture of what it is to be a woman in the modern video game industry. It is not only mentally and emotionally taxing, but it can pose unprecedented, unchecked dangers. Female developers are a threat to the homogeneity of their careers — that is white, cisgender, heterosexual men making games — despite the fact that the diversity they offer to the field is essential to the progression and innovation of video games.
I don’t write this to discourage — in fact, one of the first lessons I learned in journalism was not to write something bleak without then offering a horizon. So, who’s working to reverse sexism in the development industry, and is that even possible? At the root of the issue, developers like Ubisoft and Riot have made commitments in recent years to overhaul their HR departments and workplace cultures. Electronic Arts released a statement imploring “anyone who has experienced any kind of harassment or sexual misconduct in our community to come forward,” including both players and employees.
And while all of this is well and good, top-down industry politics like this don’t always work. Meghna Jayanth, writer on “Sunless Sea,” remarked for The Guardian that “I believe it is time for radical change rather than reformism,” and she’s right. Changing HR processes isn’t going to stop a man from roofieing a woman at a games conference he doesn’t believe she belongs at. But it is the fact alone that women are being empowered to come forward about these incidents that promises change. As the gaming industry becomes increasingly mainstream, so do the voices of these women, and this hopefully means that GDCs in the future will be a safe place for all developers.
Daily Arts Writer Maddie Agne can be reached at maagne@umich.edu.