An ethnographic co-design approach to promoting diversity in the games industry

ABSTRACT

Workplace diversity and inclusion are recognised as integral to the internal and public-facing success of organizations. The games industry worldwide has been notably slow to embrace reforms to bring diverse work cultures into practice. Not only does the industry rank very low in the diversity of its corporate profile but a series of high-profile controversies have underscored major problems with attaining and retaining individual staff and achieving overall corporate diversity. In recent years, a number of games media outlets, organizations and game companies have sought to ameliorate internal social and cultural problems by attempting to facilitate cultural change in the games sector. This paper presents a retrospective analysis of one such response. At the centre of our analysis are the efforts of a leading global game company to tackle issues of diversity in their organization. To assist them, we as an academic research team, deployed a series of workshops using participatory ethnographic methodology involving co-design approaches as feminist praxis. Through their experiences and participant observational data, this paper discusses the challenges and subjectivities in feminist design and praxis that those implementations presented for us, as well as outlining possibilities for future applications.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity
• Codesign
• Workplace Culture
• emotional memories
• Game Production

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The company name for this study is confidential as per ethics protocols, and the workshops/data collection were approved by multiple organizational review boards for ethical human subjects research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Florence M. Chee

Florence M. Chee is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication and Program Director of the Center for Digital Ethics & Policy. She is also Founding Director of the Social & Interactive Media Lab (SIMLab). Her research examines the social and ethical dimensions of emergent digital lifestyles with a particular focus on games, social media, and mobile platforms and translating those insights across industrial, governmental, and academic sectors. She has designed and taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the intersection of society and technology, including game studies, where students engage with debates surrounding diversity, intersectionality, and media production through social justice frameworks. E-mail: [email protected]

Larissa Hjorth

Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth is an artist, digital ethnographer and Director of the Design and Creative Practice ECP Platform.

Previously, Hjorth was Deputy Dean, Research and Innovation, in the School of Media and Communication (2013-2016) and co-founded the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) with Professor Heather Horst. E-mail: [email protected]

Hugh Davies

Dr. Hugh Davies is a Postdoctoral Fellow with Design and Creative Practice at RMIT. E-mail: [email protected]