The IGDA (International Game Developer’s Association) has just published the results of its demographic survey of the industry. Not surprisingly, the typical game developer is:

White,
Male,
Hetero,
31 years old (really? they all seem so young to me),
University educated.

(remind you of anyone?)

I was happy to find out that although the industry is highly homogenous, most respondents also agreed that increasing the diversity of our workforce would greatly benefit the industry. But that’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem. Make more diverse games, attract a greater diversity of gamers, attract a greater diversity of game makers, make more diverse games.

I have so much more to say about this, it’s not even funny.

Some periods of life are like a rehearsal for old age. You’re not really working towards anything, you’re not really trying to achieve the next thing. You just fill your time with a routine, you read, have little activities with friends, you knit.

I guess I should enjoy these times. But I’m too young to be old.

One of the fun things about being in this line of work is that you make a finished product, something you can eventually find on the shelf of a store. In many jobs, you just do “work”, and nothing as tangible as a box with a game in it ever comes out of it. I can’t help but think, when I go to a game store and see one of mine, that this must be how an author feels in a bookstore.

Of course, another consequence of making a finished product is that it is submitted to the scrutiny of reviewers, the same critics who review the greatest games in the world. And this is actually not as painful as you might think. There’s something very satisfying about getting a report card for your work (even if this particular report card gets published on popular sites for the world to see). Sure, I often feel the game was misunderstood and wish I could explain it to the reviewer, but this is the beauty of it. You put it out there and it finds its own way, becomes its own thing. I find it absolutely fascinating to see that some details I obsessed over mean nothing in the end, while at the same time, a feature reduced to 10% of its original intended quality absolutely delights the critics.

This is probably a cliché of the author’s experience, but still a novelty for me.

Still a video game producer, just somewhere else, as of today.

Happy.