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Women’s Experiences on the Path to a Career in Game Development

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Feminism in Play

Part of the book series: Palgrave Games in Context ((PAGCON))

Abstract

This chapter seeks to identify whether there is a dominant, presupposed career pipeline to a career in game development and then looks for women and women’s experiences at each stage of that pipeline. It concludes that a dominant pipeline does exist and that this pathway both disadvantages women who attempt it and marginalizes other pathways. Along the way women deal with obstacles that can delegitimize their choices and experiences and/or make the assumed pathway inhospitable. This chapter relies on published literature as well as data from the 2014 and 2015 Developer Satisfaction Surveys (DSS) conducted by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) in partnership with the authors.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant 435-2013-0187.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Western University, London, ON, Canada

    Johanna Weststar

  2. TÉLUQ-Université du Québec, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Marie-Josée Legault

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  1. Johanna Weststar
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  2. Marie-Josée Legault
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Kishonna L. Gray

  2. Department of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Gerald Voorhees

  3. Department of English Language and Literature, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Emma Vossen

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Weststar, J., Legault, MJ. (2018). Women’s Experiences on the Path to a Career in Game Development. In: Gray, K., Voorhees, G., Vossen, E. (eds) Feminism in Play. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90539-6_7

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