Women\u27s experiences on the path to a career in game development

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