A Call for Fostering Inclusivity and Acclimation in the Gaming Industry

Migrants in the gaming industry can face difficulties in acclimating to the host country’s culture and ways, and these concerns should be addressed for easier integration.

 

The game development industry is highly multicultural, with for example even in Finland the number of employees from overseas being about a third of the workforce in the industry. These numbers show that migrating workers are an exceedingly important part of the industry and therefore their concerns and needs regarding acclimating to the work environments of countries different from their home country are important. Their experiences were researched for Solip Park’s article “Embracing Global and Local: How Game Industry Expatriates Work Between Global and Local Game Development Practices”.

 

Game expats (referring to people in the industry who have migrated because of work) can face difficulties when trying to adapt to the work culture of the new country they are working in. These difficulties can for example arise from communication norms, the way the management is handled and how decisions are made in the country typically, with variance occurring also between different companies. There are some areas in the industry require less or even zero acclimation, for example the software that is used, but other aspects can take more time to acclimate to. Game expats might be expected to immediately be able to manage these possible differences, with cultural clashes expected to largely not happen, even though they naturally and unavoidably do happen.

 

The research done for the paper showed that game expats could at the start integrate fairly intuitively to the technical side of the work. That’s due to a lot of the knowledge of for example game engines and software being quite universal, with even internal tools found to be reasonably easy to get a handle on. The productivity of the expats is presumed to be great from the start and the specific company’s inner workings quickly internalized, but expats with previous working experience in the industry are able to meet the challenge. There were concerns shown over niche skills, as working within those boundaries could be a limiting factor in the competitive gaming industry. The gaming industry is ever-evolving like other technological fields, so previously widely used skills can suddenly become niche and new necessary skills can pop up anytime. This characteristic of the industry can also bring more uncertainty for game expats when thinking about their long-term possibilities in Finland for example, with uncertainty even coming from developers who had permanent residency in the country.

 

While the gaming industry is highly technical, the human aspects are also an important factor. Getting accustomed to the host country’s ways is important to a successful career. Many expats face very different ways of working compared to their previous countries, with these differences making working more difficult for expats. These cultural clashes require time and discussion to handle. That time can range from months to even years. A lot of the figuring out of the methods might be mostly left up to the migrants, with insufficient discussions with native developers about these methods. Overall fitting in with the culture can be a complex topic, with many game expats having very different and possibly contradicting interpretations on how it could happen or what is required for it to happen.

 

The research paper discusses the four different ways of acculturation that are gathered from previous research. These four ways are integration, assimilation, segregation and marginalization. Integration is highlighted as the hopeful outcome, as that method leaves room for expats to preserve their own culture while adapting into the new culture of the host country. In contrast, assimilation is when an expat loses cultural integrity in order to fit in. Separation and marginalization are instances where expats mainly remain outside of the cultural bubbles of the new host country, whether more by choice in the case of separation according to the paper or by lack of possibilities or by discrimination in the case of marginalization. For integration to be possible, it requires an open and inviting environment.

 

The article examined the experiences of game expats through a series of interviews and used those interviews as research data. The largest focus was on South Korean expats in Finland, as the author of the article is also South Korean, which allowed for a more fluid interview process and easier understanding of their specific experiences. The interviews were held over the period 2020 – 2023, with the result being forty-five hours worth of interviews with additional interviews conducted for expats of varying backgrounds working in Finland. Those interviews added up to twenty-two hours of material. The additional interviews were one-time interviews, while the larger set consisted of multiple follow-up interviews, examining the changes in their experiences of working, with the initial interviews mostly focusing on how they migrated and their prospects in Finland. Because of the pandemic, many of the interviews had to be done through Zoom.

 

Source: Park, S. (2024). Embracing Global and Local: How Game Industry Expatriates Work Between Global and Local Game Development Practices. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 7(1), 47–87. https://doi.org/10.26503/todigra.v7i1.2183

 

Picture: “File:WikiProject Globalization Logo.svg” by John Shandy` is marked with CC0 1.0.

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