Belonging in the gaming industry: A look back on Develop ‘22
Recently, I became aware of this post, originally a LinkedIn blog, by coach, producer, and professional disruptor Mikayla Sinead. In it, she describes the experience of participating in Develop for the first time, a black woman, new to the industry, feeling unmoored and frankly unwanted.
Those of you who met me at Develop will know my time was very different, if only for the fact that while it was my first time attending, I wasn’t new to the industry. Yet in the beginning of this three-day tradeshow, and in fact all throughout, I would feel very similar to Mikayla, despite all the love I received.
I don’t go to events often. I’ve been a freelancer for the entire time I’ve spent in the gaming industry so far, and opportunities for freelancers to visit events, especially when you don’t live in London and are operating on limited funds, are very rare. I’ve never been invited to a preview event for a game, or a launch party, or — anything, really. I’m okay with that, but secretly, I love seeing people, in the desperate way anyone would who spends an approximate 350 days out of the year alone in their bedroom.
People like to say it’s easy to forget that the people you interact with online are real people, but it truly is easy to forget. To see someone you normally don’t see, to hear their voice, that’s exciting. Maybe it’s particularly exciting if you don’t see people all that often, but for me it’s always been something that’s endlessly exciting as well as terrifying. I’ll look at people and think “oh wow, you’re real”, and because of that, I hope to share something real with people for as long as I have them.
People, Mikayla included, talk a lot about belonging. I don’t really know what that means, if I’m honest, maybe because I don’t know what belonging is supposed to be in general. Maybe belonging means never worrying about what to say or do when you’re among others, but that’s never been me — you can’t miss a state you’ve never experienced for yourself, I guess?
So I didn’t struggle with belonging in the way Mikayla describes it, although I really felt her description of looking around the Hilton and seeing only men. You go to the hotel bar, and it’s incredibly loud, and everyone seems to be a man deep in conversation with another man. I was lucky however, to find that I already belonged — I would be incredibly nervous, and almost as if I made it happen, that feeling would inevitably conjure someone I knew into my field of view. I was also extremely fortunate to have Cinzia Musio, who would regularly check in with me. I couldn’t have done it without them, and it was extremely valuable to have someone to return to.
When I went to Develop, I felt a bit like someone who had snuck backstage, someone who had ignored the “staff only” sign to trespass where the sausage was made. Of course that wasn’t true at all, I had a media pass to the event and the vague prospect of work, in that I always have the potential to make money at an event, but never the guarantee. “If you see something interesting, you can pitch it later” “it turns out we don’t have time to go, could you fill in” — it’s a lot of looking busy without actually being busy, and that makes me unsure.
As soon as I would run into too much downtime, I’d feel like leaving. I couldn’t stand not being productive, at an even where arguably a lot of people weren’t necessarily productive either — I think I saw the biggest flurry of activity the day an ice cream van pulled over by the hotel to distribute free soft serve. But there is this air of stuff going on that you’re just not privy to, no matter how many rounds around the premises you take.
I attended Develop as a sort of journalist/developer hybrid. This is a role I’m still stuck with, and when people talk about belonging to me, what they are really talking about is the need for a clear label. I want to be able to say “I’m a game writer and I’m working to be a narrative designer.” I have new business cards that say it, I have a game I’m working on. However, the reality is that right now, I can’t make ends meet with just one thing, and there are people who believe I’ve stopped being a journalist, when really, I can’t afford to, but you can’t be both. Mythwrecked hadn’t been announced yet when I went to Develop, but in many ways, I went to Develop to change my label, and I couldn’t. Because there were things going on, meetings and business deals, that I wasn’t privy to and that I hadn’t come to make. I understand the need for safe spaces, and I understand the joy that comes from meeting people who have had similar experiences to yours. But I think I’d feel like I belonged if I didn’t have to belong at all.
When I met Mikayla, I never would’ve guessed she questioned her sense of belonging. When I got introduced, she was already in conversation with someone, and she just seemed like someone with the presence to be perfectly at home wherever she went. She made me feel good, because she was very clearly trained in recognising people who were a little lost. She seemed so powerful that she really reaffirmed for me that there was power in my being different. Black power sometimes just means meeting someone and telling them you see them. Embracing that difference I represent and making it my power is more important than belonging, but it will sometimes make you lonely. How can it not?
Belonging to me seems like a double-edged sword, because like passion, it seems like a way to make our workplaces into more than workplaces. Belonging means that the minute I don’t belong, there are things I have to go without. In my weird hybrid state, I already experienced that divide — colleagues that no longer talk to me now that I don’t work with them, people I called friends who were only friends for as long as we shared the same metaphorical roof. It’s not something I would recommend to anyone.
There is often an artificial divide between developers and journalists. “Developers often feel as if it is a critic’s job to tear their work down,” dev Aura Triolo noted a while ago, an assessment I found to be both true and…not true at the same time. I’ve absolutely had run-ins with devs who were either immediately hostile or at the very least turned their noses up at me, but I can also say that without the devs who became interested in me and my work, I wouldn’t have considered that there could be a space in development for me. I know just wanting to have an amicable relationship with a dev these days is enough to alert the ethics police or whatever, but there is genuine power in acknowledging that journalists and developers are actually here about the same thing — we love games. It’s really that simple sometimes. Of course a fair share of developers stopped talking to me the second I could no longer act as a promotional vessel, but there are a lot of facets about games and game development, and if you can show people that this is what you’re about, that really all you want is to understand them better, then the relationship between journalist and game developer can be very different. My point is that I didn’t forcibly insert myself into game development — it was developers who made me feel I could have a place with them. At Develop, I noticed that in practice, maintaining this is much more difficult, because there were these groups of journalists, split off into cliques, trying to get as drunk within the license timeframe as possible, and developers, and I had to pick, knowing that each conversation would likely be about work, at a pub at 10pm.
My problem with belonging isn’t the whether or not the concept applies to you, it’s that the prize for belonging seems kind of boring, if I’m honest. At Develop, I spent a lot of time having essentially the same conversation. “So what do you do?” “How is that going for you?” “Oh, you should definitely play this” “Congrats on your talk”. It was really draining. All I want out of any outing is the feeling of one genuine connection, anything that isn’t just a drive-by. I want to be seen.
In the end, I’m not sure if that happened, or if that’s even possible in a space like this, hundreds of people talking, the constant uncertainty of whether you’re having a conversation or making a business pitch. All the people that I thought were genuinely interested in me as me weren’t new acquaintances. I had Cinzia and Moo Yu to talk to, people I know I can approach, Allan Cudicio who is fantastic conversation. But most people I met at Develop have likely forgotten me. They will remember me once the next Develop rolls around. Is that belonging? Do I only belong as long as I produce and sell?
It feels like when I ask for belonging, I ask for recognition. I can’t fit into this space the way a white man would, and we all have different interests and parts of the industry that we pay attention to. There probably isn’t one unified space you can belong to. When I walk into a room, I am recognised. What I really want is to walk into a room full of friends, and I still feel very far away from that.