Viking development

Young men tend to behave in a fairly predictable fashion. It’s easy to imagine what will happen if you take a group of 30 or 40 men in their teens and twenties, give them axes and beer, and make them row a longship out to sea for a few weeks in order to make a living. There will be a lot of pent-up aggression. There will be a lot of fart jokes. When they finally reach land, they will cut loose – and if there’s no strict rule of enforceable law where they come ashore, watch out. They will rape and pillage their way across the countryside, exhausting any easily consumable resources as they go, then get back into their longship and continue with their journey.

This is the model of Viking expansion that led to the Scandinavian kings controlling much of northern Europe a thousand years ago. Minus the literal rape and killing, of course, modern game development has a number of things in common with the Viking expansion. Specifically, game development studios and their teams are largely staffed in the same way that Viking longships were crewed. Consequently, the culture is overflowing with beer and pent-up aggression, and a very significant portion of our overall cultural output is fart jokes. I think we can do better.

What does “better” mean? Many people would argue that videogames are already a massively successfully, explosively growing, multi-billion dollar industry; what’s better than that? I would counter that the Viking expansion was also massively successful, but that it never became the Viking Empire because it never learned how to be sustainable instead of expansionist – and as a consequence was toppled in 1066 by a better-balanced culture.

I believe that developing a better-balanced culture is the most important near-term step we can take towards nurturing a stable and truly massmarket audience. This is necessary to see us make the transition from an exploitative, expansionist industry to a sustainable one. Furthermore, I believe that the most important step we can take in balancing that culture is to bring more women into game development.

Some people are sure to interpret this as me saying that we need more female game developers so they can make more games for a giant, untapped market of female gamers that’s waiting to be served. This is not at all what I mean. What I mean is that we need more female game developers in order to ensure that the development culture in game studios becomes more reflective of our culture at large. It’s this overall culture that’s the giant untapped market we need to serve: a rich and diverse mass market that’s comprised of men and women, appreciating and consuming art and entertainment together.

How do we do this? Well, the first step is guaranteeing opportunity and pay equality for women. This isn’t something that should be imposed or legislated by some outside body – but rather something that every existing developer and publisher should audit internally. And this isn’t something we should do because it’s the right thing to do morally – try selling that idea to the board – it’s something we should do because it moves us closer to the goal of speaking to a broader audience. It increases our reach and profitability – and, subsequently, our sustainability.

The next step is to begin active and aggressive recruitment of female developers. This is a more difficult process, and likely requires some kind of organised industry-wide initiative. It’s not just about trying to hire more female applicants or putting affirmative action policies in place. The problem isn’t that we’re discriminating against female applicants in favour of hiring men; the problem is the lack of female applicants. This means that we need to better position the industry as a desirable workplace, one in which female artists, designers, programmers and project managers would want to be employed. It involves reaching out to universities and colleges to help them attract more female applicants to their programmes, enabling us to benefit from a greater number of female graduates.

What about those of us who aren’t presidents making the case to the board, who don’t run studios or manage relationships with higher education institutions? What can we do? Like the Viking expansion itself, this transformation probably needs to be driven from the bottom up. Like it or not, the culture onboard your ships is the culture you’re exporting. Fart jokes have their place in culture, but when fart jokes become your culture you have a problem.

I’m not suggesting that we stop making violent, fart-joke-infused, aggression-release-valve games for the aspirational Vikings among us. If we ever hope to make high-profile titles that are something besides that, however, we need to behave a little more each day as though we’re seated at the family dinner table, rather than rowing the longship.

Clint Hocking is a creative director at LucasArts working on an unannounced project. He blogs at www.clicknothing.com. Read and follow Clint's other columns on his topic page.