Introduction to Giigibyte Collective for a Better Gaming Industry

In the last decade, we've seen story after story of harassment in the gaming industry, and instances that made it even more clear that the gaming industry has a workers rights issue. For those of us who face these kinds of issues in our career and daily lives, listening to news stories about it can make us feel removed from the problem, but the risk of being impacted still looms. Open conversation on the issues of workplace harassment in the gaming industry can be hard to come across. Even though these stories are well-known, there is a lot of silence around the issue, for fear of losing our reputation in the industry, by participating in discussion. 

The Giigi community decided it was time to make the conversation more accessible. There has to be a way to create constructive, positive conversation around these issues. Unfortunately, in some instances, it's a must to protect our identities, due to the threat of retaliation we are all aware of. 

We reached out to many industry professionals in the local area to try and engage them in conversation about harassment and workers rights. They all had one thing in common -- they felt that they were not experts on the topic. However, a few such professionals recommended one another, as someone we should reach out to. 

In our Giigi community, we believe that anyone who has been impacted by or who has witnessed harassment should have a voice, and anyone in the gaming industry should have a voice about workers rights in our industry. Our goal is to create a space of trust to discuss the issues that impact our career and our identity as gamers, and create a blog and a panel discussion to share with the community. 

This would be something that would take time, and we would have to find time in our daily lives to make it all happen. So it started off as a group conversation online with weekly discussion questions that would turn into the blog that you are now reading. 

Popular posts from this blog

Let's Meet the Panelists

   Tell us about yourself and what topics you would like to share in this discussion.  Catie:  Hello all! Thank you so much for being here! I’m Catie, moderator of the Giigi community and Discord server. I got into gaming at a young age, being attracted to puzzles, adventures and stories, as well as audio and music. I studied Interactive Design and Game Dev at SCAD and started working at EA in 2016. I’m currently at Ubisoft as a Dev Tester on Rocksmith. I founded Giigibyte because as I move up in the world of games, it doesn’t feel right to ignore the issues around us. I try to help people break through the barriers of getting into the gaming industry because I believe that’s how diversity will grow. I also have worked with different ways to bring people together and build a system of mutual support in our community. I am more of an activist than a public relations or business person. So I bring a unique perspective to the gaming industry community. One of the things...
Read more

What does a better gaming industry look like? What would you change?

What do we want? A better gaming industry. What does a better gaming industry look like? This week's question:   If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change about the gaming industry? In other words, what would a better gaming industry look like? Catie :  For me, I think there should be weekly meetings at all gaming companies to discuss the current news and any concerns around harassment in your office. It should replace those cold automatic "harassment trainings" with actors. What I see at companies is Teams or Slack channels that are supposed to be for the women of the company, but that don't really talk about much. Sometimes, the most you have is a quick commentary about recent events, but it's not integrated into the entire studio meetings. It's kind of like the current events are separated /isolated into certain small groups, and aren't made into an important part of the whole studio's discussion. I think this is the problem that encoura...
Read more