Happy holidays! ❄️
We’re two months into the fourth cohort of our Peer Accelerator and we’re so proud of the teams and their commitment to creating sustainable studios that resist the industry norms.
This month we’re featuring our board member Kenzie Gordon (she/her), who is a social worker and PhD Candidate in Digital Humanities & Media and Technology Studies at the University of Alberta. Kenzie has a background as an outreach social worker in domestic violence prevention and a researcher in gender-based violence and video games.
She has also developed a few tech/game projects including:
- It’s Your Move, a bystander intervention training game
- and Flourish, an app for survivors of domestic violence
Tell us a little bit about who you are and what your PhD is about?
Kenzie: I’m currently working on my dissertation, which is about the ways that Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West offer insights into how AAA games can help shift perspectives on patriarchy and rape culture. Since 2016, I’ve also been working with a team of researchers across Canada on projects examining post-secondary education in video games, and I’m currently helping to run a longitudinal study called The First Three Years which is following 200+ new game grads as they try to break into the industry; working on these projects is what got me interested in games labour and ways we can build a better industry!
Yes - you’ve recently written about the game layoffs. What do you see as alternatives to the way the industry is right now?
Kenzie: I’m obviously a huge fan of co-ops, but I don’t think they’re necessarily the only viable alternative. I think the shift that’s currently happening is moving away from enormous corporate game dev models, because the invasion of corporate conglomerate buy-outs is hollowing out these studios to return profits to shareholders.
There’s been a huge groundswell in labour organizing in games, which I think we have yet to see if it is able to make a large enough shift in how AAA companies work to change the industry as a whole. But smaller-scale, sustainable game development practices really seem to be where the momentum is, whatever form that takes.
Historically when a small studio became successful it got swept up into the momentum of becoming a big studio and we forget that lots of the original success emerged when the studio was small. But I also think that many of the forces driving studios to crunch and other labour abuses are symptomatic of larger forces of late-stage capitalism, so we need to see it as a networked issue connected to other social problems.
What made you decide to be a Baby Ghost board member (and what are you excited about doing while here)!
I was really excited to join the board of Baby Ghosts because I think the organization is doing absolutely amazing work empowering game developers to take control of their own working conditions (dare we say, seizing the means of production?)
This is honestly the kind of work I think we should see happening in every university game education program. The way Baby Ghosts pairs their support and training with financial resources and a support network really seems to be how helping people get established in this industry should work. I’m so excited to support this work, and from my own nerdy perspective, to support lots more research to demonstrate how effective the incubator program is!
And of course, if it means I get to play more super-cool games, that doesn’t hurt either. ;)
Thanks so much to Kenzie for chatting with us. We’re so grateful to have her expertise on our board and excited for what we have planned in the new year!
Warm wishes for the holidays,
— eileen & Jennie