If you've ever been exposed to the worst corners of the internet, and especially the ones that spend their days failing to enjoy a single thing about video games, you'll probably have seen the disdain some shitheads– from angry YouTubers through to, ah, the current United States administration--have for anyone working anywhere near "DEI".
DEI, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, is a set of:
...organizational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented, marginalized, or subject to discrimination based on identity or disability.
Which means you can instantly see why pissbaby white men are always so ready to complain about it, but also why video games--an industry traditionally dominated by white men--needs it so badly. Games are selling to a global market in multicultural and multiracial societies, and whether you're talking about representation or just good business sense, the better games are able to diversify their development teams and subject matter, the better it is for everyone.
Well, almost everyone. Those aforementioned pissbabies have managed through sheer repetition to strip DEI of much of its meaning. DEI is woke, DEI is destroying video games, DEI is everywhere doing everything, blah blah blah, the term has been used in recent years so often and so often without its proper context that precious few people know what working in the field actually involves.
So for this edition of What I Do–a regular series where we spotlight just what it is, exactly, that people working in video games do for a living--I wanted to speak to the best person I could possibly speak to in this position: Dr Alayna Cole, who recently worked as DEI (or DE&I) manager at one of the biggest AAA companies on the planet.
Luke Plunkett: Hi Alayna, and thanks for joining us for this! To get us started, can you tell us a bit about your role, and what it is you did at the company?
Alayna Cole: I worked as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion manager at a AAA company for about three years. I managed a small team, and together we directed an holistic range of DE&I initiatives spanning game content, team support, and external initiatives. At our largest, we were supporting a studio of approximately 600 developers across four countries, from game ideation through to post-production support.
DE&I—at its core—should be about making space for diversity, ensuring people have equitable access to opportunity, and feel included and like they can be themselves in the spaces they inhabit.
LP: Given we often only hear about 'DEI' when it's used in an oppositional context, if you look back over the last five years or so, what would you say the overall company culture was like in terms of their relationship to your work? Do you think your efforts had a lot of support internally?
AC: We were lucky to receive a lot of internal support, which we witnessed in several ways: leadership would encourage people to engage with our initiatives, we received financial resources and dedicated time to conduct our work, and we saw very little pushback from employees of any level of seniority. Early on, we did have to put in the legwork to ensure we could prove our value to our colleagues, but not in a way that felt particularly specific to DE&I. Ultimately, we were something unfamiliar, and it took some time for people to see that we were helpful for them in terms of saving time, encouraging creativity, and supporting wellbeing. The level and type of support we received shifted over time, and there were several complicating factors for that.
LP: OK, so that was over the last few years, but do you think any of that has changed over the last 12 months or so with, you know, everything else that's been going on?
AC: I think it would be easy to blame all of the challenges in the DE&I field to certain political shifts that have occurred over the last twelve months. Unfortunately, from my own experience as well as my broader research, it's a lot more complicated than that. DE&I has an 'ebb and flow' to it in terms of people prioritising this work, which we have seen over decades. That's not to say there aren't ramifications to the political shifts that have occurred in the US over the last twelve months, though; and they have been quite far-reaching, impacting many English-speaking countries outside the US too.
The main impact I've seen is that people who are interested in continuing DE&I initiatives are required to justify their work a lot more, as it's less likely to be accepted at face value that this work is effective, useful, and morally right. There are actually some benefits to that—it means DE&I practitioners need to do more work to explain what we mean by "effectiveness" in DE&I and find the data that proves certain initiatives work.
But that's only a benefit if these questions are being asked in good faith, rather than as a way to slow down or rebuff DE&I work. These changes also mean people and companies need to be genuinely committed to DE&I to make change, or else it is suddenly a lot easier for these initiatives to become de-prioritised because there is less shareholder expectation and scrutiny. However, this doesn't have as much of a negative impact as you might think, as performative companies were already incorrectly prioritising because they would generally invest in highly visible initiatives over more effective ones.
LP: It's interesting that you raise the issue of effectiveness there; is there a way that can be judged or assessed internally?
AC: I think sometimes we can get caught up in the idea of whether DE&I / DE&I programs are "effective" or "not effective", but stakeholders don't always have a meaningful conversation about what they are trying to achieve or want a DE&I program to do. How can we determine if a DE&I program is effective or not without defining what success looks like?
And by that, I don't mean metrics or KPIs. I mean that historically an effective DE&I program was one that didn't get a US company in legal trouble after new civil rights legislation was introduced in the mid-twentieth century. It wasn't about making sure employees felt like they could meaningfully participate in the workplace; it was about compliance. Thankfully, this generally isn't the case anymore, but we're building on a scaffold that is no longer applicable and expecting the result to meet success criteria that it wasn't originally designed for.
LP: Also, what do you mean by 'performative' companies? Do you mean companies making hollow gestures without doing any of the actual work?
AC: In my research, I've found that some studios are good at their PR presence, social media outputs, diversity websites, and shareholder report language, but aren't necessarily backing that up with meaningful structural change within their studios. I would say 'performative' DE&I occurs when a team prioritises optics over organisational change.
LP: What would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions about the job, both for regular people but also the way the field is perceived and portrayed by weirdos?
AC: I think everyone has an assumption in their head about what a DE&I practitioner does—however, that assumption differs from person to person depending on their context and experience. I've had people assume that DE&I is just about race or gender, without factoring in all the other intersectional vectors of marginalisation that we need to consider. I've had people assume that my work is primarily focused on sensitivity training, recruitment, human resources issues, supporting external organisations, or reviewing game content—but it's rare that somebody realised I work on all of those areas at the same time. I have always treated DE&I as an holistic and all-encompassing field that impacts every aspect of game content, developers, and audiences in ways that can sometimes be surprising. But when your mission is about creating supportive environments and authentic content, it's easy to start understanding how your work can touch every part of the game-making process.
...some studios are good at their PR presence, social media outputs, diversity websites, and shareholder report language, but aren't necessarily backing that up with meaningful structural change within their studios.
LP: What are those other 'intersectional vectors of marginalisation' that might also need help?
AC: In my work, I think there's space for DE&I to help a huge number of marginalised groups. There are common identity markers that we see talked about with this (race, gender, etc) but this can be about identity, access, context, and more. It might include race, gender, sexuality, disability, neurodivergence, mental health, class, education, access, religion, regionality, culture, language(s), and more.
DE&I—at its core—should be about making space for diversity, ensuring people have equitable access to opportunity, and feel included and like they can be themselves in the spaces they inhabit. That's less about individual identity markers and more about how we create workplace cultures that support everyone.
LP: For all the challenges you've faced, and that the field continues to face, what work would you say you're most proud of in your time at the company?
AC: I am most proud of the way my team and I managed to scale DE&I initiatives beyond us and integrate them into parts of the game development cycle. Reframing DE&I as a way to create innovative and authentic game content meaningfully impacted the way many of the developers we worked with thought about their disciplines, and over time we got to see that become part of their thought processes even when we weren't in the room. This showed me that dissolving misconceptions and demonstrating the value of DE&I is how we can create ongoing structural change.
LP: And finally, given so much of this interview has been about historical struggles, I'd love to end it on something future-facing. So: if you could wave a magic (workplace) wand today and change something about the job for the better, what would it be?
AC: I would say that, in my ideal world, there would be no such thing as "DEI initiatives". Diversity, equity, and inclusion works best when it's holistically integrated into the structure of organisations and isn't championed as a separate thing by certain individuals. The principles and morals of inclusive and equitable practices should simply be embedded in company goals, values, and success criteria, alongside concepts like innovation, quality, market reach, and accessibility.
This week on Aftermath, we’re celebrating Woke 2. What does that mean? Pieces that dig into the origins of woke—not the empty, sanitized version peddled by companies, but actual culture created by people—as well as communities that are already charting a course to a bolder, better future where we can all just be chill to one another.
