Industry veterans get candid on ageism in gaming | Hacker News Reader

Industry veterans get candid on ageism in gaming

kotaku.com

63 pointsPaulHoule81 comments

Twenty years in games now and am 42 and I think things are really getting better. Granted I've not been in the open job market for over a decade, moving through my network rather than applying directly for jobs. Work-life balance is much better than it used to be as is pay, in particular working remote has been a godsend for my own sanity. The article read a little starry eyed for the days of crunch and low-pay and whilst the camaraderie was there I have absolutely no desire to go back to working ridiculous hours.

I'm definitely over massive studios though and love working in smaller teams. It's much nicer to have more direct impact on the end product as well as working together in a smaller close nit unit where most people are wearing multiple hats.

> moving through my network rather than applying directly for jobs.

This seems to be the biggest differentiator between folks who are struggling to find work and those who are finding roles just fine. This is a horrible time to be applying directly for roles through HR portals. But I haven't noticed a large difference in opportunities popping up through "professional" networks.

The people who pull a muscle patting themselves on their back for being champions for DEI aren't about that life when it comes to age. But they soon will need to be. The younger generations are getting smaller and smaller and from that pool you need skilled labor. One of the silent reasons that so many senior developers are out of work is because there is about to be a decade of wage inflation. If you can dump a bunch of senior developers and their salaries you can depress their rate, then you can take a bite out of the wage inflation while also restarting their annual raises.

Only 9% of game developers are 50 years or older.

The answer to this is dead simple.

Let's take a developer who has made it a lifelong career. They started post college at age 22. This means they began working in games in 1996 or before and are still at it. The number of game developer from this time is miniscule compared to today, which itself might result in 9% or less. Additionally, games being the difficult industry it is, there are any number of reasons for someone to leave the industry well before age discrimination becomes a factor.

Or the case of a developer moving over later in their careers. Surely this is an extremely rare occurrence as the pay and ability to do things like raise a family will keep them in more traditional (stable) jobs.

There aren't many 50+ developers (and that number is turning into 55+ way too fast for me) today because there just weren't that many 20 year old developers in the 90's.

> there just weren't that many 20 year old developers in the 90's.

John Carmack was 21 in 1992 when Wolf3D came out, Romero was 25

Tim Sweeney was 21 in 1991 when he released ZZT

Ken Silverman was 21 in 1996 when Duke Nukem 3D was released, Todd Replogle was 27

Cliff Bleszinski (19) and Arjan Brusse (22) released Jazz Jackrabbit in 1994

Shawn Hargreaves (sp?) was in his 20's in the 1990's when he created Allegro and went on to Probe entertainment etc.

The games industry seemed to be dominated by 20-somethings in the 1990's

I could go on all day. Also, hundreds of teenage 'bedroom coders' were doing ports of coin-ops to home PC's.

I think they mean there are way more 20-somethings now than there were in the 90s so proportionally over the growth of the industry older developers are naturally going to be underrepresented.

I'm not so sure. Go back to the 70's and 80's. The creator of Pacman was 25. David Crane was still in his 20's when he started Activision. Trip Hawkins was 29 when he started Activision. Will Wright started at 24. Mark Turmell (NBA Jam, Smash TV) was hired at Midway when he was 26 and was selling games as a teenager. Miyamoto joined Nintendo at 25.

A huge amount of these guys were having games published when they were teens.

I think you’ve misunderstood what people are talking about.

There are way more 20 somethings entering directly into tech now than in the 90's. In the 90's something like computer science was much smaller. Other nearby disciplines were nowhere near as computer oriented as they are now. And people outside of that didn't have the internet-can-teach-you-anything as a resource.

That all changed in the late 90's as the whole population came online.

Yes that’s what I’m saying.

I think I put my reply in the wrong place...yes, we agree.

That's a nice nostalgic list, but it sort of proves the point, doesn't it? There were so few that we remember most of them. Today there are 300k game devs in the US.

They aren't remembered for being young, but for working on the top games of the time.

Single data points are not statistics. Fact is, the number of 20 something developers today far exceeds the number of developers of the 1990s.

Nothing you said here is incorrect, but it doesn't eliminate the possibility of discrimination. In my experience, it makes discrimination even more likely when the discriminated class is smaller due to other nondiscriminatory reasons. It is a lot easier to discriminate against a handful of people than a larger group and it is a lot harder to stand up against discrimination when you don't have a lot of peers.

Employers want cheap labor, and firing older workers who've climbed a ways up the salary/wage ladder and replacing them with new hires is one of the most consistent methods for doing this.

The only way to avoid this in the merciless capitalist culture we live in is to get a contract, and of course employers don't want to hand out contracts (unless you're in the executive suite, where everyone gets a contract).

Indeed, it's a fair argument to say that the artistocrat-serf divide under medieval feudalism is mirrored in the contract employee / at-will employee division under investment capitalism.

A key element in unionization efforts is the promise that all employees become contract employees, thus if the corporation wants to do a mass round of layoffs and re-hires to cut labor costs, severance pay under contract makes this an un-economical option for the executive suite.

For some mysterious reason, this reality is never taught in high school economics courses.

I want at will employment for myself and to offer my labor with less termination friction. What you mean by "all employees" is to say, take away the bodily autonomy of the employee to enter mutually consensual arrangement and instead smash them with third party imposition of the union.

A great deal for certain union barons, no doubt, who can act as a middleman cartel .

Traditionally, that kind of arrangement would classify you as an 'independent contractor' - but notice, you're still getting a contract, it's just a contract for something like a finished product. (Here I am ignoring the con game of corporations attempting to reclassify employees as independent contractors so they don't have to pay taxes into SS or provide health care etc.).

> is to say, take away the bodily autonomy of the employee to enter mutually consensual arrangement

No union ever forced someone to accept a job they didn't want. If you had a contract you'd know exactly what the terms are and you'd be entirely free to accept them or not.

Also, while I'm sure your default position is "union bad!" and that you're unlikely to change that view, I'd remind you that union employees are not powerless slaves to "union barons". If a union isn't serving the needs of its members they can vote out union leadership or in extreme cases even disband the union and form a new one that will better support them.

What if I consent to performing labor but don't consent to membership in or contract with the democratic system of the union? I don't see how the vote of third party is relevant here. I'm fine if all the other employees want to be in the union and I can undercut them to get a job.

What if my company consents to selling widgets to a new customer, but doesnt consent to the exclusivity clause they have with the another supplier? I dont see how the vote of the third party is relevant here.

You see how ridiculous that sounds when you don't treat unions as some special form of supplier that doesn't get to negotiate in groups, right?

It sounds ridiculous because your example isn't a imposition of a third party but rather a contract the counterparty signed to and thus asking something the counterparty doesn't consent to doing.

And can a company and union not sign a contract for only exclusively using union labor, sort of like some exclusivity deal?

Sure, then it's no longer third party dissent but counterparty dissent in hiring non union. Obviously competitors will emerge to varying success to employ these excluded persons.

So then you don’t have a problem with being required to be part of a union to work at certain companies.

I’d also like to point out that you needed to have this framed in the context of a union negotiating the same way as a company before you were ok with it. Why the visceral reaction to unions but none for companies?

The initial premise was 'all' employees.

If the company and employee have choice to choose union/non union I have no problem with it. The visceral reaction was to denial of employment by mutual consent.

Come on. You can be pro union and also recognize that many unions have had extremely poor, corrupt, self-serving leadership and that changing them isn't trivial. Eg look at what happened to the hilariously corrupt UAW when Fain got in and actually did his job.

While in theory union employees can change their leadership, in practice, that appears to be extremely difficult, and I don't think you can make a case that the UAW was serving the needs of its members for at least the 20 years preceding Fain.

That's not to say unions are bad, but it's a more complex picture than you're painting.

> in practice, that appears to be extremely difficult, and I don't think you can make a case that the UAW was serving the needs of its members for at least the 20 years preceding Fain.

I can't say that I'm intimately familiar with the UAW although on the whole it seems to have been an extremely successful union. Was there a large effort to oust Rory Gamble before the corruption scandal came to light?

There's no denying that union leadership was corrupt and that members were hurt by that. The last 20 years saw some major concessions to the auto industry, some of it due to self-serving leadership that was caught colluding with industry executives and some of it due to the failing industry itself which needed a massive government bailout in that same time period.

I will say that all of that didn't stop many people from claiming that the union was being far too good for the employees, so good that the workers were supposedly "highly overpaid" and responsible for driving the industry into the ground. Even trump complained at the time of the bailout about autoworkers getting raises ("They get their little five percent. They get another two percent. They get another three percent, four percent ... and all of a sudden they're making more money than the people that own the company.") Even a union at its worst and weakest is still too good for some people I guess.

We don't let people sell themselves into slavery even though that would "take away the bodily autonomy of the employee to enter mutually consensual arrangement and instead smash them with third party imposition...", no "union baron" needed.

Your race to the bottom can affect others, regardless of wether or not you recognize negative externalities exist.

I don't see a compelling reason why I shouldn't be able to act as a slave for as long as both parties consent to it. If you want to create lovich 1840s era cotton picking slave service with the full historical recreation it's not clear why that's anyone else's business but you and the masta'.

Man you literally just had the whole but about race to the bottom and negative externalities woosh right over your head.

There are some behaviors that are banned because paradoxically by allowing you the liberty to do that, everyone’s liberty is negatively affected.

Whos liberty is effected if you and I play slave farm until one of us screams uncle?

Everyone who now has to deal with that being an option on the negotiating table. It being banned removes it from the discussion.

I am having a hard believing you’re acting in good faith if you’re arguing it’s immoral that you can’t sell yourself into slavery

That some may agree to slavery-until-i-say-uncle is far less threat to liberty than some democratic oppressor that picks and chooses what consenting adults may agree to based on what hypothetical options might end up on the negotiating table of other consenting adults.

Respectfully, no it’s not. Go read up on game theory

"Ageism" itself is something of a strange concept.

Often, what is described as discrimination just seems to be a sane collection of valid trends:

- Older people are less willing to work longer hours.

- Older people are more aware of their rights as an employee.

- Older people may struggle to pick up new skillsets.

While it would be bad to find myself unemployable due to these factors, I find it hard to argue that they're not generally true. Obviously these are trends, and not things which are always true. Some of them aren't even discrimination against older folks. eg; it's easier to take advantage of younger workers. That's more of an indictment of corporate culture than the older folks themselves. In other words, it's discriminatory hiring, but not discrimination against the group of people who are older.

A common retort here is that an older person might not necessarily fall prey to these issues, even if they can be true in a general sense. I'm not sure what to do there. People don't seem to know what to think about stereotypes. Some stereotypes are true. Some stereotypes are bigoted falsehoods. Even if you're most interested in fairness, how can you know ahead of time whether you've encountered an outlier. Or, how can you know when your stereotype should not actually inform your decision? The social justice crowd provides no answers here: they claim that all stereotypes are as malicious as they are false, and this causes cognitive dissonance when you can tell for sure that some of them are true.

Further, "Ageism" is one of the only isms which can turn back on itself eventually. If I'm racist against black people, there's no chance that I become black later in life and become the target of the ire I've helped foster. However if I discriminate against the older generation when I'm in my 20s, I will eventually become the older generation myself. It doesn't necessarily work out this way in practice, but I would think I'd want to make things _better_ for the older generation, even if that requires unfairness, as I will eventually become older and reap the benefits.

>Or, how can you know when your stereotype should not actually inform your decision? The social justice crowd provides no answers here: they claim that all stereotypes are as malicious as they are false, and this causes cognitive dissonance when you can tell for sure that some of them are true.

Maybe just me, but if you are talking about enacting policies that negatively impact a protected group, I think the burden of proof should be on the people doing the discriminating rather than the group that says don't discriminate. Can you show that given two otherwise identical candidates, the older candidate would perform worse on the job? If not, then why are you so confident in these stereotypes?

For me personally? I would try not to discriminate, and just evaluate the individual's skillsets as they fit the job. I have a lot of confidence in my ability to do this, but I suspect that's sort of the point: there's a range of ability when it comes to assessing candidates, and generally speaking no one believes they're terrible at it; they believe they're doing a good job, and of course, many are not.

WRT the "older candidate stereotype," I think that's a bit more of a grey area. Are people in their late 30s and 40s being passed over? There's not really any mental decline at those ages, and I would suspect that the other issues discussed (ie, we can pay a younger candidate less) are the true issue. For sure, mental decline is a real thing, but it varies quite a bit in people. If someone were in their 50s and 60s, I would definitely be alert to the possibility of decline and outdated skillsets, but I would also be attentive to the fact that this is not necessarily the case. Does this make me bigoted? I'm not sure, and I think this is where the grey area lies. It's certainly not unusual for someone in their 60s to have lost a step compared to when they were in their 30s. It's hard for me to imagine that the stereotype should carry _no_ weight in that case.

The ideal would _always_ be to evaluate the person on an individual basis. And from a personal perspective, this is always what I would strive to do. (ie, I was talking about stereotypes in the general sense, not necessarily as they applied to me.) But people take mental shortcuts. Somewhere out there is a case where the 31 year old was the correct hire over the 62 year old, with age being one of the major factors. Is this stereotype overly-relied on? Is it just a stand-in for bad business practices? (ie, we can pay younger people less) I'm sure that's true sometime.

Realistically, people will be making mental shortcuts as they navigate the world. There seems to be no escaping this as a general fact. People often misjudge me, but this is seldom due to any protected group status. The idea behind the "protected groups" is that there has been pernicious, malicious, and egregious negative judgement aimed at these individuals. I personally find that racism or sexism feel qualitatively different than something like ageism.

The real trick, at least in my mind, seems to be to be able to see the individual in front of you rather than the group. It's just that there are two problems with this:

- People are not always very good at seeing the individual rather than the group.

- Seeing the individual rather than the group will not necessarily move representation numbers if stereotypes are based on fact. (as an easy example, there are not very many people in their 60s playing professional football. You don't need to be "bigoted" against older people to arrive at this scenario. You could arrive here with purely objective fitness tests.) And crucially, many people see "incorrect" representation numbers as proof of bigotry.

That's more of an indictment of corporate culture

Like you say, these are common issues that affect workers, regardless of age.

It always boils down to some form of those to have vs those don't. Those who have fear a united front, in this case, the corporation fears a united workforce, so they will distract the employees by trying to get them to fight amongst themselves. "Oh you're younger colleagues accept less pay for more work, blame them, not me".

I suspect that the ageism effect in tech looks more like this:

Programmer A has 10 years of experience with $various_old_tech and only 1 year of experience with $hot_new_tech. (S)he has a target salary of $150k.

Programmer B has 2.5 years of experience with $hot_new_tech and has a target salary of $120k.

Which will the hiring manager choose? Keyword-driven recruitment suggests that they will pick programmer B *possibly even regardless of salary expectations*. At least, it's easy to conclude this if you take the "requirements" section of most job postings literally.

But the most likely person to get the job is actually whichever programmer has acquaintances at the company that is hiring … which I am starting to view as a weak form of nepotism, with all of the criticism that word implies.

A good way to test if you're ageist is to replace "older" with "black" or "female" and re-read what you wrote (assuming you're not racist or sexist).

I'm an older developer (60), and no longer have an amazing memory like when I was young. It absolutely slows me down and makes it harder to learn new things. That said, I am the top performer on my current team of younger devs, in part because of my depth of experience.

This would assume that racism is totally equivalent to ageism, and I just can't imagine a world where this is true. Generally speaking, cultures have revered the older generations. It's only the recent rapid innovations in technology which have reversed this ancient trend. And crucially, it's reversed it because accumulated wisdom is negatively impacted by an ever-changing landscape. (it's not rendered useless, of course.) On the other hand racism and sexism have been around since time immemorial. Dr. King himself did not believe it was possible to erase racism from the world completely, and I think he was wise to believe that. Ageism by contrast is a very different, and modern problem.

> This would assume that racism is totally equivalent to ageism…

No, it just assumes that ageism, racism, and sexism are all forms of bigotry.

> Ageism by contrast is a very different, and modern problem.

Even though attitudes toward different age groups have varied across cultures and time periods, it's not "a modern problem". For example, the U.S.'s Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) became law in 1967, but ageism goes back centuries.

> Older people are more aware of their rights as an employee.

Love that you highlight that as a mark against them.

> I'd want to make things _better_ for the older generation, even if that requires unfairness

Making things better for the elderly requires being unfair to them. Sure.

I'm sorry this is the impression I gave. I'm discussing what I believe to be the general perception of people who do hiring. I wasn't representing what I believe is morally correct.

Ableism is another one that can turn back on you. You can get in an accident, go blind, get a debilitating illness etc. its also one where it's even more obvious that the person with the disability can't perform in the exact ways an abled person can. Blind developer requires special work environment, takes longer to have a screen reader read things to them etc. but we generally agree that we should not discriminate against disabled people as much as possible. Probably can't have a blind referee at a sports event or a wheelchair bound construction worker. But they can fill many other roles very well even if their bathroom breaks take 10 minutes longer or they can't do an over the shoulder debugging session at your desk.

The real benefits of non-discriminatory practices is in diversity. Not HR sanctioned diversity but diversity of life as in nature. Monocultures of all types are fragile.

This is a great point, I hadn't considered ableism. All of us could fall prey to an accident, but of course still need to work.

Prejudice harms everyone involved, including those who perpetrate it, and those whom a prejudice claims are naturally "better" than their peers.

We grow as people by thinking critically about our prejudices. We become more accurate in our expectations, more empathetic in our interactions with others, and better equipped to think critically about other subjects.

The benefits of accessibility are not limited to people with disabilities. A wheelchair ramp doesn't cease to be a ramp when someone walks on it. Disabilities aren't limited to where you expect them, either: most people get worse vision with age, but a significant number of younger adults have a vision disability.

> Older people may struggle to pick up new skillsets.

bologna, older people have seen the cycle enough times and have a nose for what to avoid.

That's not the same as struggling to pick up new skillsets.

I've tried my damndest to avoid react, yet I recently delivered a contract in it. Probably 8 hours of what I billed was learning react and redux and most of THAT was picking up how they were implementing it. The actual learning react/redux was probably under 2 hours.

Cliff Bleszinksi's thoughts on the games industry should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt. The sorts of development he, in particular, describes has been recognised as destructive, and is increasingly uncommon at AAA studios that operate at the highest levels.

IIRC his time in the industry ended after he ran his studio into the ground by making an overwatch clone with boring characters, then trying to pivot to a Fortnite clone before the money finally ran out. I don't consider him a credible source for what is required to create successful games, and I wish he would step out of the spotlight to leave room for newer voices.

I think this is an unnecessary ad hominem attack against him, even if what you are saying is true. TFA says that Cliff B is almost out of gaming these days, and everything he says in the article makes sense.

PS: I worked many years in the game industry at AAA level.

> IIRC his time in the industry ended after he ran his studio into the ground by making an overwatch clone with boring characters, then trying to pivot to a Fortnite clone

Tbh this kinda just feels like the industry playbook.

no click zone lol

It’s weird that people just accept an insane working culture of staying every day until midnight.

So many crap games get made, surely we could afford to cut half of them and redirect the resources towards the other half?

Sure, but the challenge with that idea is that -- as with so many things -- which half do you cut? It helps if you think of games as _media_ rather than as _software_. Sure, at least half of movies released in a given year are crap, but how can you know (beyond a baseline quality/craftsmanship level) which ones are going to be a hit and which ones will flop?

Who is "we"? There is no central planning agency that can redirect resources across the games industry. If workers want shorter hours then they need to push for that through collective bargaining or legislation.

If we're going to talk about ageism let's talk about the fact that it is still perfectly legal for older people to discriminate against younger people, and until that changes, any complaints about this topic (from people who generally hold the majority of power/wealth in this country) frankly sounds really disingenuous to me.

I'm aware ageism is a problem, but I'm not sure we should be feeling overly sorry for executives that make far too much more than the (much younger) people below them.

you are somehow making the incorrect assumption that everyone older than you is an 'executive' that nobody should feel sorry for?

Thats some stretch.

The example in the article is literally about an executive.

gaming studios are full of people who are squarely in the target market for the product they're developing. this has downsides but in many ways is a huge edge, so in a sense ageism seems more justifiable in games than elsewhere as a close proxy for audience understanding

i should make it a point to play games made by old people-- i'd probably like them more.

that's an interesting idea. are games special? does this same idea apply to movies?

The average age of a 'gamer' is actually a lot higher than you might think. 35-44 according to this:

https://venturebeat.com/business/esa-ceo-64-of-u-s-adults-ar...

That's older than the median age of a human being. Granted, people don't tend to play games before the age of about 7, but that still seems suspect.

Googling the median age of Americans it looks like it's 38.9 so not that far off the mid-point of that age range!

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/us/census-median-age.html

Why? Elder Millennials and younger GenXers (born late 70s and early 80s) were arguably the first generation to grow up where video games were mainstream, and that's just a little older than that age bracket. I'm in my early forties, and I've enjoyed everything from the original Final Fantasy to Baldur's Gate 3 over the years.

And I'm sure there are folks older than me who picked them up in their 20s and 30s.

I'll probably be a gamer until I die - I see no reason to give it up; I just change my play style.

I keep having this vision of a retirement home full of aging gamers, electronic and TPRGs.

It seems suspect in the sense that we’d expect gaming to be at least as mainstream in the subsequent generation, right? The median age of a gamers should be approaching the median age of the population from below, I’m fine with believing it is pretty close, but how’d it get higher?

When I actually googled to see what the median age of Americans was it's 38.9 which is pretty much in the middle of the quoted age range.

At 58, and playing 'video' games since the late 70s, I'm happily pulling the average age of gamers higher every year. Better than that, at 58 we just started work on our first video game that we have talked about making for over 20 years.

Seems like some definitions need to be clarified here

The measure should be weighted by hours played or dollars spent or something.

Why? To satisfy people’s preconceived notion of what a gamer is?

You can definitely break the industry down deeper by looking at different cohorts which is interesting but doesn’t alter the top line numbers.

I have never heard the use of "gamer" to mean "at least plays games sometimes every now and then".

You can understand though that from a broad industry perspective everyone that plays games is a potential customer and thus interesting as a gamer?

Yes, in the same way I am interesting as a carpenter.

Most people working on games have little input to the game dynamics, but sure have a bias for younger people because they can 'relate' to the market, and nothing to do with being more exploitable!

I believe the reason gaming studios prefer younger employees has more to do with salaries than anything else.

Game dev salaries seem to be really bad compared to the rest of the industry, but so hyped and "cool" that younger people keep fighting over those jobs.

I turned down a job at machine games because of really mediocre compensation compared to what I had before, working at a rather unknown startup.

Younger gamers have time. Older gamers have money.

That sounds like a great reason to hire more older adults. After all, that's always been one of the most difficult groups to market games to.

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