“Last year we ran a big games careers festival in Downham, on the border of Lewisham and Bromley in London, in a leisure center in the heart of a very deprived community that hasn’t seen anything like this in that space,” Into Games CEO Declan Cassidy tells me over a call. A UK-based non-profit focused on enhancing social mobility in the UK games sector, Into Games reported last year that, in terms of socioeconomic access, game development has one of the worst records “of any creative or technical sector”.
2022’s UKIE census found that only 13% of UK games professionals are from working class backgrounds, a figure Cassidy has said would be closer 37% if it reflected society as a whole. It’s a complex issue, but Cassidy’s work starts in a simple place: letting working class young people understand that there’s a place for them in games to begin with.
“There’s that famous thing: you can’t be it until you see it,” Cassidy says, “If you can’t see these roles, then you’re not going to even aspire [to them]”. Into Games brought eight big names to Downham, including Ubisoft, Rocksteady and Splash Damage, alongside local colleges and universities. 500 local young people turned up and took part in one-to-ones with 50 sector professionals, “which then meant they could see career pathways for themselves.”
“People from these backgrounds are central to the kind of work that we’re doing going forward,” Cassidy says. “You can run this kind of stuff at a kind of shiny, glitzy place in the center of a city, or a big university. But often there are certain people that just don’t leave their area, you know, because they feel comfortable there, because they feel safe there, because their families and friends are there. So it’s really important to bring this stuff to them and to those communities, to get the kind of visibility that we need. To get these people to understand that there’s a place for them in the sector”.
Even if you’re from outside the UK, you’re probably still aware of the UK’s famously byzantine, crusty, and somewhat arbitrary norms around ‘class’. That 13% figure from the UKIE report uses the term “semi-routine / routine” – things like manual labour, as distinct from managerial work. A caretaker. A waitress. A factory worker.
“Working class is really what your parents did,” says Cassidy. “It’s not necessarily anything to do with income. It infers low income just by what those kind of working positions are. But it can, in essence, be a little bit clumsy in its more broad use”. They often use the term “under-resourced” as a more accurate reflection of the place between low income and working class. “Working class doesn’t necessarily mean low income.”
The sort of social mobility problems Into Games aim to tackle with events, research, courses and bursaries for training, networking and equipment aren’t necessarily unique to games. “It’s small for the entire creative sectors. Not just the creative sectors, it’s also small for any of the major professional sectors,” says Cassidy. But the UK games industry does present a unique circumstance: the pipelines into many of those other roles aren’t filled with people from working class or low income backgrounds to begin with. “Whereas the pipeline for games roles, it kind of is. We haven’t got an issue with attracting people into games roles at all.”
“People from working class and low income backgrounds are not only financially poor, but often time poor as well.”
The issue, says Cassidy, is the challenges under-resourced people face in the last mile. The place between gradua
