JackHandy said:
I think you're missing my point. If you have two applicants, one straight white male and one black lesbian, and the black lesbian is less qualified for the job, but you hire her over the straight white male simply because you want a more diverse work environment, you are committing two sins. One, you are intentionally hiring lesser talent, thus lowering the level of output for your company and guaranteeing a subpar product.  And two, you are hiring based on someone's identity... which is exactly the same as hiring someone simply because they are white. You can not hire based on identity and not have it be exclusionary. If you hire a black person because they are black, you are not hiring a white person because they are white. If you hire a white person because they are white, you are not hiring a black person because they are black. One comes with the other. There is no way around it. Do you understand, now? The only fair way to hire people is to do it based on qualifications and merit. |
First of all, hiring often doesn't really work like this. You often have numerous qualified candidates and any choice of who is the "best" candidate is just subjective. This goes double for creative applicants. It doesn't really make sense to fall back onto test scores and GPA so any choice has to be informed by those intangibles.
And one of those incredibly important intangibles is who that person is and what experiences they bring to the table.
Filling a writers room with only the "best" candidates could be creating a bad writers room. Diversity is an integral part of a writers room, because of what it can add to a game, so part of what may make that black lesbian the "most qualified" is that she is a black lesbian. With that she brings experiences that that straight white male likely didn't have and with that she adds something to the writers room that he just can't.
She can very well be the most qualified candidate not despite the fact that she is a black lesbian but because she is a black lesbian.
See, I used to play Magic the Gathering and I was kind of bad. My goal when building a deck was to grab all of the best cards I had and put them all together, and obviously that would give me the best shot of winning right? Well, not really. You have to worry about synergies and vision and having cards which fill in gaps. The 10 best cards in Magic the Gathering could all be in the same deck and get destroyed by a bunch of mediocre commons if the commons worked together better. Making games in some ways works similarly. Someone can be really good, but still not be a fit. That could be because they don't synergize well or their strengths are already covered by someone else on the team.
An individual's identity isn't just some meaningless flavor text written on the bottom of a card, it brings with it experiences which can be invaluable to a project. I think that is a big part of what you are missing. You fail to see an individual's identity and experiences as something that they can contribute and as such I understand the kneejerk to be concerned with diversity. The problem is, when you try to ignore or throw away a person's identity, you miss the value it brings.
EDIT: I just thought of another comparison I wanted to add. Say a game studio is making a game about growing up in Brooklyn. They are hiring writers and one writer comes in and says "Oh, thats cool. I actually grew up in Brooklyn," would it not be reasonable to say "Hm, because of this person's lived experiences with this topic, I feel they can add something that another person without those experiences may not be able to add"? It is the same with other parts of a person's identity.
Last edited by sundin13 - on 15 December 2024
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