When a door becomes a window: using Glassdoor to examine game industry work cultures

ABSTRACT Despite a growing interest in its labour conditions, research about the games industry remains constrained by the streetlight effect. Non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements, or HR blocking access for embedded research, are examples of how the industry can shield itself from outside view. Furthermore, when access is granted, researchers might find themselves constrained by their own timelines (tenure clocks, graduation deadlines, etc.) that are antithetical to long-term, embedded ethnographic research. In this article, I discuss an opportunity to look behind the curtain of the game industry via employee reviews left on Glassdoor, a popular job-seeking website. These reviews provide a means to gather worker perspectives in a way that reduces the potential for harm for those who speak out to counter the dominant, PR-polished narratives about working in the game industry being a ‘dream job.’ To demonstrate Glassdoor’s utility as a supplemental data source for investigations of industry workplace cultures, I draw on employee reviews describing their experiences at Riot Games, developer of the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena League of Legends. These first-hand accounts of working at Riot provide a view into the games industry, allowing observation of how problematic work cultures become normalized, and ultimately, how workers who do not come to internalize these norms may be pushed out.