Ramsay Young

(that relevant experience was contract testing that I picked up on Craigslist - basically Focus Testing)

The entire culture of schmoozing at booze-heavy events seems useless to me, for any purpose that's actually related to working. It seems designed to allow gatekeepers to coerce people into sexual harassment, to be honest.

Like, if you were designing a system to give people cover for leveraging their social stature and power over other people, you'd say "everyone drinks and makes worse decisions in varying degrees, and people with power intermix freely with people without power."

I went to GDC once, in 2012. The talks were good and I learned a lot from a classic game postmortem on Fallout. People always said "the parties are where the real event happens" but, I rarely got invites. When I did, it was just to go see one friend who I knew worked at a place.

I think having a specific place/event for people to drink together and have fun together can be good and fun. But there must be extreme caution there with imbalanced power dynamics. Coercion is violence, and systems are enabling it across the board.

I've had fun drinking with my coworkers at PAX East/South/West, and Gamescom. We'd hang out after a long day working the show, and just shoot the shit and talk about our hopes, dreams, and ideas. Those are some of my favorite memories of my time in the industry so far, tbh.

But those are good situations with known-good people, all of whose intentions and stakes are on the table from the beginning. That's a totally different scenario from one where people of varying power levels with no accountability are mingled with an expectation of non-sobriety

I'm rambling, but the point of this thread is - If you're scared to go to networking events, you can get into the game industry without going to them. You don't have to go to parties. You don't have to expose yourself to abusive gatekeeping situations. You, reader, can break in.