How Ubisoft taps the strengths of its neurodiverse employees in game development
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About 18% of game development professionals identify themselves as neurodivergent, according to a census by the United Kingdom’s trade group, UKIE. The key is turning that neurodivergence into an advantage.
That’s a higher percentage than the 15% that is present in the general population, but these individuals are too often invisible as a group or misunderstood, Ubisoft said in a session at the Game Developers Conference.
Ubisoft’s Pierre Escaich, director of the neurodiversity talent program, and Aris Bricker, associate game designer at Ubisoft’s Redstorm, gave a talk at the GDC about unlocking the power of neurodiversity in game development. They shared how Ubisoft’s HR teams and employee groups launched a dual, complementary initiative on neurodiversity, and they did an interview with me during GDC in March. While Escaich has been working on games for 25 years, Bricker has been at Ubisoft for three years.
“We have people with all kinds of neurological conditions, all kinds of jobs, all kinds of seniority,” said Escaich, who has worked for about a year as head of the HR program at Ubisoft dedicated to neurodiversity.
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“The main point basically is that there is a strong connection between our diversity and what we call techies,” Escaich said. “They share many traits with neurodivergent individuals.”
More than a billion people around the world are neurodivergent, and that population is well-represented within gaming. The 2022 UK
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