Report: The Game Industry's Relationship With Alcohol
When Anna attended her first games industry event ten years ago, it came with a warning from her boss.
“I should be nice, but not too nice to the male attendees,” she recounts. “It might get taken the wrong way, he didn’t want me to end up in a bad situation. He was preempting this kind of behaviour from the men in attendance.”
He was right to warn Anna (not her real name) about these events. It was an afterparty for a recent expo, which many attended for networking opportunities.
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“I was subsequently followed around the venue by a man incessantly,” she says. “You only need to look at photos from the early days of the industry expos, where things like booth babes were really common, to get a read on how the atmosphere of these events was incredibly hostile towards women.”
Anna is speaking to me in the wake of yet another industry event, one held specifically for women, being described as a “men’s preying ground”. The Activision Blizzard sponsored GDQ afterparty, held by Women In Games International, was called out on social media for failing to protect its attendees. One woman who attended claimed that “several inappropriate men” were allowed to enter, one of which kept touching her.
One thing these events had in common is the prevalence of alcohol. On all sides of the industry, many networking opportunities take place in bars and clubs. Much of the frat boy behaviour that took place at Activision Blizzard apparently happened on boozy work outings, especially in BlizzCon’s infamous “Cosby suite”. This room, which pictures reveal to be excessively full of alcohol, was linked to incidents like senior developer Alex Afrasiabi
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