The Conflict in Ukraine: Impact on the Gaming Industry
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“Games are a cultural force,” says Kate Edwards in her closing remarks on this panel on the geopolitical dynamics of games. In the last few years, gamers have been negative on the way developers model geopolitics in games. Always convinced that someone is trying to message them with some kind of SJW intent, the Trump-era kickback was not insignificant. But dynamics, global dynamics, have real world impacts on the creators, and so how would any gamer expect these things to not seed themselves in the stories that they tell? The conflict in Ukraine is a timely example on the impact of geopolitics on the gaming industry.
Kate Edwards, a geographer who does culturalization work in the games industry, is a consultant who helps game companies understand the real world of geopolitics. She discussed these issues during a GamesBeat Summit panel last week with game developer Dr. Yaraslau Kot, who is heavily involved in the game dev scene in Russia and Ukraine. Alexey Menshikov, head of a game studio in Kiev (and now a refugee from the war in Ukraine temporarily living in the United States) also joined the panel.
The three had a simple message: Politics impact games development and politics are in games.
Menshikov was at DICE when the conflict in Ukraine started. His team could not get out of Kiev. He worked with other nations and got fifteen members of his team and some of their family out of the country. His oldest daughter evaded capture. She spent a week in a local bomb shelter, left over from the Cold War. She eventually escaped to Europe. His company is back on track now at full capacity. It took three weeks for them to
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