Alisha Karabinus
ABSTRACT
This paper reports out on a survey of games industry professionals asking participants to weigh the potential value of hobbyist and volunteer experience as "work" experience. These types of volunteer experiences are offered as possible alternatives to internships, an important tool for professionalization that may be inaccessible to some students, particularly some of those historically sidelined in the games industry. Demonstrating expanded opportunities for job seekers in the games industry could be an important step forward in helping to diversify a field traditionally dominated by white cis men, and could also have implications for how we as educators teach students to self-evaluate when creating professionalization documents.
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