Clint Hocking Criticizes “Viking” Culture in Game Development

LucasArts creative director Clint Hocking, who's best known for his work on Far Cry 2, leveled some good amount of criticism against game development studios, which he says suffer from "Viking" culture, "Minus the literal rape and killing, of course."

"Game development studios and their teams are largely staffed in the same way that Viking longships were crewed. Consequently, the culture is overflowing with beer and pent-up aggression, and a very significant portion of our overall cultural output is fart jokes. I think we can do better."

Hocking wants game dev studios to hire more women into game development and make it less of a boys' club. Studio culture, he says, must better reflect the structure of society as a whole and not marginalize women in the industry. 

"This means that we need to better position the industry as a desirable workplace, one in which female artists, designers, programmers and project managers would want to be employed. It involves reaching out to universities and colleges to help them attract more female applicants to their programmes, enabling us to benefit from a greater number of female graduates."

"Like the Viking expansion itself, this transformation probably needs to be driven from the bottom up. Like it or not, the culture onboard your ships is the culture you're exporting. Fart jokes have their place in culture, but when fart jokes become your culture you have a problem."

via Edge