Games Programmer who happens to be Gay

Hmm, If this post goes out it’ll be to much internal debate in my head.

I am gay, and by defin­i­tion a gay games pro­gram­mer. I want to write about how being gay has effected my life in terms of my work­ing career.

I don’t hold much in the “gay com­munity”. I tend to think of gay people with very diverse back­grounds. I only act as myself nor­mally, and most of my gay friends do as well. There is a cer­tain amount of expec­ted beha­viour in the com­munity in how you’re sup­posed to act if your gay, but the real­ity is I like guys and that’s about the end of how being gay effects my per­son­al­ity. People who know me, I hope, see me as a nice guy and I hope they see all of me just not that I am gay.

I also am not the typ­ical gay per­son in terms of looks/appearance. I have no dress sense; I don’t wear tight fit­ting clothes. I don’t have the nor­mal physique; I am a bit on the chubby side.

I have found being gay in the work­place has been tough at times. I remem­ber my first job at MYOB, they just had a set of redund­an­cies. A group of fel­low employ­ees gathered around near my work­sta­tion and said “Oh my god we got rid of one of those”, and they were all talk­ing how relieved they were to have a gay employee let go dur­ing the redund­an­cies. No men­tion that he was a fel­low col­league and had just lost his job, it was all about just one aspect of his life and that was it. This event affected me but not in a good way.

I joined the gam­ing industry because I wanted some­thing with chal­lenge and cre­ativ­ity. I decided when I was work­ing for MYOB and later Élite work­ing on tax soft­ware that gam­ing was what I wanted to do. I ended up spend­ing a for­tune buy­ing games book after games book on Amazon, this was before they were easy to get hold of. As a high school dro­pout my maths skills were shock­ing, and I knew from all the research I had done that I needed to improve. I spent 2.5 years learn­ing the maths required, much of which I would of learnt dur­ing high school.

I then got my final big break into the games industry. Ratbag was an amaz­ing exper­i­ence for me. I have many fond memor­ies from my time there, includ­ing my first pub-crawl, through the streets of Adelaide. The job came at a good time, almost a week after break­ing up with my first boy­friend I got the call to come for the inter­view. It was just the thing to boost my spir­its. Unfor­tu­nately Rat­bag only las­ted for a few months before things didn’t go well. I got told I wasn’t going to pass my pro­ba­tion, and was given a gen­er­ous pay­out and I headed back to Melbourne.

IR Gurus/Transmission was my next stop. It took around 6 months to find this job. As a junior in the games industry it’s hard to land on your feet again, and I spent many an hour going to inter­views. Hav­ing Rat­bag on the resume did help to a degree. At IR Gurus I was told I was going to be on a 3-month con­tract. I basic­ally spent about a week doing the job they hired me to-do, then I was given other duties pretty much straight away and quickly became full time. I spent a year at IR Gurus work­ing on their sports titles.

I ended up for­cing myself into the role of graph­ics pro­gram­mer. So I ended up rewrit­ing a lot of the graphic engine for the play­ers, and I think I ended up improv­ing how things worked. In terms of my gay life it was quite hard to IR Gurus, the guys in the sports team I felt were pretty homo­phobic, mak­ing homo­phobic jokes all over the place. IR Gurus had two very dif­fer­ent cul­tures because when I joined two com­pan­ies com­bined together into one, there was “That Game” who worked on Her­oes over the Pacific and IR Gurus who worked on the sports title. The “That Game” team were cool; I had issues with the IR Gurus team. I was never happy at IR Gurus due to other factors as well, such as bad work­ing con­di­tions. They were con­tinu­ally “ask­ing” us to work week­ends, pub­lic hol­i­days, and they were late with our monthly pays con­tinu­ously. I ended up hav­ing one of the worst work­ing morale’s in my work­ing life there. I almost got out of games. I ended up quit­ting and was con­tem­plat­ing going over­seas to work. I put my resumes around to dif­fer­ent com­pan­ies. I ended up quit­ting without another job to go to out of frustration.

Krome rang me about a week after quit­ting IR Gurus and asked me to-do a phone Inter­view, and later that month I accep­ted a offer to work in Bris­bane. Now Krome was a inter­est­ing place to work for. I made tech for some very excit­ing games while I was at Krome, Viva Piñata Party Anim­als, Scene It: Box Office Smash and about half a dozen other titles. I was ori­gin­ally employed in the engine team only as a tem­por­ary pos­i­tion until a pos­i­tion on a game team opened up, but the guys were suf­fi­ciently impressed with my work so I was work­ing on their tools inside the engine team. The engine team in Bris­bane had a great vibe, inter­est­ingly enough they made gay jokes all the time but I was never fazed because it was always in good spirit. One of the fel­low employ­ees made a com­ment one day “If there was any gay guys on the team, I always won­der what they think”, and to be hon­est I never had any issues. The only issue I had was isol­ated to one employee who hated gay people with such dis­taste it was fright­en­ing in a way. Things were improving.

When Krome bought out Mel­bourne House I took the first oppor­tun­ity to head back to Mel­bourne. Mel­bourne House was a great place to work. The engine team in Mel­bourne were some of the most exper­i­enced guys I’ve ever worked for, and I was learn­ing things con­tinu­ously.  I had a very sim­ilar per­son­al­ity I felt to one of the other engine pro­gram­mers, who had worked for Mel­bourne House the longest, so we had a great work­ing rela­tion­ship. There were also other gay employ­ees in the office, they weren’t “open” in terms they tell every­one about their part­ners or some­thing, but went with the policy if you asked they wouldn’t deny anything.

One thing that I always found annoy­ing though is the fact that if people asked if I was gay I would always deny it. It would be very unpleas­ant feel­ing and I would instantly turn off. I had this hap­pen a lot at Krome. I did tell one girl on my team I was gay, but that took a great deal of effort. She was great because she had a circle of friends who were gay. Also the employee who had been around Mel­bourne House for some time had a great atti­tude towards gay people. Gen­er­ally the atmo­sphere around Mel­bourne House inspired me in a lot of ways.  I guess I was hav­ing issues with my lead, I respec­ted him a lot, but we had very dif­fer­ent ways of work­ing on things. He was very much dot all the i’s type, and make sure everything came in on time. I was very much the type that would under­es­tim­ate the effort on things, which never fit­ted in well . In some ways I regret leav­ing Krome, when I left it was for a pos­i­tion with more money and it was the first time I wasn’t leav­ing because I was unhappy.

Infin­ite Inter­act­ive was the next place. I really loved their games, part of the reason why I jumped ship. Infin­ite was very much extremes in terms of the work­ing envir­on­ment. There were things that were extremely good, and things that were extremely bad. There was no middle ground in terms of the exper­i­ence there. The greats were the open doors to Steve office, I chat­ted to him for hours. I chat­ted to him about gay guys and he had some great stor­ies about that. While he worked at Stra­tegic Strategies Group, he said that boss there hated gay guys and prom­ised never to hire any, but dur­ing one Christ­mas party about 4 employ­ees all came out of the closet. Steve said he’s never had any issues with work­ing with gay guys, used to-do Dan­cing as a hobby so had many gay friends. He would get upset if any­one had issues with gay people in his com­pany. At Infin­ite there were 2 other gay employ­ees that I know of, one was very openly gay and would talk about his part­ner (and they were prac­tic­ally mar­ried), the other was a bit more intro­ver­ted any­way but never hid any­thing from any­one. I dis­covered I had good pro­ject man­age­ment skills when I was there, I organ­ised soft­ware pur­chas­ing, fix­ing of equip­ment, and fix­ing up the equip­ment. This was the extreme down­side; I had such trouble with the IT equip­ment that was bought second hand it just ended up dom­in­at­ing all my time. It spilt over into all the other ele­ments of my career, and I had angry people when my tools were late. I also felt like I was extremely unpro­duct­ive while work­ing there. I felt frus­trated at myself while work­ing there, I was in a rela­tion­ship of sorts with a guy from New Zea­l­and, and I phys­ic­ally could not tell any­one. One guy even asked me “Are you talk­ing about a girl or guy?” and I couldn’t say, I just had a phys­ical issue say­ing it out loud. In such a great envir­on­ment for homo­sexual employ­ees I should of been able to say some­thing.  The issues with the IT equip­ment, me work­ing long hours, and I had star­ted to go to Uni at that stage part time, meant I was get­ting angry, get­ting poorer and poorer in my health and some­thing had to give. I was really enjoy­ing Uni at this stage, more so than my work­ing career, so I ended up quitting.

Hmm so then I ended up being a full time uni stu­dent. I have to admit I haven’t lost the buzz of enjoy­ing learn­ing yet. Part of the reason for doing Uni (well one reason amongst many) was to meet guys. I am very phys­ic­ally attrac­ted to reg­u­lar Uni going guys, and my ex from NZ was also doing CompSci. I have been doing uni now for a year and a half.

I have done a whole heap of games units at Mon­ash. I have to admit it was a little tough. I was act­ing the intro­vert dur­ing the semester, when in fact I love being social (and introverted/extroverted I’m weird like that). I was just told by a few work col­leagues at Infin­ite to lay low don’t let any­one know.

I’ve also star­ted my own com­pany doing some iPhone games. We applied for fund­ing back in March but got declined and now I really want to focus in get­ting some tech done over the next few weeks. We couldn’t pro­gress with the game until we knew what was hap­pen­ing with the fund­ing, which was frus­trat­ing since the fund­ing can only develop new stuff, not stuff already developed.

I went to the Mon­ash Games Boot Camp; iron­ic­ally I prob­ably wouldn’t have issues with com­ing out to most people there. I found out a friend was gay there, and I found out another acquaint­ance was “bi”.

I guess if someone is read­ing this and maybe decid­ing to become a games pro­gram­mer and is gay, take com­fort, things are get­ting bet­ter. I would say that the games industry des­pite my earlier prob­lems things have got­ten a lot bet­ter, it is a cre­at­ive industry so people are going to be from all sorts of back­grounds. If you’re in high school, Uni is a lot dif­fer­ent; you’re going to have some level of accept­ance in Uni. I per­son­ally dropped out of high school and part of that were the con­flict­ing feel­ings of being gay. Don’t feel the need to be any­one but your­self, and real­ise that people have issues with being gay all the way in their 20s and I’m soon to see in their 30s I’m sure.

Also don’t let being Gay define who you are. I am start­ing to learn that emo­tion­ally it has to be a part of you but don’t let being Gay determ­ine your actions. Your attrac­ted to guys (or girls) and there are many ele­ments that make up the rest of you. I believe the path to true integ­ra­tion into soci­ety is for people who are homo­phobic just to real­ise that gay guys and girls are just like them, they play games, they pro­gram, they go home to part­ners, they are short, they are tall, and they are chubby (like me), and some dress well, some don’t, some hit the gym every day, some don’t. I real­ised when I went through the stage of get­ting gay friends “hey these guys are just guys, with their good points and bad”.

I guess that’s why I have a fun­da­mental issue with gay cul­tural stuff. I see gay bars as being a import­ant thing, in terms you can go there and hit on someone and you know they aren’t going to get weirded out, but gay magazines and stuff are strange. You can find gay gam­ing magazines now, if I want to find out if a game is good enough, what does being gay have to-do with it? i.e. Halo 3 is going to suck if a straight or gay guy reviews the game.

*edit* I don’t want to be known as the gay games pro­gram­mer, I don’t think its rel­ev­ant most of the time. I don’t want to shout from the hill­tops I’m gay or any­thing. The three things I con­sider import­ant in a employer is,

1. Can I take my part­ner along to the christ­mas part­ner
2. Can I tell other col­leagues about  sig­ni­fic­ant life events such as buy­ing a house with a part­ner.
3. Ideally I don’t want a ton of gay jokes. It just makes it more com­fort­able without it.

Any­way, I hope someone finds this useful.