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Right now in the UK,  drought of fairly paid, entry level roles in the industry. The ones that do exist, either sit at minimum wage or  


their applicants. Dan Ahern, QA lead at Radical Forge


SOCIAL MOBILITY AND THE GAMES INDUSTRY: HOW AN INDUSTRY WORTH £4.6 BILLION IS FAILING ITS TALENT


OVER TWO DECADES AGO, I sat down to play my first video game, Ocarina of Time. My uncle had acquired a questionably cheap Playstation 1 from his mate down the pub, and he decided that he would pass down his battered N64 to me, games included. That, paired with the CRT TV my grandad had found in the neighbouring alleyway a few weeks back, set me on a path that has undoubtedly spiraled into my career today.


For many kids, videogames are just fun distractions from boring things like numbers and the alphabet. For me, it inadvertently ended up as a coping mechanism. Being a child growing up in a low-income, working class household, you get exposed to things your brain doesn’t fully understand at the time. Loud bangs on the door from bailiffs, for me, became a game of hiding from the ReDeads skulking around Hyrule’s Castle Town. My grandmother having to choose between paying our electric


14 | MCV/DEVELOP June 2023


bill that week or buying food that wasn’t tinned or in powder form didn’t phase me, since I’d managed to get a Gameboy Color from a car boot sale just the week before (which ran on batteries, no wall socket needed!). I was fortunate enough to be shielded from the reality of financial strain growing up, and my situation felt normal. Shared baths and butter sandwiches were just something everyone experienced, right? The nature of this struggle became clearer as I got older, and when I became homeless at 17, it really put into perspective just how much my grandparents shielded me from. Several combinations of couch surfing, working stressful jobs, and signing up to degrees just to have some funding and housing behind me, I was fortunate enough to be able to tune into E3 and The Game Awards, dreaming that one day I’d get to work on something shown there. It was however difficult not to look at all the decorated


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