Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene Unhappy with Lack of Gender Diversity in PUBG Corp Special Projects Division, Games Industry

Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, the creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), recently lamented that the Special Projects Division of PUBG Corp was almost “all male” due to recruitment guidelines in Amesterdam preventing the team from telling a recruiter “we want a particular type of person.”

According to GamesIndustry.biz, while speaking at the recently held VIEW Conference 2019 in Italy, Greene categorized the goal of improving gender diversity among his Special Projects team as “really hard” due to the fact that Greene cannot tell recruiters to explicitly pick “a particular type of person,” in this case a hypothetical woman:

“It’s really hard. We cannot tell a recruiter that we want a particular type of person. We will give them a job description, and we will tell them ‘this is the kind of team we’re building’, but we can’t tell them we want a diverse selection of people.”

“They will just give us stuff. And as a result I have one woman on my team, and I hate that. [My team has] people from all over the world, from Ukraine, Russia, America, Canada. It’s an international crew, but all male.”

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Greene then reflects on the difficulty of this endeavor, noting that even though the job descriptions had “heavily feminized wording,” this did not deter recruiters from contacting male candidates, as in Greene’s words, “the quality of the the candidates we get is not at the stage we want.”:

“I’ve looked at my job descriptions, trying to figure out if we have a male-oriented job description. But no, [they had] heavily feminised wording, right? You try and try, but I’m reliant on the CVs that I get through the door… And the quality of the candidates we get is not at the stage we want. It sucks, but we are trying.”

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Looking towards the future, Greene believes that the industry has to begin “earlier” in promoting “diversity in the industry” in order to change applicant and candidate demographics, specifically by “going to schools” and inviting interested individuals to pursue a career in video games:

“But that’s the problem, I think. It’s fine to want 50/50, but right now there isn’t that diversity in the industry. We have to start earlier. We have to be going to the schools and say ‘Listen, do you want a job in games? Then please come… There’s something for you here within gaming. Come and be a part of the fun.’

“It’s fine wanting these diverse standards now, but unfortunately there just isn’t that diverse a work-pool to draw from. We have to start earlier. We have to start getting out there and contacting education, and changing it at that level.

“And then, hopefully, in a few years we’ll start seeing the results from that. But it’s a challenge.”

What do you make of Greene’s comments?

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