A Serious Game to Teach About Career Pathways in the Games Industry

This paper argues that undergraduate games students often lack awareness of the diverse roles in the games industry and the hard and soft skills those roles demand, and proposes that career-pathway education, potentially delivered through serious games, should be embedded in game development curricula to support graduate employability. Its framing draws on industry context: the UK games sector is described as the largest in Europe, the global industry was valued at $175.8 million in 2021, and the UK industry supported 73,370 full-time equivalent jobs in 2019, with 24,020 of those in development and publishing roles. The discussion of job roles and required skills is primarily qualitative and conceptual, grounded in established scholarship on game design and industry practice.

The authors propose four complementary approaches for teaching career pathways: industry guest talks, extracurricular events such as game jams, multidisciplinary team projects, and curriculum design that introduces career content from the first year. Their central contribution is an early-prototype serious game, a Unity-based simulation of a games studio in which players learn about job roles, hard and soft skills, and the interdependence of roles through non-player character dialogue, puzzles, and quizzes. The design draws on Bloom's taxonomy and intrinsic motivation theory to structure learning and engagement.

The work is explicitly preliminary. The game has not yet undergone formal evaluation, and no empirical data on learning outcomes is presented. The authors acknowledge that substantiating their pedagogical approach requires further research and plan a mixed-methods study combining questionnaires and focus groups. The scope is therefore conceptual and developmental, situated primarily within the UK and Scottish games sector and aimed at undergraduate game development education.