Extra Credits

In her interview at Riot in 2015, one woman was asked to recall her favorite trinket from a 2004 World of Warcraft raid. She had already detailed what games she played and how often she played them. Throughout the hour-long interview, she said, her interviewer had been fact-checking her, looking for holes in the story of her gamer upbringing. “I was trying to prove to this executive that I wasn’t lying about playing games,” she said. To demonstrate she was a real, Riot-style gamer, she recalls wondering in desperation, “Should I just ask this guy to log onto my World of Warcraft profile?” Eventually, she was hired, despite hearing from a confidant later that her interviewer didn’t think she had the “grit” to work there. Another confidant told her that the tone of her interview would have never happened were she a man.

Working at Riot isn’t just about doing a job—it’s about enthusiastically participating in the company’s culture. What that means, among other things, is that successful hires across the company ought to be video game fans and specifically, according to three sources with knowledge of Riot’s recruitment practices, hardcore video game fans. “We want passionate gamers who are talented professionals,” read the first line on Riot’s hiring page until late June. “Loving what you do is mandatory, and you won’t fully appreciate a gamer’s perspective unless you are one. We’re not looking for the feedback averse. You need conviction, passion, and horsepower to excel at Riot.” Those lines are no longer there. Now, the page includes the line, “Whatever you play, if you make time to play, you’re a gamer,” apparently softening Riot’s cultural standards for gaming.

According to four sources with knowledge of Riot’s recruiting practices, this “ideal Rioter” image has led the company to turn down a disproportionate amount of women for jobs.

During hiring, Riot vets whether potential employees will be “culture fits.” According to three sources familiar with Riot’s recruiting practices, Riot focuses on finding what the company calls “core gamers” who can empathize with League players, and especially with the grind for competitive skill points. On paper, that makes sense. People who work at Riot need to understand the product they’re putting out and the community they’re meant to serve. But in practice, four sources say, the company preferencing core gamers when it hires not just game developers, but all of its full-time employees—from office managers to finance specialists—means preferencing a certain kind of person.

'''Those sources said that talented women have fallen through Riot’s hiring processes because they weren’t considered “core gamers,” which one source described as “an excuse.” Two sources familiar with Riot’s hiring practices say the company checks interviewees’ League of Legends stats prior to bringing them on campus for interviews. In an e-mail, a Riot representative told Kotaku, “During the interview process, we often expect Rioters to try out League of Legends, and for some League development roles require familiarity with the game, but we’re not evaluating for skill.” To correct hiring mistakes, Riot has a program called “queue dodge”; new hires who are deemed cultural “mismatches” can receive 10% of their annual salary, up to $25,000, if they leave.

In an interview with Variety published last week, Riot co-founder Marc Merrill explained, “It is drilled into [our employees] that player focus is the thing we aspire to be our north star,” adding, “That’s why we hire gamers and only gamers because the difference between a great decision and a terrible one is how it relates to players.” In a statement sent to Kotaku, Riot said that, “To ensure our aspirational culture becomes a reality and isn’t lost in translation, we must over-index on cultural reinforcement,” adding that “We believe hiring gamers is critical to our success.”

Preferencing Riot’s definition of “core” gamers during hiring means drawing in employees from a larger pool of men than women. Avid players of MOB As (multiplayer online battle arenas, a genre encompassing popular games including League of Legends and Dota 2) and first-person shooter fans are typically men. Game data company Quantic Foundry surveyed over 270,000 gamers worldwide between July 2015 and January 2017 on what game titles they enjoy playing and reported that only 10% of gamers who play MOB As are female. For first-person shooters, that number is 7%. Without examining why these gaming genres are heavily male, Riot’s apparent job candidate expectations can create a very stratified workplace, where women, who are less likely to be megafans of these games, are considered lesser Rioters because of the way they grew up. Several women interviewed by Kotaku said that, even after getting hired, they felt they were not taken seriously by colleagues or managers because they weren’t steeped in the competitive online gaming tradition. League of Legends’ playerbase, which in 2012 was over 90 percent male, has earned a reputation for rampant sexist language that Riot has proactively addressed over the last few years. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women who play League of Legends have been regular targets of harassment, and data from Riot indicates that new players encountering toxic behavior are 320 percent less likely to return to the game.

In 2016, Riot surveyed its own employees to study the correlation between in-game and workplace toxicity. It turns out that Rioters who received complaints about their in-game behavior were also awful to work with. According to that study, 25 percent of employees “let go” between 2015 and 2016 had “unusually high in-game toxicity.”

Riot says it doesn’t define “core gamers” as MOBA and first-person shooter players, which several sources with knowledge of Riot’s recruitment practices and who have been interviewed for positions at Riot dispute. One former Riot employee who presented as a woman, for example, has always played role-playing games, and said as much during their 2014 phone interview for a position at Riot not at all adjacent to games development. The interviewer then asked if they played “real games like Call of Duty,” they recalled. “He kept going, kept rephrasing the question, no matter how many times I listed all the things I played,” they said. “In the end, he asked, ‘If someone just met you, how would they know you’re a gamer?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m looking at my TV right now that has 16 game consoles plugged into it.’”

When asked about this trend, Riot acknowledged in its statement that it actively seeks hardcore video game enthusiasts. “We’ve found that the best way to hire Rioters is to hire gamers,” the company said. “While not every Rioter is a gamer, most are. And to be clear, this doesn’t mean just League of Legends; whatever you play, if you make time to play, you’re a gamer. Whether it’s Mario or Dark Souls, MTG or D&D, Overwatch or Lo L, a Rioter speaks the language of players and can relate to them in ways that could never be learned on the job. We pride ourselves on player empathy, whether that’s relating to the fun players are having with a new game mode or understanding the pain they’re feeling with a nerf gone too far.”

A former female employee told Kotaku that she was asked “How big is your e-peen?” by an interviewer who was questioning her over her gaming habits. Another former Riot employee, who is passionate about tabletop games, said she was told by an interviewer that her gaming preferences meant she wouldn’t be considered a “gamer” at Riot. Another woman, who was interviewing for a position far removed from games or game development, said she felt like she wasn’t being taken seriously because, instead of playing League of Legends, she casually played World of Warcraft. A few months into her employment, she felt that her suspicions were confirmed at a 2016 global Riot conference talk by a senior producer.