SMU Guildhall Graduate Catalog Spring 2020 — Cohort 28 | Page 66

Jaye Garrison Stuber Weston Wong Production « The Impact of a Small Group’s Universal Diverse Orientation on Product Diverseness of Video Game Development Teams For my thesis, I wanted to better Data analysis for this project ran for six diversity affect video game development. measure individual diversity, a grade that understand how diversity and openness to Specifically, I aimed to learn whether more diverse teams create more diverse games. Because the video game industry operates on this belief, I wanted to see if that was true and if there were any other relationships I could identify. I looked at diversity because it is one of the most important topics to me. As a diverse individual, it is very important to me that I can directly highlight the value of having a different perspective. Support for diversity in the games industry is still growing, and the more research that can be done to support growing diversity, the more equal the industry can become. 66 PRODUCTION months. Along the way, I created a scale to captured product diversity, the framework for a detailed product diversity scale, the framework for a detailed emergent leadership scale, and refined existing measures on universal diverse orientation. Through this process, I gained a deep understanding of both how diversity and an individual’s opinions on diversity can impact the games that are created, as well as dynamics on a team caused by these differences. This thesis not only validates the hiring strategies currently present in video game development, but also provides a guide for the industry on how to best create diverse games.