Debugging Inequality: Caste and Labour Hierarchies in Indian Gaming Industry

Recently, Rajya Sabha MP Sudha Murthy, and her husband Infosys founder Narayan Murthy, both Madhwa Brahmins, declined to participate in the Karnataka government’s ongoing Social and Educational (caste) Survey, specifying that since they do not belong to any backward class, their participation will not be of any use to the Government. Former Infosys CFO TV Mohandas Pai, a Goud Saraswat Brahmin, who had previously tweeted that one's varna does not matter in cities (as opposed to the apparently static village), also criticised the Karnataka State Government for focusing on “caste, caste surveys, and appeasement” instead of “growth, development, good jobs, and technology”. 

While on one side we see a consistent attempt to portray the city as ‘casteless’, we also see examples of people proudly declaring their caste—from baniyas being valorised for becoming tech disruptors to a CEO boasting about her brahmin genes. In both cases, the need to address caste-based disparities and discrimination within the private sector in India takes a back seat. Despite multiple studies that indicate the prevalence of casteist mindsets, behaviours, practices in the corporate sector, mostly people within it argue that it is a space that is modern and free from old and traditional descriptors such as caste. In the gaming industry, this has specific implications. In this article, the author reflects on their own experiences in the industry, the narratives they came across and how caste does in fact shape the process of game development. 

Historically, the Indian gaming industry has been functioning as a service sector to the Global West with the likes of Zynga, Ubisoft, Rockstar, Electronic Arts, Lakshya Digital, Scopely offering QA (Quality Assurance), Art Development, and live-operation services. However, in the last decade, there have been multiple indie-teams, small to mid sized companies, startups, and even large-scale investments for game development in India. Many of these gaming companies capitalize on the existing popularity of cricket, chess, ludo and other table-top games in India. Some companies claim to be working towards showcasing ‘Indian’ culture and history. 

Despite the recent ban on real-money gaming, which constituted at least 80% of the Indian gaming market, causing layoffs and market slow-down, India’s gaming industry, primarily driven by mobile games, is projected to grow in multiples in the next 5 years. Whenever I have mentioned that I work in the gaming industry, there have been certain assumptions that creating a game is a creative endeavour, akin to filmmaking, music production, or performance arts, requiring effective collaboration amongst the team members, that it would be a fun workplace to be at. Except for a few small sized teams, this is rarely the case. The social hierarchies and inequality that plague Indian society, also affects what happens within a gaming company, curbing creativity, personal growth of its employees, and free and democratic flow of knowledge and skills. 

Caste in Corporate India

The caste composition in the IT sector has always been skewed towards twice-borne castes. Dr. Carol Upadhya in her study on the IT workforce in Bangalore, with a sample of 132 software engineers, notes that Brahmins, who have had “historical monopoly over higher education and formal sector employment”, constituted 48% of the total workforce, and if one considered all of the twice-borne castes, the count was more than 70%. She explains how upper-caste youth are 2-3 times more likely to graduate out of an engineering college making them more eligible to be hired in such roles. Besides, she says, IT companies usually visit only selected educational institutions for campus-placements and look for “good communication and social skills, confidence, and the right kind of personality”, which allows “middle class (and usually high castes)” to ace these interviews. 

Studies on corporate board membership indicate a similar story. One such study on 4000+ publicly listed companies found that more than 94% of the board members and CEOs were from twice-borne castes (that too mostly men), who represent less than 20 percent of India’s population, and if the boards were dominated by a specific caste group, the CEO was also likely to come from the same caste. Studies on hiring practices in IT (which consistently pushes the narrative that job applicants are selected purely on the basis of their ‘merit’) shows that it often takes place through referrals and interviews involving questions about the candidates’ family backgrounds. Additionally, hiring is designed to test one’s English-speaking fluency, and soft-skills, not just technical training. These practices create multiple hurdles and disproportionately affect those with limited social networks, socio-economic and cultural capital, often from marginalised castes and religious minorities.

Inside a gaming company

The skewed hiring practices and imbalance in leadership plays out in specific ways in the gaming industry. A gaming studio usually consists of game developers/software engineers, game designers, 2D or 3D artists, product managers, project managers/game producers, marketing team, and game testers/quality assurance (QAs). In my experience of more than 8 years in the industry, most of the QAs and some of the artists/game designers have happened to be from SC, ST, OBC, or Muslim backgrounds while most of the product managers, project managers and game developers have mostly been from twice-borne castes.² For the purposes of this article, I will be exploring caste and its workings by focusing on the role of a QA within a gaming company.

So far, I have never met a QA who thought of game testing as a career of choice. Many of the QAs I have worked with, have grown up in tier-2 or tier-3 cities/towns, and have not been trained with the technical or English speaking skills that could help them move up, and do not have influential networks that could provide them access to non-QA roles. They have studied in non-premier educational institutions, far from urban centres and so have not had access to better-paid jobs through campus placements. 

On the other hand, most of the CEOs (Chief Executive Officer), COOs (Chief Operating Officer), CFOs (Chief Financial Officer), game developers, product managers, project managers, and game designers that I have met, have been from twice-borne castes and have had the social, cultural, and economic capital that has enabled them to study in tier-1 cities and in more popular educational institutions. They have received training in the requisite English speaking and communication skills, have easy access to networks that aid them in finding jobs or with references. In fact, most companies pick only those who have studied in IITs and IIMs for many of these better-paid roles. 

The wage gap between these roles is also stark. If one looks at the average salary of a QA, it is around 3 to 6 lakh INR per annum, with even the most senior QAs with about 5-10 years of experience struggling to get their salaries to move up to 15-20 lakh INR per annum. Whereas, product managers start with a salary of at least around 10 lakh INR for junior roles and quickly move to 12-15 lakh INR and up to 35-50 lakh INR per annum for about 8-10 years of experience if things go well. Game developers/Software Engineers also earn salaries equivalent to Product Managers or more since coding is central to any game production. The salaries of project managers, game designers, and artists earn significantly higher than QAs, wherein most of these roles start with a minimum of 6-8 lakh INR per annum and have better chances of salary hikes/career progression as compared to QAs. This has been the norm generally in the IT sector too. 

According to a study that analyzes NSSO employment data for 2011-12 and 2020-21, in 2020-21 only 13% of graduate-degree Dalits/OBCs secured IT sector jobs versus 41% of equivalently educated upper caste candidates (Twice born castes, OBCs) and lower-caste (SC, STs) earned roughly 22-24% less than upper-caste peers on average, with the gaps widening compared to 2011 data. This way, marginalised communities continue to be denied access to better roles and better wages, if not to the entire industry. 

Wide wage gaps between roles are common in the gaming industry world over. For a long time, popular discourse on education and work has valourised ‘merit’ as the basis for remuneration or compensation as it purportedly affects the quality of one’s work. However, Ajanta Subramanian in her book the Caste of Merit breaks down this idea of merit as having roots in caste inequality to begin with. Building on this understanding, we can explore what specific shapes caste inequalities take in the world of gaming. 

QAs are relegated to manual labour of testing... like the empirical shudras, and twice-borne castes in other roles monopolise decision making power, knowledge, technology, wages, and networks.

The graded hierarchies in the making of a game

In a gaming company, product managers are usually at the top of the hierarchy just below the CEO, CFO, or COO, and are expected to make key decisions based on data analysis and apply product-based thinking on the kind of game one needs to develop, the revenue that the game needs to generate, and the features that should go into a game. In some companies, the senior game developer/software engineer or the game designer takes up this role, or works in tandem with the product manager. The tech implementation is coded in by the game developers, the art of the game is created by artists, features are designed for best player experience by game designers, and the project managers manage the entire project and collaboration of the team to ensure timely delivery. Here, QAs, whose role is to test the game or feature being built for issues/performance, come at the bottom of the hierarchy.

These workplaces can be imagined as collaborative spaces where each of these roles and their contribution to the making of a game is respected, where voices are heard, labour is dignified and ample opportunities for career growth and better salaries are provided to everyone. But as one can presume, this is rarely the case. A combination of the drive to maximise profits in the shortest time with least costs, and a mindset shaped by caste hierarchies that relegates the manual labour of QAs and QAs themselves to the margins systemically is what shapes the workplace and in turn, the limited growth of QAs in the industry.

In his important essay on social sciences in India, Dr. Gopal Guru talks of the dichotomy between “empirical shudras and theoretical brahmins”, arguing that historically in India, groups like Dalits “were pushed into occupations that were completely devoid of any possibility of innovation and imagination and hence were not impregnated with any possibility of knowledge.” The twice-borne castes, in contrast, were in a privileged position through “modern education, fellowships, and beneficiaries of intellectual opportunities worldwide”, to, in a way, lay siege to the field of social sciences in India. By deploying different strategies like “canonizing the discourse with the help of well-defined ground rules, procedures, and protocols, and compartmentalisation of institutions around chosen themes” and “strict observance of a language code, protocols, body language, and ground rules”, twice-borne castes he suggests, monopolised and owned the field of social sciences, with dalits being relegated to work of empirical data collection. A similar parallel can be seen functioning within a gaming company in India, wherein QAs are relegated to manual labour of testing and data collection of issues within a game/feature like the empirical shudras, and twice-borne castes in other roles monopolise decision making power, knowledge, technology, wages, and networks.

The essential role of a QA is to test a game, or a feature within a game, for its stability and functionality, in order to ensure that the players of the game have a smooth and fun experience. QAs are supposed to write down test cases and test all the different permutations and combinations of how a feature might be working within a game and ensure that there aren’t scenarios that can crash the game, slow down the game, result in players being stuck, and check for cheats/exploits that players can take advantage of. While there are softwares and tools that can run automated tests, most of the QAs I have come across are made to focus on manual-testing, which involves playing the game throughout the day and reporting the issues that they see so that the developers/software engineers can fix it. In some of the bigger companies, they are made to run automated tests already created by someone else to check for issues and report them. In a way, the experience of QAs is closest to the experience of players playing the game, the ‘customers’ for whom the game is being made. Yet, QAs are seen as devoid of any capability to possess important knowledge, decision making capabilities, and are not really given opportunities to build on their skills.

Usually, the decision making of what goes into the making of a game is limited to product managers and game designers, who are seen as more capable of understanding the market, player data, and deciding on what needs to go into a game. The QAs in most cases are handed over the game/feature after all the meetings/brainstorming sessions are completed and the game/feature is built and ready to be tested. In some cases, they are not even made to understand why a certain feature was built in the game and rationale behind it, which would help them test the game better. In fact, involving QAs in the early stages of game development and in the decision making and brainstorming sessions, could result in a better game/feature and reduced costs/time incurred in fixing issues during late stages of game development as they have more knowledge about what the players are experiencing and can identify issues that might come up. This is completely lost on product managers and other stakeholders who believe that they alone possess the capability to think, analyse and decide. It creates a scenario where knowledge is centralised based on hierarchies and roles. QAs barely have any information on the business goals of the company, the reasons why certain feature or a certain game is being built or cancelled, the financial runway that a company has, the access to data or the analysis of data that has gone into decision making, and the multiple meetings and discussions that have taken place. Even though QAs can play a vital role within a team, they are not seen worthy of needing this information and are mostly seen as manual labourers whose only job is to test the game and list down issues in it.

Besides limiting a worker’s career growth, the hierarchy in labour also allows caste-based superiority and pride to play out. For instance, many around us, especially twice-borne castes, believe that there will always be a dispensable population to work as domestic workers, ‘delivery-partners’, and sanitation workers, all with bare minimum wages, and keep the economy running while we can focus on our lives and careers. This can be seen in gaming companies too. It is assumed that certain roles like QA will take care of the labour that is considered mechanical, while product managers and game designers focus on more important tasks that require ‘thinking’ like the ‘theoretical brahmins’. At times, product managers, CEOs/Founders take decisions, raise investments, decide on timelines, without ever having ‘touched’ (played) the game or the feature, just on the basis that they already possess the knowledge to make the right decisions or by just looking at data. A normative workspace is thus manufactured by twice-borne castes where QAs are relegated to manual labour and paid extremely low wages as compared to other roles, and a culture of following orders/decisions from the top of the hierarchy without any questioning is established, so much so that QAs never get to experience what an alternative democratic and collaborative workplace can look like. QAs continue to expect a similar experience in other workplaces and rarely question this status quo, in a way ensuring psychological subordination.

The process of game development has always been aided by tools and technologies and is increasingly relying on the same in the age of AI and rapid technological growth. For instance, there are tools that let you track and analyse every click made by a player in the game, tools that allow one to show different pricing options of in-app purchases based on player demography and previous player behaviour, tools that allow companies to monetise by showing different kinds of ads in the game, tools that can automate game testing etc. But the technical know-how to operate such tools and technologies is gate-kept by product managers, project managers, and developers. QAs have to rely on engineers, game designers, and product managers to operate these tools and technologies so that they can test different things. For instance, a game like candy-crush can have a tool integrated in it which allows developers and other stakeholders to decide the difficulty of each level for players - all they need to do is change certain parameters on the tool in the backend and it will be immediately reflected in the game. Without any training or access to this tool, they have to rely solely on game developers to make changes to the parameters for them to then be able to test different difficulty levels in the game every time, resulting in a lot of back and forth. If there was any democratisation of such knowledge, then QAs would do a much better job in testing the game and the company would save time (and thus money) spent in the back and forth between QAs and other roles to manage such tools. The CEOs/Founders/Product Managers or other major stakeholders rarely think about investing money and time to train QAs on emerging technologies like AI, latest automation tools or latest QA practices in other parts of the world, which in turn might allow for QAs to be better at their jobs resulting in better chances for making a successful and profitable game. 

Instead, QAs spend most of their careers doing manual testing without any possibilities of upskilling themselves, learning tools/technologies, understanding the core aspects of what goes into making a game, whilst other roles like product managers learn and grow in their careers. QAs never get an opportunity to understand different roles within a gaming company and skills required for the same, improve their communication/ soft-skills (since they are mostly excluded from meetings/decision making), gain hands-on experience on different tools and technologies. Thus, they find it very difficult to shift roles or find other jobs in an economy that is already precarious. QAs have to work hard in upskilling themselves to move out of their roles, or move up in the hierarchy, and make themselves market-ready by investing time, energy, and money in certifications (project management/data analytics/product management) since every other role apart from being a QA provides them with a better career trajectory, wages, dignity and respect, and career stability. In some cases, they end up falling out of the industry and taking up alternative professions/businesses that are unrelated to their formal higher education.

On top of all this, QAs are seen as a replaceable labour force as compared to product managers or other roles which are seen as more central and essential. In my experience, in most mid-sized and large gaming companies, they are mostly hired as contractual employees or through contract agencies, which results in them not enjoying the benefits of pension, gratuity, insurance, and other workplace rights—benefits reserved for other roles that enjoy permanent contracts. Often, these are stressful environments with limited resources/tools, time for testing, and exploitative wages. In case of any job-cuts or layoffs, the first ones to be affected are the QAs, since the cost-to-company of QAs (in terms of wages and the assigned importance to the role) is the least compared to other roles and they can always be replaced or outsourced or their manual labour automated. During such layoffs, QAs find it harder to find other jobs, but even with a precarious economy, job cuts, and layoffs, twice-borne castes can sustain months/years without having to earn any regular income (with the aid of generational wealth and family support), work on their skills, and find another job eventually through referrals. 

All of this results in an exclusionary systemic structure within a company, amplifying the inequalities that already exist in the society. Marginalised castes and religious minorities entering gaming companies at the bottom of the hierarchy find it difficult to witness any significant growth in their careers, networks, language fluency, and skills, while twice-borne castes are systemically enabled to capitalise on their already existing socio-economic and cultural capital and are always well-equipped to deal with changing technologies, economy, language and market.

Collusion of caste and capitalism

This might seem like it is a normative reality across the world shaped by capitalism, not limited to India; that perhaps there is nothing uniquely troubling about a division of labour that centers and prioritises some roles. Product managers, developers, game designers, and project managers have the pre-requisites to be good at what they do in their roles. With the age of internet and Chat GPT, one could also argue that skills can be developed, that knowledge is not necessarily gate-kept by caste, instead it can be accessed by anyone, making it seemingly seamless to transition between roles, hierarchies and jobs. One could also argue that caste does not play any role in this and it is purely a case of deciding what’s best for the company’s success, its profits, and workplace efficiency and that the individual and not the company is responsible for one’s growth in their career. However, one needs to contextualise this reality in a country like India ridden with inequalities of caste, class, and gender.

On one side, this is a reflection of the neoliberal market economy that we live in, wherein IT companies tend to prioritise profits and efficiency by providing low wages to QAs, relegating them to manual labour, using outsourced and contractual labour while keeping the headcount of the company minimal, laying off employees in the guise of AI/Automation, making it an individual responsibility to move up the career ladder without ever investing time and money in up-skilling QAs, and maintaining status-quo in terms of how knowledge, decision making, tools/technologies are centralised to certain roles. All in all, companies that are motivated purely by profit-making would tend to extract the maximum out of QAs with minimal costs and negligible investment in employee growth. 

Far from being ‘casteless’, IT workplaces replicate and sustain caste based inequalities and practices...

While all employees, regardless of their social background, could be described as being victims of a capitalist setup that prioritises profit-making over employee welfare or growth. In India, these exploitative practices systemically ensure the monopoly of twice-borne castes, through which they can ‘hoard opportunities’, continually accumulating social, economic, and cultural capital. In contrast, SCs/STs/Religious Minorities are pushed to the bottom of the hierarchy finding it increasingly hard to move up in their careers and survive in the market. In a way, as Dr. B.R Ambedkar elaborates, a ‘graded hierarchy’ of labourers based on one’s caste location is replicated and sustained in the corporate space, with the neoliberal market and capitalist workplace culture disproportionately affecting the marginalised. In addition, this privileged position of twice-borne castes within a workplace enables the sustenance of an upper-caste culture and dynamic in which practices of hiring, language, food, workplace culture and conversations, festivals being celebrated, clothing/appearance, stereotyping get defined based on brahminical values. For instance, in a study based on life-stories of dalit engineers, the authors elaborate on how brahminical values and practices are normalised in workplaces—having different plates or microwaves for vegetarians and non-vegeterians, disdain for reservations, meritocratic claims that emerge in conversations, presumptions about one’s caste or stereotyping. Another study highlights how the axis of caste is missing in diversity and inclusivity initiatives of IT companies, while ‘upper-casteness’ is reproduced through caste coded discussions around dietary preferences, ‘vegetarianism’, use of ‘brahmin slang’ , identifying other members of one’s (upper) caste within IT workplace, and prevalence of caste names for groups in ‘team-building exercises’. 

It is of course in the best interest of the IT sector and the twice-borne castes who dominate it to represent the workplace as ‘casteless’, to maintain status quo, and leave the responsibility of addressing caste-inequality to the Government or the State. This reflects a “complete denial of the unequal distribution, by class and caste (and other divisions such as gender and religious community), of the cultural, social, and economic capital required to become an IT professional”, as Dr. Carol Upadhya states in her study. Far from being ‘casteless’, IT workplaces replicate and sustain caste based inequalities and practices, simultaneously enabling twice-borne castes to amplify their social and economic standing and delimiting marginalised castes and religious minorities from progressing in their career and creating barriers for one’s individual growth.

This idea of ‘castelessness’ needs to be consistently dismantled in order for us to re-imagine and re-shape workplaces that recognise social inequalities and embody constitutional values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It requires further research and studies on the private sector, its hiring practices, the monopolisation of knowledge, technology, and networks within the private sector by twice-borne castes, and on the intertwinings of neoliberal market economy and caste. In addition, in an economy with increased privatisation of public sector units, dilution of labour laws, tax-breaks, and incentives by the government for the private sector, and the persistent drive by multi-national companies towards monopoly over all aspects of the economy, it would be essential for the government to recognise and implement the legitimate demands for reservation in the private sector. Lastly, we need to continually question and resist the capitalist hyper-focus on profit-making and efficiency in every company that functions on the basis of alienating labourers, devaluing individual-growth and well-being—practices that provide the necessary conditions for caste as a social structure to be deeply embedded into the functionings of a workplace.