48 Hills tech reporter Leah Isobel was at the 2026 GDC Festival of Gaming (formerly Game Developers’ Conference), March 9-13 at the Moscone Center. Read her first dispatch about game-worker unionization efforts here, and (mis)adventures in AI gaming here.
The first event I attended at GDC was a roundtable titled “Uplifting Latine Game Devs Here, There, and Everywhere.” Moderated by representatives from the nonprofit organization Latinx in Gaming, the roundtable gave space for Latinx developers from inside and outside the US to discuss their experiences, from conventional game-developer struggles like trying to find publisher funding to more specific problems, like navigating immigration and seeking solidarity and support from employers or colleges.
One developer who spoke up mused that such topics were difficult to discuss in a work environment, which they experienced as “a weirdly apolitical space”; another asked the moderators if they had any support or advice for helping developers in other countries get access to visas in order to work. A developer who had flown in from Uruguay shared that they had been advised to travel in a larger group in order to pass through TSA more easily. Later on in the discussion, that same developer mentioned that funding struggles are quite different outside of the US, saying, “I don’t know how much [funding] to ask, because for me, $100 USD is a lot because of conversion rates.” The US is dangerous, but its economic position in the world still creates an incentive for developers to engage with the market here.
After the roundtable ended, I made my way to a coworking space on Market Street for Ctrl + Unite, a networking event sponsored by Latinx in Gaming, Black in Gaming, and AAPI in Gaming; the event was meant to serve as “a unified space for underrepresented communities to connect outside the GDC walls.” Inside, developers took the stage to give talks about their games, while attendees got to try out the various demos set up around the space. One such demo was for the colorful math shooter Addie Shen, developed by the studio Unexpected Accessories. “Some people say it’s Doom with algebra,” says studio founder Josh Delson. “It’s kind of like an after-school game to help people practice math while gaming.”
Delson began making games during the Adobe Flash era, a time when the increased availability of multimedia software allowed young developers to put out small-scale games for a niche audience on websites like Newgrounds or Kongregate. “I always admire people that just make games just because they want to,” he says. “I admire and respect lots of indies as well that get funding. But people are always gonna make stuff either way.”
That era’s DIY spirit didn’t always translate across different identities, though. “I think then it was very hard to find, as an Asian-American, community for that kind of thing,” Delson explains. “When I used to go to GDC, it was just like, there’s a cool Adobe afterparty or Unity party… But here, there’s a diverse crowd of people of different backgrounds, identities. And I think it’s really cool that we’re able to embrace this.”
This diversity also means getting exposed to different perspectives from around the world. “I’m meeting a lot of people from Southeast Asia and South America as well, because I’m curious about hearing their perspective, trying to break into the industry and what it means to make games and promote in their area,” he says. “I was with some people from Spain and Italy on Saturday night, and they were giving me this crazy perspective. Because their big dream was, ‘Oh, you’ve got to come to the US to make games.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s so disheartening.’”
On the second floor of the space, I saw a display for H1B.Life, a narrative simulation game from the studio Reality Reload based on the process of applying for an H1-B visa. The game uses simulated gambling mechanics to articulate the arbitrary nature of making your way successfully through the system, and draws on interviews that the team conducted with people who have experienced it.
“The American immigration system is like a maze, or it’s like a very old program that’s constantly updated by different people,” says Allison Yang, the game’s director. “So it’s very hard for someone to navigate through it. One of our team members said, before he came to America, he felt like there’s a big commercial saying, ‘This is a good life. You are really smart.’ And then when he arrived, he realized that advertisement is far, far away. There’s so many obstacles in between.”
Originally, the team was working on a more straightforward simulation of the visa process. But last year, when the Trump administration announced new restrictions on companies hiring workers via H1-B visas, the team reassessed their approach. “Now it’s not about the paper, per se. It’s really about how people are trying to figure out what they’re doing,” Yang explains. “What can they do? They used to have this dream, an immigrant’s American dream, but now this dream is collapsing. But their life goes on. So how do they repackage everything [to] make sense?”
As a result, the team reworked the game’s mechanics and introduced more fantastical aspects, like “Immigration Buddhas” that grant unpredictable effects and represent the random cultural and political shifts that affect applicants. These new elements are meant to add in a “dream dimension” that articulates the subjective reality of people working under these visas.
Yang connects this approach to her experiences playing games when she was growing up in China. “I played so many, for me, foreign games… so all of these racial, gender, sexual labels could be suspended. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. [But it] could be suspended a little, and I could try to understand what this person is going through in the world he or she or they live in,” she says. “And so, we want to really do this. Like, to put you inside someone’s skull or something. You couldn’t do it better. You don’t have better choices.”
In lieu of those better choices, the game instead aims to depict something more human: people’s ingenuity and resourcefulness in the face of systemic cruelty. “The more interviews and community events we did, we realized people actually are trying really hard,” Yang says. “Now, because everything is so vulnerable, a lot of them just started to take care of themselves, or trying to reach out to people, do things they think they will do after they get a million dollars or something.”
And that resilience opens space for other possibilities. “This system is collapsing,” she says. “It’s very hard for people’s livelihood. But it’s also good, because now you’re pushed, finally, to think, ‘What’s the alternative?’”
It’s a question meant in the context of the people that her team has interviewed. But it feels to me like something with a broader resonance, too; it stuck with me as I wandered around the rest of the conference. An era of unprecedented collapse—both within the games industry specifically, and in the broader sociopolitical context of the US and of the world—offers a strange, painful sort of opportunity. Something is falling apart. Could something better, more humane and equitable, take its place?
