Manifesting company culture: exploring mission statements and their role in shaping game industry workplace cultures

We argue that corporate mission statements, as dual-purpose documents that externally communicate an organization’s values and goals to the public while internally communicating the organization’s identity to its workers, are a useful window into the inner workings of the games industry. To demonstrate this utility, we examine statements posted to the Riot Games website: The Riot Manifesto (2014–2018) and the Our Values statement that replaced it in 2019. We approach our analysis as a close reading grounded in feminist media studies, linking the underlying messages embedded in Riot’s statements to broader issues in gaming cultures. We focus our case study to statements made before and after the publication of Cecelia D’Anastasio’s (2018) investigative article for Kotaku, “Inside the Culture of Sexism at Riot Games,” where current and former employees described Riot’s workplace as a “bro-culture.” Our goal is to demonstrate that mission statements warrant serious consideration as ideological documents that play a role in shaping workplace cultures and influencing who is (or is not) seen as “belonging” in the game industry.