Game designer at small indie studio gets excluded and disrespected by three coworkers who ignore him during meetings, dismiss his ideas, and refuse to collaborate professionally

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  via Maxim Tolchinskiy

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• Getting ignored at work

  
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  via Getty Images For Unsplash+

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• Working with a small team, especially in a creative field like this small gaming studio, seems like it’s supposed to be scrappy, not hostile. But at this indie game company, “small team energy” has turned into something closer to an unspoken social cold war. The new game designer has been there about three months, officially handling design and production tasks to help the boss keep everyone aligned. In reality, though, alignment seems like a luxury item. Three of the six coworkers, a programmer, an artist, and an animator, have apparently decided the newcomer is invisible. They avoid eye contact, ignore ideas, and act like updates are classified information.  

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• What makes the frustration even more understandable is that none of this seems to bother anyone except the boss and the designer. The detailed game design document the designer describes, the one full of systems, lists, and milestones, gets ignored unless the boss orders someone to read it. The disrespect doesn’t stop at silence either - when the boss isn’t around, the same people start loudly complaining, throwing around insults about ideas and colleagues.  

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• Every brainstorming meeting turns into a silent standoff. Whenever the designer suggests something, the trio exchange glances and counter immediately, as if their creative process runs on negation fuel. The designer doesn’t mind having ideas rejected, game design thrives on trial and error, but it’s hard to collaborate when colleagues treat discussion like sabotage. At one point, the designer mentions a task from the production checklist, only to be mocked when it’s already done. Instead of communicating like a team, one programmer laughs that “everyone knows except him.” The problem isn’t ignorance, it’s deliberate exclusion.  

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• This office might look like a passion project from the outside, but from the inside, it’ssounds more like a dysfunctional group chat where three people mute the newcomer by choice.

  Every project needs teamwork to function, but this one’s running on ego instead of collaboration, and that’s not a design problem, it’s a people problem.

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