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Programming Technology Entertainment Games

Drawing Minorities Into Gaming 256

Posted by Zonk from the everybody-join-in dept.
UnseenOperation writes "CNN has up entitled an article Drawing Minorities Into Gaming, which discusses the lack of minority heroes in games as well as the lack of minorities in game development. The article states that black and hispanic youths spend more time playing videogames than whites but members of those groups make up less than 7 percent of the industry workforce." From the article: "Roughly 80 percent of video game programmers are white, according to preliminary results of an International Game Developers Association survey. About four percent of designers are Hispanic, and less than three percent are black...A March study by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that black youths between 8 and 18 years old played video and computer games roughly 90 minutes a day -- almost 30 minutes more than white youths. And Hispanics play about 10 minutes more per day than whites."
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Drawing Minorities Into Gaming

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  • Double Standard, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @01:57PM (#13280873)

    From TFA:
    "CJ," as he's known by his pals, is black -- and to some in the video game industry, that's a problem.


    But in GTA: Vice City, Tommy Vercetti is Italian, and that's OK? As the fiancee of an American of Italian descent, I find that offensive!

    Waitaminit....in RTCW, the Nazis were German! As an American of German descent, I find that offensive!

    Hold on...in IGN's NCAA Football, they have the Notre Dame Fighting Irish??? As an American of Irish descent, I find that offensive!

    (I could keep going, but I trust you all see the absurdity at this point...at least I hope you do...)
    • Alternately, one could complain about the shortage of white players in the latest EA NBA licenced title.

      Ah, whatever - the Champ in UT2k4 is black, that's good enough for me. Malcolm pwnz.

    • Re:Double Standard, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mad_Rain ( 674268 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @06:21PM (#13282713) Journal
      I find myself agreeing with you about the prevalence of double standards in how we portray members of different ethnic groups, especially when we belong to those ethnic groups. It can be okay for "us" to make fun of ourselves, but as soon as another group does it, be prepared for an argument (at least!)

      Since you mentioned NCAA college athletics [sfgate.com], I just want to say that (as a very pale-skinned Native American) I'm glad that the NCAA has stepped up to eliminate names that demean American Indian culture. However, the argument I hear from some of my friends is "Why are you so upset over some name like the Braves? I mean, we have the Fighting Irish and Vikings - surely that's equivalent." It's not the same - Irish Catholics at the University of Notre Dame chose to represent themselves as "The Fighting Irish" and they can control the image they present (to some extent); some white guy decided to call the team "the Redskins", and the image that the team presents conflicts with the true image of the people, and they don't have the control to stop it. The original intentions, honorable or harmful, doesn't matter.

      I see a similar thing in video games and other media (tv, movies, whatever). Characters in video games or movies aren't truly representative of people in real life, and they're often shallowly stereotyped. Unfortunately, I don't think enough of us know about where the creators are coming from to make a decision about whether the game creators are poorly informed/rushed/sloppy, or just racist. And I don't think that TFA is really going to help us figure that out.

  • Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BlackCobra43 ( 596714 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:01PM (#13280916)
    No one complained that the hero of the first *4* GTAs were white american males, but suddently a black man appears and OH MY GOD RACIAL STEROTYPING RACISM HAVE YOU NO SHAME?

    • Re:Hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Soul-Burn666 ( 574119 )
      Agreed.
      Also, in games like Postal2, the game devs specifically said the city populace will have all kinds of people, including the minorities so that it will resemble the real world status so no one specifically will be offended.
      So what does the media say? That the game is racist as it allows you to kill members of the minority groups.
      To that the game devs responded that you can kill whoever you want. The game is only "racist" if YOU are racist and kill only specific minorities.

      And you know what? If the gam

  • Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ArsonSmith ( 13997 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:03PM (#13280930) Journal
    More affirmative action crap. Why not just let people do what they want? Why does it matter if a game is developed by a black, white, man, woman, child etc?

    Why don't we have more white people in basket ball?
    how about Blacks in hockey?

    Do what you're good at and what you like.
    • As soon as you heat those Hockey Rinks you'll see LeBran out there on skates, slappin a puck with his DICK.

      Or so says Chris Rock. Oh, and "White Man Can't Jump" wasn't just a movie ;).

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by FLAGGR ( 800770 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:24PM (#13281120)
      Your not getting it. We need diversity, and everyone knows diversity only comes from dudes with different skin colors. We have to make sure every race is 100% equally represented, otherwise we're racist (because caring about things this much sure doesn't make you a racist) In fact, while we're at it, we need more women developing games, 50% infact should have vagina's, otherwise we are being sexist.
      • Exactly. To point out racial differences is NOT RACIST because then they can be fixed.

        To ignore races and their differences (ie; colorblind) IS RACIST because it means you are ignoring the minorities.

        Anyone else see something backwards there?

        • Exactly. To point out racial differences is NOT RACIST because then they can be fixed.
          To ignore races and their differences (ie; colorblind) IS RACIST because it means you are ignoring the minorities.
          Anyone else see something backwards there?

          Wow, you've just summed up what I've been thinking about for a long time but could never quite put to words.

          I always thought that racism doesn't end when everyone is forced to stop using words such as "nigger." It ends on the day when everyone CAN use them and

      • Re:Why? (Score:3, Funny)

        by Tim Browse ( 9263 )
        50% of women developing games should have vaginas? o_O
    • The real crime is that non-whites get to play more video games. I think we need affirmative action to balance out the amount of video game play across all races. That means less work for white people, and more mandatory video game time. Hell, white people need to be paid to play video games until this horrible imbalance is corrected.

      Joking aside, the static doesn't mean much. Honestly, I think getting into the video game industry being non-white male is NOT going to hurt you. Video game companies eat m

  • Stop (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Evro ( 18923 ) <evandhoffmanNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:04PM (#13280944) Homepage Journal
    Please stop this stupid bullshit. Slashdot is constantly running stories about making games more appealing to women, and now the same drivel is being directed towards "minorities"? We don't need more minority heroes and we don't need more women heroes. We need better games. Games like Zelda don't appeal to white people because Link is white, it's because the game is fun. Mario and Luigi, same deal.

    I wish there was a "politically correct" Slashdot section so I could filter it out.
    • Mario and Luigi were soooo gay. They were new generation of Bert and Ernie. Millions of children brainwashed into being gay, by those wiley character designers. ;)

    • http://politics.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]

      There isn't anything more politically correct or slanted than that. Probably the worst thing to happen to Slashdot since they were bought.

    • Re:Stop (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Seumas ( 6865 ) *
      What I don't understand is what the number of hours a particular ethnicity plays videogames per week has to do with what percentage of that ethnicity there should be in gaming.

      The fact is that almost 81.7% of the country is caucasian [cia.gov]. So obviously there will statistically be far more caucasians in any one area than there are of any other group.

      So I guess someone needs to figure out how we're going to start relating population to employment in each industry. And what is going to happen when we run out of min
    • Actually, Link is more like yellow-pinkish. And he wears all green clothes. Seriously.. he's a minority all by himself.

  • What about Japanese? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:04PM (#13280950) Homepage
    Many games are developed in Japan and are just translated for the US/Euro markets. Is anyone sweating Sony and Nintendo to hire more non-Japanese programmers?

    Besides, if more minorities are playing games than whites, wouldn't it be reasonable to say that the programmers, although white, appear to be making games that appeal more to minority interests than white kids? How would hiring more minority programmers alter this?

  • Breakdown (Score:2, Insightful)

    by niskel ( 805204 )
    80% of game developers may be white but what is a rough breakdown of ethnicity percentages of US citizens? I really have no idea but as a rough guess, the ratio seems fine by me.

    • Re:Breakdown (Score:2, Informative)

      by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) *

      Here's the numbers from the 2000 U.S. Census:

      White: 75.1%
      Black or African American: 12.3%
      American Indian and Alaska Native: 0.9%
      Asian: 3.6%
      Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander: 0.1%
      Two or more races: 2.4%
      Some other race: 5.5%
      Hispanic or Latino: 12.5%

      (NOTE: Percentages do not add up to 100% due to rounding, and because Hispanics may be of any race and are therefore counted under more than one category.)
    • Not from the States? The two largest minority groups are blacks at 12% and Hispanics at 13%, so the right ballpark is something like 70% for white folks. Remember, Hispanics are technically tracked separately from the races so thats not necessarily additive (gah, switch to a colorblind system already -- why should I have to learn how the old apartheid-esque system works...).

      Anyhow, you can see the breakdown here. http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/cenbr01-1.pdf [census.gov]

  • ...4 percent hispanic, less than 3 percent black.
    but what I really want to know is...

    Where da asians at?

  • Non-game programmer statistics? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SeekerDarksteel ( 896422 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:10PM (#13281008)
    I wonder how the ratio of minority programmers in video games compres to the ratio of minority programmers in non-video game jobs. In my class of 40-50 CS/CE students, I know of two blacks and no hispanics. Maybe the problem isn't with the video game industry, but with the entire programming field itself.
    • Let me put it to you this way. I'm in my twenties. When I was in high school I went to a relatively affluent school. Back then a state of the art computer would cost you several thousand dollars. BBS were all the rage, but you needed a seperate phone line to stop the parents from nagging you. You needed to pay for a modem, a computer and hard disk space to accomodate all the cool stuff you were downloading. My friend (middle class) got a computer that cost 4000. A 486Dx2 with 16megs of ram and window
  • Why is it always about stressing the diferences in skin color? or sex of religion or anything else?

    No offense intended, but, man, let it be...
    Let the ones who want to play play... and the ones who don't, don't... Why is that bad?

  • Who cares?! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) *
    Look, if you like games and can afford them, play them. If you don't, don't. Whatever.

    I'm tired of hearing every other day about how transvestite inuite natives transplanted to the lower SE of California, born on Tuesdays are brutally neglected from videogaming.

    I'm a white male in my late 20s and I grew up during the biggest days of gaming and MTV and didn't indulge in either of those things until I was an adult. Guess what? I was okay. My life wasn't destroyed because I couldn't play Megaman on the NES.

    As

  • I see (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fixer007 ( 851350 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:16PM (#13281054)
    "If you've got kids who can sit in front of a game for eight hours, then they have the cognitive thought process to learn how to build the game,"

    That just about sums up the entire article...

    Ummmm no... I've seen some of these kids, trust me they can't do much more than sit in front of a TV for 8 hours.
    • Yeah, the kids with a future in game development (of any race) are the ones reading ahead for fun in their math textbook or drawing sketches, not the ones playing an extra two hours of Madden.

  • It Doesn't Matter Anymore (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:26PM (#13281140) Homepage Journal
    Given the current globalization of software development, our concerns about the ethnic distribution of game developers simply doesn't matter anymore. Those game development jobs will have fully escaped U.S. borders by the time the kids playing now (many minorities) are old enough to apply for the development or design positions. With that in mind, effort would be better spent trying to figure out how to make better games no matter who develops them. With each generation of new hardware we see what's possible make a great leap forward, but so far I haven't really seen very much new and different in the games themselves. Of course I know very well that this a difficult task at best regardless of what color you are!
    • Those game development jobs will have fully escaped U.S. borders

      Creating games isn't like coding a database or writing back-end bank account managing software; there are many cultural aspects involved that will prevent the "escape" of these jobs outside of US borders. I don't ever see an Indian company (or any other tech-export country) creating a game that is able to strike American gamers' emotional chords as well as a US or Japanese publisher. Japan has retained their quality game development compani
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Well...... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Abdadrama ( 900458 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:47PM (#13281326)
    It seems that white people still have problems seeing the racial divide in the U.S. I'm an Artist currently working on my 5th game title, btw I'm also Black. I grew up in inner city philedelphia, I went to black schools and white schools, private and public, I even went to a catholic school. Point: my mother did the best she could to keep me out of inner city public schooling, but when it came time for high school public schooling was all she could do, the money just wasn't there. Once I got out of college (don't ever go to an Art Institute) I landed my first job as an assisitant animator and a lip sync animator. The other animator (a young white male) I worked with once told me that when he was in High school his art teacher gave him is big head start in learning animation. He had a chance to start learning 3d studio vr.1 (dos) and that gave him the boost he needed once he got into college and out into the career path. He had an oppurtunity to learn 3d and animation at a much earlier age than most people. At first I thought this was a odd coincedence, wow he he was lucky, good for him. As the years have gone by I've met more and more White's and asians in the industry that at some point in life had incredible opportunities to learn thier area of expertise at a younger age than I was. These sorts of experiences are difficult to come by in urban schools, the money just isn't there and sports and music are a stronger focal point than art. I feel that blacks need to be educated in game development at a much earlier age, learning about game art once you get into the field is a daunting task that many blacks and non-blacks have trouble adapting to. P.S. As far as GTA is concerned I feel it's a weak argument to make, I'm more concerned with the role of black "caricatures" like T-Bag in the downhill domination game. Who ever designed that character need's to be shot.

    • Re:Well...... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sumbry ( 644145 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:29PM (#13281622) Homepage
      I too was in a pretty similiar situation. I grew up in the inner-city but my mom enrolled me in a Magnet school in Brentwood, CA (it doesn't get any whiter than that).

      When I came home after school and kicked it with the kids in my neighborhood, the difference between what I'd learned at Brentwood and what they'd learned at Manuel Arts was staggering. We had a computer lab full of Apple ]['s and me and my little brother were programming games in basic and doing logo before we hit our teens. My friends in the neighborhood were going through metal detectors and getting randomly searched for guns and drugs and avoiding getting their asses kicked for being seen with books when they walked home.

      It was and still is completely FUCKED UP. The reason why you don't have more minority developers is not because they're too stupid too do it, it's because they're so far behind in their level of education than it's almost impossible to catch up. How the hell are you going to code a game engine when you're leaving school with an Algebra I math level?

      Know what Affirmitive Action really is? It's a patch. It's a patch designed to fix the fucked up unequal education problem. But instead of Affirmitive Action what really needs to happen is the problem needs to be fixed at its source, everyone should be educated at the same level from the very beginning and they're not.

      With no affirmitive action this will only get worse as families have kids in poor areas that goto poor schools, learn nothing, stay poor, and then have poor kids.

      • Re:Well...... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by KingJoshi ( 615691 )
        Education system has a LOT to do with it. But it's a hell of a lot more.

        My sister and I went through the public school system. We're Nepali (inbetween India and China). We went through the ghetto schools, but still were able to get into private colleges. My mom has worked at McDonalds for over 15 years and my father as a parking booth attendant.

        But difference include family, cultural pressures and EXPECTATIONS. My parents were educated. My father was supporting his graduate school at Ohio State throug
      • avoiding getting their asses kicked for being seen with books when they walked home.

        And the educational system is responsible for this how, exactly? Take it up with the folks who've decided that they're going to be failures and darn well aren't going to be showed up by successes who happen to look like them.

        Ah, "acting white". I had a friend in grade school. His father was a doctor and he lived in a house bigger than any I could ever have imagined. He played classical piano (and very, very well, I

    • ...like T-Bag in the downhill domination game. Who ever designed that character need's to be shot.

      you've peaked my curiosity. Who is this 'T-Bag' fellow?

      I've never played any GTA since the first incarnation (Grand Theft Auto 1, on the PC back in like 1997 or so). What could possibly be so horrific about this character? How could he be any worse than anything Dave Chapel has done?

  • Hrm.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by BigZaphod ( 12942 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:50PM (#13281353) Homepage
    "A March study by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that black youths between 8 and 18 years old played video and computer games roughly 90 minutes a day -- almost 30 minutes more than white youths. And Hispanics play about 10 minutes more per day than whites."

    So, basically, black and hispanic kids play games more than white kids do, but we need to recruit more minorities into the industry to fix the problem with the games being too stereotyped? Now, I have nothing against anyone who can do the job (regardless where they come from or what they look like), but obviously the blacks and hispanics they speak of are enjoying themselves playing all these games that the people in the current industry have created. It seems if there was some fundamental problem with racial equality here, they'd have a far smaller market and be playing games less - not more. I could be missing something...
    • Well according to all these article's logic lately you have to be black in order to make a game a black person would want to play. You should also be female to create a game that females would play. I think we should also get more children working at disney. Don't children spend the most time using disney products? Yet, I am absolutly sure that their workforce is made up of 0% children! We need to hire more children!!

      Natrually we should also remember that because people are black, they only like a certain t
  • So blacks and Hispanics play video games more often than whites, but what games do they play? Do they play a wide variety of games, or do they just play the latest editions of Madden and NBA Live? This is important because the people who tend to go into game development tend to be the people who are buffs of the whole medium, not just certain games.

    Rob
  • This isn't an industry thing, it's a cultural thing. Perhaps if folks worked on getting rid of the damned culture of embracing ignorance that is widespread in many "minorities" we'd have a more diverse set of coders.

    Of course, "race" has nothing to do with ability to code, but what are the odds that you'll get a bunch of great programmers out of a culture (for example, black teenage culture where I live, LA) where academic achievement is called "selling out" ?

    The more acceptable being intelligent is within
  • I won't go into this forced diversity stuff (many other commenters already have). But I'd like to point out that programmer statistic. Why does that matter? As a white programmer, why is it I can't program a black character? I program what I'm told to program, right?

    Argue about the designers, the artists, the producers, etc. Don't target the guys who just make the sprite/model (white guy, black guy, or a lemonade stand) display and move around.

  • In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory [4players.de], The Field Ops class (ammo guy) on the Allies side is black. Though oddly there are no black soldiers on the Axis side.
    • I hope you were being sarcastic, i really do. The axis were Nazis, there weren't too keen on black people.

    • In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, The Field Ops class (ammo guy) on the Allies side is black. Though oddly there are no black soldiers on the Axis side.

      I'll play devil's advocate and use this as the reason why there aren't any more ethnic minorities - in this game, having a large number of dark skinned characters (e.g. a 50/50 split) would look awkward at the time (e.g. the US wasn't known for equality at the time.) There are two solutions - either multiple skins per class (which would take up more space

  • In part 2 of this article series the inverstigative journalists will explore the topic: "Drawing White Suburbian Kids into Basketball".
  • You know, I'm sure I'll be marked a troll for pointing out the obvious, but I'm sure if you looked at statistics for CS enrollment at various institutions of higher education you would find that they too skew drastically into whitey-ville. No one wants to say it, but what we're all thinking is that a lot of these "minorities" who play video games aren't exactly game developer material. In fact, most of them will be lucky if they graduate highschool and don't get thrown in jail.

    Whether its politically cor

  • What is this shit? We are all equal unless there isn't enough blacks or mexicans? Then all of a sudden their differences are big enough to warrant a call for more of them? If we are all equal, then what in the fuck is up with this big fucking focus on diversity?
  • OK, my karma is Excellent, so I might as well lose some...

    I often see stories like this - "XYZ industry needs to attract people who don't look like the ones in it now..." My own (accounting and finance) has the same 'problem'. After spending a semester doing a research project on the subject of 'minorities' in higher education, I found the following, based on stats from the US Dept. of Education. This was as of the end of the 1990's, but I doubt much has changed.
    1. 'Minorities' as classified by the USDOE pe
    • My conclusion was, solve the education problems (that is, access to good education and a supportive home environment) facing poor kids and you are far more likely to solve the inequity problem.

      Agreed, but we still need to examine why students in high school aren't learning, but can then go on to CC and get prepared to attend a four-year college.

      For example, is it because the students who attend CC (since it's optional, compared to high school) are interested in learning, but their educational growth was stu
  • This is a good defense for the GTA series. Vice City is mostly Italian and Latino Culture, and San Andreas is mostly African American and Latino. 95% of games marketed for the US are white anglo-saxon, whereas GTA is one of the most culturally inclusive games ever made. Someone should e-mail Hillary that little statistic.
    • Indeed, the most "culturally inclusive" game has black men running around stealing cars, vandalizing shit, and having oral sex with blonde white women. How unfortunate these are the ingredients of a best seller.

  • Stay away!
    Don't do it!

    It's a trap [cnn.com]!!

  • Why are intelligent white people portrayed as skinny, glasses wearing, nerds? As an intelligent white person I am offended by this!!! I'm sueing the makers of Half-Life 2 for stereotyping me!! Oh now that I put it that way it seems pretty upsurd doesn't it?

  • Bob says: "You see Billy... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @11:10PM (#13283997) Homepage
    [pulls pipe from mouth, points to clean cut Billy with the tip]

    ...it is a law of nature that certian races are different.

    In the case of com-pu-ter vid-e-o games, the caucasians -- or whitie as people like we are often called -- are more likely to be aclamated to dark climates. Thus, long hours spent looking at com-pu-ters and playing games indoors is more likely.

    The darker races are used to well-lit climates, thus they are less likely to accell at either the creation or playing of these darkened pastimes and prefer brighter pastimes like Football, Baseball, and Jogging. Basketball, by contrast, being an indoor sport, will always be dominated by caucasians. That's just nature at work!

    Billy, let that be a lesson to you!"

    Billy: "Gee, thanks mister! That explains a whole lot!"

    [We now return you to the current dimension.]

  • Every game that I've ever loved was always chock full of JAPANEESE names in the credits. Mario, Zelda, Metriod, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Contra, etc. Programmers and artists can be whatever, but obviously the game designers in Japan really have it going on.

  • The first paragraph is BS to begin with! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NEOtaku17 ( 679902 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @02:55AM (#13284565) Homepage

    "Roughly 80 percent of video game programmers are white"

    Wow I had no idea all the hundreds of Japanese games I play all the time were created by mostly WHITE MALES!? Where the hell did they get that number?
  • A March study by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that black youths between 8 and 18 years old played video and computer games roughly 90 minutes a day -- almost 30 minutes more than white youths. And Hispanics play about 10 minutes more per day than whites.

    My first reaction when reading this is, "Well, if they would spend more time on their studies and less on playing games, perhaps they would be qualified to become game developers."

    I mean, listening to a lot of music does not make one a musician,

  • "which discusses the lack of minority heroes in games"

    ".A March study by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that black youths between 8 and 18 years old played video and computer games roughly 90 minutes a day -- almost 30 minutes more than white youths."

    At least in the college dorms I used to live in, every African American male was playing some form of EA sports game (sans NHL). I'd say that the "characters" in these games tend to be African American more often than not. Just because 98% of games por

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