Drawing Minorities Into Gaming

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."

Comments

Re:Game development, not gaming

[CoffeeJedi]

stupid racist troll

1) its been repeadetly shown that giving children a test with a CULTURAL BIAS affects their score. most IQ tests are written from a middle-class, white, suburban perspective. African American or Latino children do better on comparable tests written from their cultural perspective. Give those same tests to suburban white kids and you get lower scores.

2) IQ is extremely overused. it was designed as a test of the mental capacity of mentally disabled children. (mental age/physical age) it was never to be used as a guage against normally intelligent people to begin with, let alone adults.

now stfu troll, before i taunt you a second time!

Re:Hypocrisy

[elrous0]

If I put black and white people in a game, in approximately equal good guy/bad guy positions

Hate to burst you're politically -correct bubbled here. But in the real world (at least, here in the U.S.) blacks and hispanics make up about 20% of the population but commit about 70% of the violent crime (go look at the population of your nearest maximum security prison if you don't believe me).

So good guy/bad guy ratios are not proportional in the real world. Why would you expect them to be in the video game world? Or is that just part of the fantasy too?

-Eric