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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."
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.)
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
"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...
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I personally hate the idea. It assaults the foundation of my liberalism, that everyone is born equal. But I don't think that ignoring the facts for political correctness makes sense. This is part of Harvard Pres Lawrence H. Summers 'controversial" speech.
"It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right-it's something people can argue about-that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem."
Now, this seems pretty firmly grounded in the questioning openmindedness we expect from our universities. If you disagree, and Summers has pointed out some weak spots for you to start with, I'm sure he's open to disscuss it.
Of course, the resulting PC backlash had Harvard promising $50,000,000 for anti discrimination measures in two weeks. Something is very wrong here.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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.
Not by mandate, but theoretically that's the way it should be. Unless you're going to make some lame-brained argument about how some races are "predisposed" to certain professions
Here's a lame brained argument for you.
There are two sides to a penny. I can flip it 100 times but that doesn't mean it is going to turn up heads exactly 50% of the time and tails exactly 50% of the time. It's entirely possible that it could turn up 80/20 or 60/40 or 30/70. Was there any bias in the coin? No, that's just the way things go. Just because there is the potential for an even toss of the coin does not mean the end will always be even.
People follow the things that interest them. You can't just say "15% of the population is black but only 5% of the gaming industry is - oh noes CONSPIRACIES!".
And by the previously mentioned logic, if a hispanic kid plays videogames twice as much per week than a white kid, he should get two jobs? Isn't the number of people playing more relevant than the number of hours they're playing? And really, what does it matter how many are playing either? That has NOTHING TO DO WITH THOSE MAKING THE GAMES.
I watch movies, but I don't want to be an actor. I read books but I don't want to be an author. I listen to music but I don't want to be in a band. I use a computer but I don't want to design hardware. I buy groceries, but I don't want to be a cashier. I eat corn, but I don't want to be a farmer.
If people are being denied positions because of their ethnicity, that's one thing. But just to throw out some stupid, invented, random "there must be X percentage of Y in Z industry!" for no particular reason is just dumb, sensational and slow-news-day-trolling by the Associated Press.
D'arcy Stern from Urban Chaos was a black female cop in a game whose mechanics were sort of a cross between Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider, and it came out well over a year before Grand Theft Auto III. Fun game for its time, too.