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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."
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.
rooooar
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.