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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."
From TFA:
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...)
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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?
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
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.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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
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?
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.
...4 percent hispanic, less than 3 percent black.
but what I really want to know is...
Where da asians at?
Hey, it's my OPINION that dogs have eight legs and make a sound like a car horn every time they take a piss.
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.
The laws of probability forbid it!
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?
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 for the characters in games - who cares? As long as they just feel appropriate, it's fine with me. I didn't play GTA:SA and think "oh this sucks, the main character is a black man. There is no possible way I can identify with him and enjoy playing this game!".
I'm beginning to think that the real "racism" is harbored by those who implicate the industry in some sort of "unintentional racism".
"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.
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!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Okay. Explain why IQ correlates so well with income and education level, even when controlling for other factors?
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.
...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.]
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
"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?Creative Demolition