Inequity and Diversity in the Game Dev Sector

Thumpah writes "J, the Damned Vulpine, has just posted a report on the inequality panel from the latest meeting of the Austin Game Developers group. The panel consisted of Sheri Graner Ray of Sony Online Entertainment's Austin studio, Ellen Hobbs of Amaze, Chris Smith of Lois Earl Entertainment, Denise Fulton of Midway Austin, Matt Crump of Amaze, Suzanne Freyjadis-Chuberka of the Women's Game Conference, and Susan O'Conner (a freelance game author) to moderate the panel. He ties the discussion in with the recent IDGA Game Developer Demographics Report."

Comments

Man, I hate this stuff

[0kComputer]

Why is diversity so important? Why does every industry HAVE to have diversity? Discrimination is one thing, but I think its pretty obvious that thats not going on here. I just don't buy the whole "lets encourage everyone but young white men to get into [ insert field/acedemia here ] because the industry needs diversity argument."

Re:Man, I hate this stuff

[RaphKoster]

The most practical reason is because diversity in the development teams leads to diversity of subjects in the games, which then potentially leads to larger audiences for games. Games like Dance Dance Revolution, Katamari Damacy, SimCity, and so on appear because people who aren't like the current game developers, people who aren't interested in the same old things, end up controlling a project. These then may well result in larger revenues, and larger cultural relevance, for games in general. As well as more kinds of games to play for everyone.

Re:Man, I hate this stuff

[Ada_Rules]

(on a side note) Boy this is a scary discussion. Seems like a lot of anonymous cowards!

To quote the parent

One of the main reasons that gaming is only popular among males under the age of 30 is that the majority of people working in the industry are men under the age of 30.

I'd actually turn that around. I think one of the main reasons that the majority of people working in the industry are men under the age of 30 is because they are the ones that want to play the games.

I see a lot of students that "want to get into writing games". They don't think they are going to get rich doing it. They think they are going to have fun doing it.

surprised?

[minus_273]

I am a bit surprised by these numbers:
"Male = 88.5%, Female = 11.5%
White = 83.3%, Black = 2.0%, Hispanic/Latino = 2.5%, Asian = 7.5%, Other = 4.7%"

Sure most employees have college drgrees and therefore there are few blacks and lations (not PC, but sorry, I can't change relaities of different cultures)
but asian is ONLY 7.5%!! WTF? What happened to all the japanese and korean developers?