African Americans and the Video Game Industry

An anonymous reader writes "African Americans spend more money and time playing video games than whites, yet only 2% of game developers are black. This past week, MTV's Multiplayer blog interviewed five black game industry professionals for their perspective on race in the industry. Intelligent Gamer summarizes and highlights portions of this lengthy series of interviews."

Comments

Re:Let's devolve everything down to race.

[Criliric]

whoa whoa whoa, lets not get to hasty here.... I don't think those weird purple people have EVER made anything decent

Re:Who cares?

[Dr. Cody]

I don't know, but there was a Danish documentary on the subject.

Re:Who cares?

[explosivejared]

I believe the proper term is jorka-borka-ellthing-jafrikaner-schmorker. However, I always did do poorly in Danish class. Either way, I am a fan of affirmative action. It helped quell the riots in the seventies. Ask yourself, what could be worse for your MMO than a pissed off black panther guild?

[Eldridge Cleaver Tone] We grind and we grind all day long only to have our gold stolen from us by these white pig 'developers'. They are afraid of an empowered, 31337 black guild. They are afraid of a dark Azeroth![/Eldridge Cleaver Tone]

Promote African-American programmers! Save Azeroth!

Re:who cares

[g0dsp33d]

Oh, and all lazy persons must be stupid huh? You productivist.

Obviously

[fishyfool]

They'd rather play than develop. Can't say I blame them.

Here's an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask them! I don't know. I just know I don't want to go near that damn industry. In fact, maybe it's too much like slave labour, and they are smart enough to stay away?

Re:stupid

[Shados]

Well, TECHNICALLY, all the racial issues will go away once we ARE fucking each other over... as in, literally so :)

Re:Who cares?

[Culture20]

I always did do poorly in Danish class. Mmmm, Danish class

Re:Who cares?

[spintriae]

So true. There's no distinction between race in the UK, is there? Black, Irish, German and French people in English probably don't even realize they're immigrants. And the British aren't even familiar with those words. They were just invented by Americans to satisfy their obsession with the classification of ethnicity.

what?

[Punto]

now I'm supposed to know if the person who programmed some game is black or white? I honestly don't care, and I prefer to keep not caring.

I wouldn't mind having more women around the office tho :p

Re:Who cares?

[empaler]

Actually, as a Dane, I'd usually go with "black", or quite a lot more likely, their name. In one specific instance, I'd go with 'aunt', but I know that's cheating, on account of her being my aunt.

Re:Who cares?

[0100010001010011]

I work with a guy that's African. Came to US for college straight from Ghana.

He has no problem being called black.

He also has no problem walking into bars declaring: "Where are da white wimmen at?". He thinks this (and the whole movie) is hilarious.

Only once did we run into trouble. Some 2nd generation+ born in America African descendants decided he wasn't "African enough". Some native tongue (No clue what it was) and some bouncers quickly ended that.

Re:Someone call the waahmbulance

[FiloEleven]

Oh gosh I don't even know where to start with this one. Perhaps with some line breaks?

=)

Re:Who cares?

[Kamel Jockey]

... what country are you from?

What!

Re:Who cares?

[donscarletti]

Fact: anyone who prefaces a statement with "Fact:" sounds like an arrogant jerk, even if they are right.

Any argument is implicitly presented as a truth, stating that it is fact is redundant.