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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."
That certainly is a major factor, but I'm not convinced it is the only one. There is a lot of self-segregation in many industries. This is not to say that people are consciously being racist, just that race is also a social/cultural differentiator. I've worked places where one project team or division was almost entirely immigrants from Malaysia. Another place I worked had greater than 50% of the team graduated from the same University... one 600 miles away. Programming is one of those industries where people are often hired through personal networks and although I went to a university that had a large number of ethnic groups, it was not at all uncommon to see large groups that tended to associate only (or primarily) with people of the same race.
In some of the best places I've worked the workforce was much less homogenous and I don't think that was a coincidence. Among some of the most brilliant people I've worked with I've seen a tendency to hire people based upon their intelligence, talent, and experience almost to the exclusion of any social factors. For the video game programming industry, however, a lot of the time it seems to be people who are less competent. Most of the really intelligent people I know quickly got out of the game segment as the wages were relatively low, benefits weak, hours long and stress high. It would not surprise me at all to find that such a market segment was more prone to hiring people based upon social aspects more than skills.