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Games Fail To Portray Gender and Ethnic Diversity
eldavojohn writes "A new study has found that game characters tend not to reflect cultural diversity. According to the paper from researchers across four universities (PDF): 'A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. ... The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly.' The researchers also note that games 'function as crucial gatekeepers for interest in science, technology, engineering and math,' and that without these groups represented properly, 'it may place underrepresented groups behind the curve.'"
The only "science" that starts with the answer and works backwards from there.
THL phish sticks
Honestly, I'm tired of this bullshit. Someone needs to tell the PC brigade to go fuck themselves. Game developers aren't obliged to fill quotas; all they have to do is make good games. Does anyone really care about what video game characters look like? These folks need to examine their priorities.
I'm guessing this is based on locality. From my admittedly limited experience, there are a lot of Japanese games which feature people who are pretty clearly Asian. Many of them don't even get exported out of Japan.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Given a choice between creating an representative cross-section of America and an representative cross-section of their customer base, game makers are likely going to go with the people who are paying them money.
They also over represent people with big muscles, excellent combat skills and multiple lives. What tripe will be next?
They should make Duke Nukem (in DNF) a black, homosexual, vegetarian, female eskimo, right?
I sure wish that people writing these papers would pay from their pockets - in form of investments - for such the games.
I only hope my efforts will be recognized by future generations...
Why can't
A big part of the problem is, obviously, because game manufacturers are reluctant to use a female or minority character as a villain. "It's discrimination!" the protesters cry! (Yes, I'm serious, look what happened when a Tom Clancy game set in El Paso had Hispanic villains.) That right there cuts minority representation in half, or worse.
I mostly have to agree with the parent. I've noticed when I play the Sims, I tend to make pale white characters. And yes, I'm whiter than sour cream. This does not mean I hold anything against any other races (though that statement sure sounds like the beginning of such an admission). It just means I make characters that visibly, I find more attractive/I can relate to more.
How many Japanese games feature a purely American setting? (I can think of a few, like Dead Rising, but it's in the minority) Most Japanese developers feature their games in a clearly Japanese setting. Similarly, American developers rarely feature games outside an American (or at least Westernized) setting. It's not racism, it's merely a case of "write what you know."
That being said, with games often offering a great deal of customization these days, is it really an issue at all?
I'm always annoyed when people bitch about the unrealistic portrayal of the female body in video games or fiction in general. It's not like women are unique in this regard, most of the men have bodies that are like finely-chiseled statues that few men in real life are going to match up to (and certainly not ones who play games lots). Do you hear them complaining about that? Of course not. That sort of person doesn't give a fuck about equality, they're just in it for their own benefit and putting up a front of egalitarianism to make them look like less of selfish bastards.
Not that I'm saying that people in fiction should have realistic levels of attractiveness. It's been like that forever for good reason; most people would much rather prefer attractive people over unattractive people. The only ones calling for 'realism' just can't accept the fact that they, like most people, are average, and cannot match up to people on the higher end of the bell curve. The solution is not to try to prevent any portrayal of anyone superior to them in any aspect, but to stop being so goddamn insecure about themselves.
Yeah, the social "sciences" love to pretend they're scientific, but they really aren't. I think Feynman put it best when he talked about them:
"Because of the success of science, there's a kind of pseudoscience - social science. They don't do scientific research, they don't find any laws, they haven't found anythinig yet. They give you experts that sound sort of scientific, they sit at a typewriter and type something like organic fertilizer is better for you - maybe it's true, maybe it's not true. They haven't proved it... I've realized how hard it is to actually find out something. I know what it means to know something. So when I see how they get their information and see that they haven't done the work necessary..."
Awesome rant, and still true today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EZcpTTjjXY
You say the token black guy was a gangster. HELLO? The entire series is about criminals with absolutely no social value whatsoever. They kill left and right for no other reason then that they are in a hurry. None of the leads are heroes, but this is only bad if he is black right?
The black guy is no worse then any of the "white" guys. Who by the way happen to be hispanic or slavic as well as western europe white. Or do ethnic groups only count based on the amount of pigment?
You then mention japanese games as an example... where of course the lead is japanese... but that is all right because a japanese person making a game with a japanese lead is totally different from a white person making a game with a white lead.
You also happily ignore the countless western games where UNLIKE the japanese games, you can choose your own race. MMO's like WoW and Lotro. The sims. Dues EX. Fallout, all of them. Far cry 2(probably the widest assortment of backgrounds).
You are indeed a closet racist. Everything whites do is wrong and everything someone else does is alright. Japanese games as an example of racial diversity. I want some of what you are smoking.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Two episodes now have revolved around a mixed-race female with realistic body proportions and sensible clothes, while the plot has been driven entirely by elderly people, one of whom is both black and disabled.
They've been critically acclaimed and sold gazillions of copies.
Did "awesome" suddenly become synonymous with "fundamentally wrong in every possible way"? Since Mr. Feynman isn't here to answer and you seem to agree so strongly with him, I'll simply address this to you instead of him. Full disclosure: I am a social scientist, which is why I'm so curious.
Do you honestly think that social scientists just sit at a typewriter (computer nowadays) and make shit up? That there's no theorizing, no testing, no data? And then nobody else ever cross-checks this, never tries to replicate results? Have you ever sat down and read a social science publication? Any journals? Any books published for the academic market?
I ask these questions because otherwise I cannot even fathom how you can draw these conclusions. I don't assume you have any advanced studies in sociology or the like, so why do you assume that you know what they're doing and that they're making things up?
Let's try the example given in that rant: that organic food is better for you than non-organic food. A basic problem with his argument: who's researching that? Which social science deals with questions of nutrition? I don't mean the social effects of organic farming, I mean who is going to see if organic food is more nutritious than the alternative? I don't think any of them do, at all. Economists might ask about the economic effects of organic farming, or political scientists about the political effects of malnutrition, but neither of them are going to look at whether it's better for people in a biological way. They'll go across campus and ask somebody in the food science department, because those are the people who actually would research this sort of thing. (Or the nutrition department, or the health department, or whatever physical science actually looks at issues of organic nutrition.) Social scientists might use these findings in a study to look at the social effects of organic farming, but that's a different question entirely.
Some people on /. seem to have a desire to pit the physical sciences and social sciences against each other, but I say that's silly. They look at different phenomena, but each contributes valuable knowledge to the world. Not like those jerks in the fine arts departments. (I'm kidding, please put those instruments down!)