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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.'"
Mmmrhmhmhmrhrmhmrmhm!
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.
Ethnically homogeneous developers rely on stereotypes. In other news, the sky is blue, water is wet.
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
Normal humans without special powers and skills are so underrepresented in those games. As a normal human whose only special power is the random temporary ability to cast ./ mod spells, I feel left out.
When the mages and sorcerers get into MIT and I don't, I guess I can blame the games.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A bunch of white dorky male geeks with no lives.
I being one of them.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Sergeant Johnson.
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.
Good thing they did not try to compare breast size and hip to waist ratios as compared to real world...
.. if someone develops a FPS where you shoot Hispanic 8-year-old females everyone will be happy? I kinda doubt it..
Somehow I don't think that the average person wants a game where they play a senior.
No one wants to bend down to get the Amulet of Yendor and not be able to stand up again.
The game I'm currently playing has four main characters. A Half-orc, a Tiefling, a Yuan-Ti, and a Dwarf. How much more diverse do you want?
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
They also over represent people with big muscles, excellent combat skills and multiple lives. What tripe will be next?
Lack of representation of children? 12 year olds save the world all the time.
what, you wanted Gordon Freeman to be a black, 6 year old girl? i'm not sure how many people would enjoy battling mutants and enemy soldiers with a little girl as their character...
weinersmith
Anecdotally, it would be my guess that these minorities are probably over-represented in terms of those who actually consume these games.
Which leaves open a very large, untapped market to be targeted by game producers who could potentially profit from targeting titles to these under-served groups. I don't expect that market to be ignored for long as gaming becomes a more ubiquitous form of entertainment.
The question is do women and minorities consume fewer games because they are underrepresented or are they underrepresented because they're generally less interested in that form of entertainment?
I bet it shows an unusually high percentage of Dark Elves and Orcs, as well as Caucasians. What should we be inferring from that?
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.
One reason I believe that children are underrepresented is, at least, partly the nature of mature games. Depiction of violence to children is frowned upon if not flat-out illegal in most countries. For the sake of consistency (why can't I rip off the child's head? It should be easier than the adults!), they're just excluded, I.E. Prototype.
White, male, adult, and single.
As always, you can't take any of these "papers" seriously. They're never even close to mathematically rigorous, and always designed merely to attract media attention.
there. fixed that for you.
weinersmith
Two games that represent the best of the best in racial diversity.
New Economic Perspectives
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.'
Kind of a stretch there Mr. Social Scientist. If it involves a kid using a computer then that kid will grow up to be an engineer. Sure.
More likely that kid will end up stoned in a dark basement somewhere playing WoW.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Help! I'm being oppressed!
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I recently was struck by a broader instance of this, in relation to popular media in general. Outside of targeted forms of media (television shows or movies that focus on a specific demographic), I think this trend is as present in TV and film as well. Its as if we've gotten used to a mode of depiction, despite what we see daily at work, on the street, and in our neighborhoods. American is well on the path to be, by around 2040, a "minority majority" country, where the majority of citizens are not white. Despite this, I agree that entertainment media do not currently reflect this.
I work in the video game industry, and to be honest, the games I have worked on don't even reflect the ethnic or lifestyle-minority makeup of my office, let alone the country at large (the presence of females in my offics vs. the games we have produced, on the other hand, is a different story).
Speaking for myself and where I work, this isn't any conscious method of producing entertainment - its just a weird (and, I feel, unfortunate) habit of depicting people in games. It reflects work yet to be done, I think, that popular media often has to make a conscious effort to more accurately depict the world around us, and its unfortunate that it takes a conscious effort to do so.
News for NERDS remember? Just do a Google image search on 'nerd' and you will see how diverse the /. demographic is. I count (on the first page of 21 results) only two females and the only non-anglos I see are are three duplicate images presenting them as thugs.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I've always wondered this but never had the opportunity to post it remotely on-topic.
Can someone explain to a non-anime person (myself) why all the characters in Japanese cartoons appear caucasian?
[video] 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.'"
Bullshit on that one. I know a lot of boys think they are "good with computers" because they spend a lot of time gaming, but reality rarely lives up to their self perception. The more the white male middle class and upper class potential professionals and potential elites spend their childhoods addicted to games the better. They'll give up their places in the socioeconomic order and unconsciously undermine their own privilege. Let the spoiled pale brat boys squander their minds. Let the female, transgender, people of color, etc feel alienated by corporate developed video games. Maybe they'll pick up a book, join a discussion group, or code their own self-empowering games.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
as long as the brown people are the bad guys I think they got it pretty right. :-)
Hooper: "Always some white boy gotta invoke the holy trilogy. Bust this: Those movies are about how the white man keeps the brother man down, even in a galaxy far, far away. Check this shit: You got cracker farm boy Luke Skywalker, Nazi poster boy, blond hair, blue eyes. And then you got Darth Vader, the blackest brother in the galaxy, Nubian god!"
Banky: "What's a Nubian?"
Hooper: "Shut the fuck up! Now... Vader, he's a spiritual brother, y'know, down with the force and all that good shit. Then this cracker, Skywalker, gets his hands on a light saber and the boy decides he's gonna run the fuckin' universe - gets a whole klan of whites together. And they go and bust up Vader's hood, the Death Star. Now what the fuck do you call that?"
Banky: "Intergalactic civil war?"
Hooper: "Gentrification! They gonna drive out the black element to make the galaxy quote-unquote, 'safe' for white folks. And Jedi's the most insulting installment! Because Vader's beautiful black visage is sullied when he pulls off his mask to reveal a feeble, crusty, old white man! They tryin' to tell us that deep inside, we all wants to be white!"
Banky: "...but isn't that true??"
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
When RE5 had black people as zombies in a game set in Africa, that was racist. When Schwarzenegger plowed the female terminator into a toilet head first it was sexist. What the fuck do these people want, do they even know? DO they want kids, women and black people get gored the same as white men or NOT.
For a long time while I was playing the Marathon series, I thought I was playing a black guy (because you could see the character's hands, which were dark brown). Then someone pointed out to me that the character had gloves on. Somehow, as a non-black person, I didn't feel any less oppressed as a result.
I would expect game characters to reflect the characters that players want to play. That doesn't require diversity.
And when some games don't provide the characters that gamers want to play while other games do, I expect the games that provide the right characters to succeed and the ones who don't provide those characters to fail.
It's called the free market, folks, and maybe you should worry about it a little bit less.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The demons in Doom don't represent the full list of demons in the various religions in the world.
and a systematic under-representation of females
...but each one portrayed is stacked enough to count for two or three average women. So it breaks even.
Have gnu, will travel.
I only hope my efforts will be recognized by future generations...
Why can't
Do they reflect the players?
The gaming industry is a multiBILLION dollar industry. If the studies they've done indicate that more people will buy the white male thing, then that's what they sell.
Is it PC? No. Does that matter when making money? No.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
they complain about it.
More hispanic gangster bad guys and GTA games, that should address this awful imbalance.
put some females in the game that you can pay for sex and then rob and they complain about that too.
Developers just can't win!
Can someone explain to a non-anime person (myself) why all the characters in Japanese cartoons appear caucasian?
In live action, you can tell by their eyes. But not so in manga and anime: cartoon eyes differ more based on the art style than the character's race. For instance, the upper eyelids in Sam Butcher's super-deformed character designs form a characteristic teardrop-shaped eye.
Big fuckin' deal. Who writes games? Mostly adult white males. Does anyone suppose that an adult white male is going to sit and ponder how a juvenile latin female might thing and act in some given situation? Nope. He don't GIVE A SHIT. Now, if that juvenile latin female wants to go into the game writer's world, and contribute something, then he'll give a shit. If she understands the game engine, and how the graphics work, if she can actually contribute to the (mostly mindless) plot of the story, then he WILL give a shit.
You want this adult white female to attempt to create a juvenile latin female character? Great - he's feeling both magnanimous and sensitive, he's going to sit right down and create this character, and give her a leading part in the story. The character is going to be one of two things (maybe both at the same time, even). An over endowed little slut who wants nothing more than to bang the hero, OR an over endowed AND over muscled bull dyke who is as mindless and shallow as any female character has ever been.
Which is the better choice? The bit of fluff, or the hunk of meat?
Give everyone a break. If you want your group represented in games, or stories, or movies, or whatever the fuck, GET OFF YOUR DEAD ASS AND REPRESENT!!! Stop sniveling, stop whining. (Lest anyone think that I'm picking on the young Sotomayors of the world, no, this goes for blacks, male and female, Asians, Arabs, and even fucking ESKIMOS! Oh, cool, a great game idea, "Mighty Quinn wreaks havoc in New York!"
While we wait for everyone to go do something useful, I'm intriqued by the idea of an adult male who appears to be white writing a novel from the perspective of a young Mexican girl. I just KNOW that everyone on slashdot will want to read it when I'm finished!! Quick, how do you say "pretty ponies" en Espanol?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
Except for pseudo-political-correct pathetic people who can't look beyond it.
If I make a game in some post-apocalyptic Texas-like desert, of course you will see massively more Rob Zombies than Mahatma Gandhis. And actually intelligent people know that this has nothing to to with genders or ethnics.
When I hire the best 20 people I can get for the job, I do not care if all 20 of them are white conservative males in their mid-50s, or half-Bantu half-grizzly half-swine-flu-victim-zombie girlie midgets in pink snake skin dresses. That's what it being irrelevant means. :)
Race or gender quotas are really disguised racism. It's just the "other extreme" of the full circle. ;) (Yeah, that really describes it very well.)
But one way to make you and even the hypocrites happy, is to use only two kinds of persons in your games: 100% average gray mixes of neutrality, and total freaking extremes. What are they going to say? That group chainsaw-vomiting pinky-toe made from knitted sea grass belts was not ethnically diverse enough when they fought that horde of grayish indistinct blobs of dust?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Your choices only run from 1 to 4. You don't offer the most accurate choice.
5. Yeah, there's a problem of sorts, but it isn't our problem. Let the underrepresented minorities sort it out for themselves.
Now, scroll down and look for my more verbose answer.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
A war game, where the teams you can choose from
1) Maori, in full dress and tattoo
2) One of several American and Mexican Indian tribes, also in full regalia
3) The legendary Amazon tribe.
4) Gurkhas!
5) Santa Ana's army
6) Custer's Army
7) Bowie et al.
Now, clearly I've stacked the deck against the "white" teams. But if such a game would be made, who do you think would scream the loudest? (besides Jack Thompson)
Altzheimer Quest - Search for the pants
Brown Hindu atheist here, telling all white people to stop blaming yourselves for the sins of (some of) your forefathers. The rest of the world doesn't hate you for being white. That's just racist.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
You're assuming that "we" have a problem. It is YOU, the self-designated representative of the PC brigade, who has a problem.
"Let the female, transgender" - - - - -
You're right. I never thought about that. Gays should be represented in games too. Next title should be, "Peter Puffer Destroys Las Vegas".
Oh, man, I can picture it now
ROFLMAO
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Is it a really serious problem that there aren't enough minorities shooting other people in video games? And are there really teenagers that are going to think "every person that I shoot in this game is white, so anybody in the real world that isn't white must be inferior"? I'd like to think that nobody here will claim that discrimination isn't a serious problem in society, but I somehow doubt that having more minorities in video games is all that's needed to change anyone's attitudes.
A better title would be "Games portray the gender and ethnicity of their creators". Which should be completely obvious. "Write what you know", as the adage goes.
"Games fail to portray gender and ethnic diversity"? Really?
Alyx Vance - African American/Asian female
Eli Vance - African American male with a physical disability
Father Grigori - A Russian priest
Judith Mossman - A Caucasian female
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
Were games supposed to portray gender and ethnic diversity? Keep the Dutch on their side of the border, the girls out of my room and the diversity out of my games!
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
A research note like this is far more interesting for what it tells us about the tastes of video game consumers than what it tells us about video game developers.
semantics are everything!
You don't feature enough ethnic groups, you're racially insensitive.
You set your zombie game (Resident Evil 5) in Africa and have huge numbers of black people in it, you're racially insensitive.
The majority of characters in games are "bad guys" to kill. If you make them [group X] then you're bad for implying [group X] are evil/should be killed. If you don't make them [group X] then you're bad for pushing [group X] in to a disproportionately small grouping.
Unfortunately, those who're determined to take offense will manage to take it no matter what you do.
They complain about not enough ethnic diversity, but you can bet your ass if there were a game where a young black male in "colors" as the main avatar went around an urban/metropolitan area shooting and looting, there would be screams of racism. Same if it were a hispanic, oriental or asian. Maybe not so much as a Native American, defiantly not as caucasian.
It doesn't matter what you do or how you do it, someone, somewhere will find something to bitch about.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
I have been thoroughly amused by a lot of these comments, but does anyone know what the racial makeup is of slashdot readers as compared to the video gamers and the general public?
They tried to put Canadian NPCs in games, but the playtesters were annoyed by having to hear "Eh" at the end of every sentence.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Interesting that they weight their numbers by game sales.
What this tells me is that people buy games that do not reflect social/racial diversity, not that games do not.
Like another poster said, social science that starts with the answer and works back from there. It would be interesting to see the stats if the weighting was removed, I suspect the answers would be quite different and would not meet the agenda of the people who sponsored the study.
Someone should also publish a paper about the underrepresentation of female characters endowed with regular-sized boobs in real life -
everyone in real life has such tiny boobs compared to normal ones.
There, fixed that for you.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
My favorite part is the suggestion that the elderly are under-represented, and that under-represented groups will fall behind in interest in technology. In other words, the reason grandma still has AOL is because she can't find enough video game characters she identifies with. Fantastic.
I'm not an advocate of most conservative agendas, but this strikes me as a "who gives a fuck?" issue.
...and it's the idiot social scientists who came up with this harebrained theory. It's not that they're wrong about under-representation, it's that there's actually a very good reason for it.
Think about the main audience for current video games. Predominantly young and male, right? Maybe, just maybe, these video game designers realized that these young male fans will want video game characters that they can identify with. Hence why so many protagonists are male! And guess what, a lot of these young male fans enjoy curvalicious women to ogle while they mash buttons, hence why the female characters tend to be so top-heavy and hourglass-shaped. I'm also pretty sure that your average 14 year old gamer doesn't really care about the depth of the big-boobed lady's character so much as he cares about boobs.
The game industry cares way more about people buying their games than equal representation. As soon as it becomes profitable to have a minority version of Mario, Link or Marcus Fenix, I promise you that there will be one.
And seconding the other post about Japanese games being very Asian-centric. Even some of the ones that get exported here are obviously so
If people are pissed about a particular minority being under-represented in games; stop fucking whining and developing games.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
The lead author is on the faculty at USC. By the same author:
There's much more like this. The papers are competent but mediocre.
Being able to somewhat believably portray an average white guy is hard enough. Add in females, skin tones, age, and weight, and your cost of development will go up if you try to make them look and act correct.
Don't want to spend the extra time and money to get it right? Fine -- then you'll get short haired, masculine women, overly shiny or plastic looking skin tones, and overweight people who walk like they're only supporting half their weight. And this is usually what happens in most games that try
So most games choose to put more time into perfecting gameplay than providing diversity of characters, and try to hide the flaws by using minorities less often.
So they want more child characters? Well, Fallout (1/2) had that aplenty, and somehow those same people weren't very amused. I mean, yes, so the kids get to be in a "running scared with a ticking dynamite stick strapped to them" role - so what?
Is it just me, or is worrying about representing different Races and Cultures what makes this become a problem? I'd rather it be that everyone "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." As soon as you start saying things like "I'm so proud to be Irish/Black/Hispanic/insert culture or race here" that's fine. But once you expect to have that recognized rather than let anyone get to know you, than you are being asked to be judged by the color of your skin, right?
I'm white, born and raised in Arizona, come from a poor part of town. So what? Shouldn't tell anything about me by all that.
When I was in high school, I had a black friend who quit the ebony club. I asked him why, this is what he said, " I thought it was going to be teaching me about African culture, I really would like to know what my ancestors did. Not just the Civil Rights stuff, or slavery. I want ancient history. Instead, I'm being asked to promote black people. Almost like Black Power!" We decided to try and start an "Ivory" club, the Vice Principal told me it sounded like the KKK.
It is cool to recognize what my Ancestors did, my people did. It's cool to hear about my ancestors. But what does that have to do with me? I have some stories I can take morals from, but don't assume you know me because I am a White boy from Laveen Arizona. And I would love to be judged by the content of my Character.
So frankly, I don't care about ethnic or racial diversity in games. When I played TES IV: Oblivion, I made my Character ( A Bosmer), and I made him look like me. So naturally, my Character was a white male. I'll tell you what, those goram guards don't give a damn what race I am, if they catch me stealing. "Halt! You violated the law...."
Indoctrinate : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments Educate : to develop mentally, morally, or aestheti
The PC Brigade, the FAT/Transfat Police, the Smoking Police, the Drinking Police, they all need to go take flying leaps. It's bad enough in the fiction area most of the novels involve female hero types but whatever, someone must be buying them cause they're all over the place, I'm not buying them. If all the games have burly women with swords/maces/wands as the hero you can play well count me out. But it seems to me that most of the games I play have the choice of male or female characters to play so what's the big deal? I know, it's the PC Brigade trying to make all your choices for you.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Bloods vs Crips vs Latin Kings... I think we have a best selling game franchise right there.
I was going to make some sort of comment about their data gatherers systematically mistaking stylized Japanese as white people (eg. Naruto isn't white.), but then I saw the bar graph on page 12. Black people in games: 10.74% Black people in US census: 12.3% Wait... A 1.6% difference? Am I the only one who finds this to be surprisingly representative? I was expecting a much more embarassing number. Such as the number of hispanics. X-(
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
She is neither Caucasian and (by definition) not male.
Clearly, Bozos are the most under-represented of all.
Seastead this.
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.
In the older wing commander games (WC1) there was a caucasian pilgrim, a scott, a canuck, a japanese woman, a beligian woman, an angolan, an aussie, a maori... it was pretty diverse.
Then in wing commander 2, they added more flavour.
Unfortunately, come wc3, the cast was whitewashed. I admit, I missed it, but I understand that 1 char of each race ends up being cliched and a circus look
If we're (and i mean they) are going to constantly check every damn game, or form of entertainment for "diversity" then lets just remove blacks, browns, and yellows from all games.
This is just getting stupid.
WHY must everything be looked at in terms of race? This constant need to evaluate everything in life by skin color is becoming racist in itself!
Even if such research is best intentioned and aimed at making sure we all "GET IT" that judging people alone, on the color of the skin is wrong..... this constant focus on race in everything is exhausting and a self fulfilling fear/problem.
I thought the entire idea of equality was to STOP prejudging individuals by race. It would seem the opposite has taken place. We just cant stop looking at things in terms of race, even when we're trying to end racism.
This stupid nonsense has to stop.
The Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson's must be rejected from society for they are the racists among us all for they are the ones that only see race in EVERY situation... especially ones that will potentially get them on the evening news, and make them money.
The solution is to simply remove all blacks, browns and yellows from videogames until we can actually be mature enough to NOT look at everything in terms of race.
Yes... how ironic... i know. Its even stupid... and its racist... BUT if we're going to look at everything in race.... we might as well have a real reason.
correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most American gamers white adult(or close) males? Sounds like a business decision.
Here's my characters from the last eight games I played:
- An Asian female warrior with a big sword
- A talking dog with an insane rabbit sidekick
- A humanoid lizard
- Half time tarantula/half time scorpion
- A little burlap sack creature
- A Mexican wrestler
- A fuzzy, yellow cat-like alien with a robot sidekick
- A gust of wind
Play along at home by guessing the eight games. :-)
The idea that games have 1.69% Asian primary characters doesn't pass the silliness test; I would guess a correct figure is at least 30%, possibly even 50%. Furthermore, Japan (and for that matter Scotland, where Grand Theft Auto comes from) has a much lower percentage of blacks, Hispanics, etc. and trying to explain why these groups are underrepresented compared to the American population makes no sense.
Look at chess! OMG! Only two ethnic entities and only one women on each side. No wonder there are so many wars in the past. Chess makes people violent and sexists and racists. The small figures are clearly children who are the first to be killed as if they were mere pawns in a game. Who kills children like that?
And the self sacrifice is fueling the minds of terrorists.
I think I am going to propose a law that outlaws chess as it is clearly undermining our society. Everybody who is against that is clearly a sexist, racist, killing, pedophile terrorist ...
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Females are well represented in the Grand Theft Auto series.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Someone should make a game in which you play as an... I don't know, something like a Native American. And, um, maybe something involving killing extraterrestrial life-forms. It would be awesome if you got to kill'em on their ship, actually.
Even better: make it so at the beginning you're in some building and then somehow the whole building ends up on the alien ship.
Oh, and play Don't Fear The Reaper when you're being pulled into the ship.
Oh, wait...
this first person shooter game is missing?
Romanian babies.
In other news, researchers make a misguided assumption that games are obligated in some way, shape, or form to portray gender and ethnic diversity.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
... I'm shocked.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Ah, so then Duke Nuke'em should have been a black, homosexual, vegetarian, married female eskimo.
You left out differently-abled, orphan, whistle-blower, and rape-survivor.
And homosexual married transgender might qualify for an even better job in Ottawa.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Most game characters are there to slaughter or be slaughtered. Most games are violent and they are more prominent when weighting by sales. I am glad to hear that children are underrepresented. Now I already don't play FPS and gangster games, though they are reported to be a lot of fun with free-roaming worlds, complex AI etc. The violence part is at best an unnecessary distraction.
How many games are created outside of the base gamer market stactics that succeed. I'm gussing very few. This isn't a racial issue or hardely even something that sould use any type of social science since its all based on what market will make the most money. Young white males are the largest group that buy games in the US. If you made games that had an ugly and smart woman with half naked guys everywhere trying to solve quests the game would fail. But if you change the character into a monkey boom! No racial/social/cultural comparisioin. Same goes for a game made in Japan. If a game was released in Japan where the main character was Latino or Native American doing something relating to their culture it would most likely in every case fail.
If you are a game company and can make a game for 10 million white kids or 1 million black kids which one do you think is going to be made? Its not social/racial/culteral/etc its about money.
TruePunk | Games
The 'PC' movement needs to shut their face, they are out of control.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oh, but they have. They know exactly what their goal is, and really don't care how stupid and twisted it might be.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I can't remember it exactly but it went something like ths...
First Panel: A young boy is playing a Doom like game.
Second Panel: Mother is watching from behind the boy and says 'Why are all these games geared towards boys? Why don't they make any geared towards girls sensibilities?
Third Panel: Boy says, "Maybe the question should be, why do girls not just make the games they want and stop complaining about it". Fourth Panel: Boy is sitting in the corner and his Father is standing behind him and says "When you get out of there come and see me and I will explain the concept of the 'rhetorical question' to you".
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Games are a reflection of cultural stereotypes because stereotypes are easy to understand and therefore facilitate the important thing -- the game play. The goal of game play/design is not "to reflect cultural diversity." Is there any profit in adopting this secondary goal? ----- "I should like balls infinitely better," she replied, "if they were carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing were made the order of the day." "Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but it would not be near so much like a ball."
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
There are many cases of experimenters running dozens of experiments with slightly different conditions before hitting on one that gives them the desired p 0.05.
I hate to break it to you, but this isn't limited to psychology. As a physical chemist working in a largely biologically-oriented lab, I'm appalled at what passes for science in some cases.
I put the fault for this in a couple of places. Firstly, the fact that work in science is now just another job draws people to work in scientific fields who are not particularly well-suited to the constant frustration and failure that comes with testing hypotheses until you get it right. These people are more interested in getting positive results than they are in getting true results.
Secondly, the way that funding is allocated stems largely from a person's track record of getting positive results. While this certainly makes a great deal of sense, it favors people who get the results they are looking for and not necessarily those who do good science.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Clearly they didn't count WoW, since it has a huge number of Native Americans (Tauren), as well as Jamaicans (Troll), and the Scottish (as always... Dwarves). Plus, if I'm going to be staring at an ass for months of gametime, it's going to at least be an ass that's pleasing to stare at, so I tended to pick females of the reasonably attractive races (human and night elf... gnome if u're into that sort of thing...).
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.
That's just a stereotype, eh?
"Stay a while, and listen, eh?"
"War. War never changes, eh?"
"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike, eh?"
"Look behind you! A three-headed monkey, eh?"
-Billco, Fnarg.com
This Feyman's "I know what it means to know something" is a true gem of boundless wisdom.
Look at the work of Burt, Granovetter or Podolny (head of Apple University) and tell me again that sociology isn't scientific. That social network analysis has informed biology and physics and vice-versa speaks to how ridiculous it is to try to divide the hard sciences from the soft sciences. Critique the article on its merits.
Bringing in labeling of different ethnic backgrounds that could lead to factions going at it against each other.... ...very... oh, never mind.
might...make... WoW...a
"The day we stop our need to put labels on things is the day we lose our humanity"
"The day we stop reacting to labels we place on things is a day the world will know no war"
All media has this issue. Look at the IMDB top 20 movies. All twenty star white men. If anything, games do much better than movies.
The cake is a pie
Okay at some point they flirt with being another field of economics, although the difference with "applied game theory" is a bit unclear to me (ie. nonexistent. You'd have to admit, however, that most things you hear about "sociology" are more like "X is racist" or "women are disadvantaged here". As the university Utrecht puts it "Empirical analysis is theory-guided, aiming at deeper explanations (in the Popperian sense) of social phenomena and processes rather than mere descriptions. Structural individualism is a major feature of theory building. This means that social phenomena are explained as a result of purposive behavior of individuals as well as corporate social actors". In practice this means they blame individuals (never themselves, big surprise there) and corporations for society's ills.
The last court case to make the news made a big illustration as to the usefulness of these type of arguments. A women's magazine was recruiting a writer. They specified that that employee "had to be a man". So they were sued, and some woman got a big turnout. So the magazine did a long article about the court case. Why did they want a man ? Well they had 27 women writers, and 1 man. That man had an accident and they looked to replace him, and they've got several "man's viewpoint" type of columns, so they did so to avoid being a women-only magazine. They had to pay the woman that sued big damages, and had to hire her.
So in effect, all the "anti-racist" idiocy accomplished exactly one thing : the TOTAL exclusion of one group of the population from that company. Of course, all was done in the name of "anti-racism" and was done by sociologists, paid by the government to fight racism (as opposed to jurists, or just well-thinking people in general).
Sociologists are a field about how to "redesign society" and seem to go about accomplishing such in the same way as the last group that tried it.
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!)
finding a way to pass off their gaming as "academic research into diversity" takes more than mere chutzpah. it takes talent.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The same voices that cry out for diversity in gaming, as well as every part of life are likely the REASON that this even exists. Imagine for a moment that you are creating a game. You are approaching the decision to create the characters and how they must look. True, most games seem to portray a male Caucasian adult. As you begin the task of creating a character, what will you make him/her? White or black? Skinny, fat, or overly athletic? If you create a black character, anything he does that is illegal will have NAACP up in arms.. You create an Eastern Indian character, ah but he is too stereotypical, more angry organizations. You create a female character, ah but her breasts are unrealistic, and she is not representative of a modern American (overweight), more hate-mail. Your game does not have anyone in a wheel-chair, more problems. Your hero uses any type of slang, and now the Dev's are racist towards the group who speaks that way. Any deviation from that white male that we all knew since the inception of gaming is in the cross-hairs. Game makers would have started changing it up long ago, if it weren't for the crying voices that always seem to condemn those who actually step away from the norm. Diversity is coming to America even without your cries for diversity and correctness- maybe if you shut up and watch the melting pot bubble things will be just fine? "These video games don't represent America!" WTH did you just say? These "games" don't represent real life census statistics, because they are games. Why do developers (developers, developers!) stick to the same characters? Maybe because attempting to include everybody when it really should not matter, is just as bad as crying about representation. To say that a game NEEDS diversity is to say that a Mexican guy can't handle playing a game as a pale looking character.. stop coddling the world. If you care about people, go care about the people who are hungry and sleeping on a slab of sidewalk. I'm not a smart man, but I do know what dumb is. With that said, I am not entrenched in this thinking, so if you have a good response, I am glad to entertain it, as I have been wrong before.. that one time..
http://xkcd.com/435/
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
When the hell did Slashdot turn into The Daily Mail?
Agree or disagree with the story all you like, but please quit whining about alleged so-called "PC brigades".
Help! Help! I'm a white male being oppressed!
Or we could quit the Daily Mail style hysterics, and perhaps provide some references to support your claims of this happening?
>>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?
>>Do you honestly think that social scientists just sit at a typewriter (computer nowadays) and make shit up?
Yes. Though they disguise it with stats to make it look scientific, and may even believe it themselves.
You don't need an "advanced degree" in a social science to see the profound methodological errors in their studies. For example, consider the article posted on here that claimed that road rage is derived evolutionarily from territorial behavior protection. Ok, fair enough. Except the article didn't examine the different rates of road rage between men and women, or between cultures, etc. It made a claim, posted some numbers, and said that it had proved the hypothesis without doing, as Feynman said, the necessary checks or legwork needed to really know if their claim was right or not.
This is the article you're referring to, right? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/06/17/0148238/Road-Rage-Linked-To-Automobile-Bumper-Stickers?art_pos=2
It took a little bit of legwork to get the Szlemko article proper, but I do not agree with your assessment. First, it does mention that there was no significant correlation between gender and road rage at the very beginning of the results section (see Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol 38. p. 1680). Second, the numbers used are derived from a survey completed by a pool of drivers, they aren't made up.
Mind you, I would question these results. However, it's because I think there's a sampling error of this particular study rather than a categorical dismissal of the entire field.
Help, Help, I'm being repressed!
So question for you - were Americans upset when Crysis warhead had a British protagonist?
OK ,I'll bite.
I've played videogames for many a long time. All your base are mine.
All the male characters, female characters , All ethnicities at some point. Some characters even reflected religions that do and don't exist.
So this "study" is coming from some whiner college with a politically correct agenda to regurgitate some lefty dem propaganda and leave their mark on videogames.
Typical waste of my taxes. Morons! Liars! Who believes you?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
The original black Barbie doll was a miserable failure. Black girls still wanted white Barbies.
The developers had cleverly given her African hair.
Turns out, playing with the hair was part of the big deal.
Black Barbie was then given long straight hair, and sold well.
hawk, avoiding discussing the mental deficiencies of those who think girls get self-image from toys
It's been a while since I read that paper. I'll see if I can find my notes on what was wrong with it.
>>Mind you, I would question these results. However, it's because I think there's a sampling error of this particular study rather than a categorical dismissal of the entire field.
I actually work in the social sciences, conducting scientific evaluations of education programs, attempting to assess using statistics if the programs are effective or not at improving student or teacher history content knowledge. I do it legitimately as possible, and *I* wouldn't accept my own results as being scientifically valid. There's just no way to isolate the millions of variables that go into learning and then come to the conclusion "Therefore we conclude (p 0.01) that the program had a positive impact on student history content knowledge".
With other evaluators, it's even more sketchy. I went to the national TAH conference last year and sat in on evaluation workshops all week, with the following gems:
1) Having the experimental group write the test that the experimental group and control group would then take.
2) Only basing "overall content knowledge gains" on post-workshop tests that were then also given to a control group, and not on an annual pre- post-test based on overall American history standards.
3) Having no controls in the program at all, or conducting significantly different evaluation efforts with the controls than the experimental group.
And remember, these were presenters.
But even if you could magically wave a wand and have a perfectly randomized experimental/control setup, where everyone complied with the test-taking (control group teachers that lose the lottery to join the program tend to tell you to go to hell), I'd still not be satisfied that it was the program causing any measured gains, though I would dutifully report the statistical analysis reports back, and demonstrate the differences in gains between the experimental and control groups. There's still too many uncontrolled factors for my tastes. But unless we can lock kids in little cubicles for a year and only do instruction via carefully-controlled prerecorded video (which might raise some ethical concerns) I doubt we'll ever be able to do better than what we're currently doing, which is a lot stats mixed with hand-waving.
Shin Megami Tensei games spend a good amount of effort to depict beings from diverse mythologies/religions around the world. They even keep a brief description about each of them available.
It isn't the same as having diverse ethnicity, but it is much more interesting and informative this way.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
in several games either the devs are lazy or under the thumb of the bean counters they tend to have a standard male. many games ive tried to do one ethnic or another the latest was american indian but everything is so politicly correct EXCEPT white males. if they let you make different races then they become vulnerable to nitpicking lawsuits. we had a very old sign in town that dipicted an indian and it was forced to be taken down I see this happen alot its just easier NOT to identify charactoristics of other races or even things like religious symbols. ask yourself why dont fantacy games have charactors that are part of a church? other than name only. why cant my high level charactor be a pope or bishop or at least head of a local church? its because of american fear and shame of its own identity. in my opinion.
Elderly? Maybe a wizard or kung-fu master (did they even consider these stereotypes?), but your typical elderly citizen isn't taking on endless physical fights with gusto.
Female? As if females were as strong, tough, and physically aggressive as males? Show me the dominance of females (esp. thin, frail sexy ones) in coed boxing or MMA, or competition shooting, or military ops, etc. As such, it looks like females are actually overrepresented.
Racial minority? This would be influenced not only by the number of those involved in such types of dangerous adventure, but also by concerns over portrayal lawsuits (e.g. "The character does what?!? Racist! Racist! Racist! Shut them down!"). And then there's the predominant racial makeup of the target consumers; if the main videogame appetite (and production) were in South America or subsaharan Africa, there would be a natural tendency to have more people from that market reflected in the products.
An additional factor in this is education. Ethnicities that emphasize education tend to end up with more jobs using advanced technology, including dangerous jobs.
If, to remedy this 'problem', one looked at the Bureau of Justice Statistics on crime to shape the numbers on race and activity in a game based on street crime, a lot of those same social scientists would cry foul, as certain groups would then be 'overrepresented'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdDj0Syzrn8
F*** with her, and she'll shoot you in the toodles.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
'cuz the games in general reflect some shade of reality, so a lot of 'em are variations of war games, and the reality of history is pretty blunt: It is us white guys who can't go 10 years without starting a war somewhere .
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
male entertainment has an over representation of females, like it or not once you crunch real numbers, not flash game players or wii fit gamers the mass of gamers is male. and they don't mind playing a female character much of the time. now look at womens entertainment, 99.9% of the time anything catering to womens interest involves only women as main characters. so putting the spotlight on games is slightly dubious since the assumption that it should be 50/50 is a false assumption. you may as well claim that because most fashion magazines cater to women that fashion magazine editors are sexist against men:P its simply a matter of the market. as for race, theres plenty of divesity. of course asian characters probably don't get counted as minority by people who like to game numbers these days.
Yeah and the kids on cereal boxes are always little white kids racist bastards
BTW, I'm getting ready to release a new FPS, called Grandpa's Revenge. Basically you're old, blind and in a wheel chair and you've lost your teeth. You must guide Grandpa around a old folks home and try to find his teeth. Various obstacles get in your way, such as getting raped by orderlies, forgetting what you were doing and dying.
...So does classical literature. So do movies. So what? Look, I'm a chick and I really don't mind that there are not exactly 50% of games with female protagonists out there. I don't really CARE about the ethnicity/whatever of the character I play. If there's a choice, by all means, make your game allow for the choice of various different ethnicities, but if not... Seriously, I could not care less. The preset character I became closest to in a game? A nameless, scarred immortal MALE of indeterminate ethnicity. In other words, someone who was most certainly not me. If game designers could just focus on making a fleshed-out, well-dimensioned character, I'd be thrilled. I don't honestly care at all if the character looks like me, as long as I can connect with them. I wouldn't care if a game shipped with a main character that basically WAS me if it wasn't fleshed out well. There is an order to these things. First, fleshed out character. Somewhere around LAST, social diversity. Oh, and didn't you realize? We can't have kids or even sometimes innocent females or old people in games. Someone might kill them! Think of the goddamn children! Do away with that piece of nonsense, and maybe you can have more diversity age-wise. Until then, just bloody deal with it.
We don't want to offend some third universe culture by not representing them (and their different cultures). Let's make sure that all games include every know creature in the entire universe before we allow a game to be released to the public so we don't offend any ONE (as in single, uno, #1) person. Heaven forbid we offend a single person in our strive to be politically correct.
geez, give me a break. These morons that think we are discriminating against someone need to get a life and forget about it.