Copied this insightful comment from the article link. I took the liberty to post it here for some additional views (I apologize in advance for any copies I posted by accident as "Anonymous Coward").
Author: Areala
Any time you bring race or gender bias into any particular medium, there's going to be problems. And while I can certainly see that there is a disparity, the first thing one has to look at is that numbers don't tell you everything.
Being female, when I was growing up, I heard all the time about how women were paid less than men, and how terrible this was. And while the numbers are true, they don't tell the whole story. Women, by and large, simply tend to go after jobs that traditionally pay less. Female teachers outnumber male teachers in every school in the US, for example--this is not because men are being "held back" from teaching by an elite group of high-powered females in schools and universities, it's because there are more women interested in the job than men, and fewer males are getting their degrees and licenses than females are. Numbers alone are meaningless without a reason to go along with them.
On the subject of ethnicity, the only counterpoints I can offer to the subject of "bias" against any particular ethnicity are as follows. First, the majority of gamers are male, and the majority of game developers are male; this isn't surprising considering that males (especially in the teenage demographic) are statistically more interested in gaming than females. We're not the rare birds we once were, but we're still not as common. Boys use video games as bonding experiences and social experiences. By and large, girls tend to bond and socialize in other ways. Men are more apt to enter the field of game design because, statistically speaking, they are more apt to be interested in it than their female counterparts are (remember the teacher analogy). It's not that the top-tier of every gaming company is conspiring to keep women out, it's that they're having a hard time finding any who are at all interested in the field period. Black or white, asian or european, it's going to be guys right now who are filling the ranks. And gaming isn't the garage-based hobby it was twenty years ago--with budgets of games in the next generation hovering in the double-digits of millions of dollars for a major, AAA title like Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, or Gears of War, and gaming revenue surpassing Hollywood in terms of dollars generated, gaming companies are only interested in hiring the best people for the right positions. If you can't program, or you aren't as good a designer as somebody else, or you lack the experience a company is looking for, it doesn't matter what colour your skin is or whether you have two X chromosomes: the job will not be yours. Plain and simple.
Point two is something that an awful lot of people seem to forget about gaming when this topic comes up for discussion, and that is that video games are all about fantasy. There's a reason why Microsoft has not made a multi-platinum-selling video game about a geeky programmer who works a 9-5 job programming the next iteration of Windows; it's a fantasy that appeals to so few people that those who would be interested in playing the game are already doing it in real life.
Fantasy in games is all about getting to do things that you can't do in real life, either because of physical, social, ethical or legal ramifications or because the universe we inhabit is not the same as the universe of a video game. No matter how hard we might want it, none of us will be able to be Joan of Arc leading an attack on the English in an effort to restore France's deposed dauphin to his rightful place on the throne. Unless we play a video game.
Since gaming is all about fantasy, it stands to reason that the things we want to fantasize about most are the things we will never, ever get to do in real life. There's a reason Madden NFL sells millions of copies with each year's release: there are millions of people all over the world
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Copied this insightful comment from the article link. I took the liberty to post it here for some additional views (I apologize in advance for any copies I posted by accident as "Anonymous Coward").
Author: Areala
Any time you bring race or gender bias into any particular medium, there's going to be problems. And while I can certainly see that there is a disparity, the first thing one has to look at is that numbers don't tell you everything.
Being female, when I was growing up, I heard all the time about how women were paid less than men, and how terrible this was. And while the numbers are true, they don't tell the whole story. Women, by and large, simply tend to go after jobs that traditionally pay less. Female teachers outnumber male teachers in every school in the US, for example--this is not because men are being "held back" from teaching by an elite group of high-powered females in schools and universities, it's because there are more women interested in the job than men, and fewer males are getting their degrees and licenses than females are. Numbers alone are meaningless without a reason to go along with them.
On the subject of ethnicity, the only counterpoints I can offer to the subject of "bias" against any particular ethnicity are as follows. First, the majority of gamers are male, and the majority of game developers are male; this isn't surprising considering that males (especially in the teenage demographic) are statistically more interested in gaming than females. We're not the rare birds we once were, but we're still not as common. Boys use video games as bonding experiences and social experiences. By and large, girls tend to bond and socialize in other ways. Men are more apt to enter the field of game design because, statistically speaking, they are more apt to be interested in it than their female counterparts are (remember the teacher analogy). It's not that the top-tier of every gaming company is conspiring to keep women out, it's that they're having a hard time finding any who are at all interested in the field period. Black or white, asian or european, it's going to be guys right now who are filling the ranks. And gaming isn't the garage-based hobby it was twenty years ago--with budgets of games in the next generation hovering in the double-digits of millions of dollars for a major, AAA title like Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, or Gears of War, and gaming revenue surpassing Hollywood in terms of dollars generated, gaming companies are only interested in hiring the best people for the right positions. If you can't program, or you aren't as good a designer as somebody else, or you lack the experience a company is looking for, it doesn't matter what colour your skin is or whether you have two X chromosomes: the job will not be yours. Plain and simple.
Point two is something that an awful lot of people seem to forget about gaming when this topic comes up for discussion, and that is that video games are all about fantasy. There's a reason why Microsoft has not made a multi-platinum-selling video game about a geeky programmer who works a 9-5 job programming the next iteration of Windows; it's a fantasy that appeals to so few people that those who would be interested in playing the game are already doing it in real life.
Fantasy in games is all about getting to do things that you can't do in real life, either because of physical, social, ethical or legal ramifications or because the universe we inhabit is not the same as the universe of a video game. No matter how hard we might want it, none of us will be able to be Joan of Arc leading an attack on the English in an effort to restore France's deposed dauphin to his rightful place on the throne. Unless we play a video game.
Since gaming is all about fantasy, it stands to reason that the things we want to fantasize about most are the things we will never, ever get to do in real life. There's a reason Madden NFL sells millions of copies with each year's release: there are millions of people all over the world