Protests across the United States against police violence and systemic racism against black Americans have prompted game companies like Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Sony Interactive Entertainment / PlayStation to issue statements of support and to donate. to the human rights organizations concerned.
These are positive actions, but the most impactful thing that gaming companies can do is take action internally. Racial prejudice is cooked, usually unintentionally, in games by those who develop it. This creates a recurring pattern of stereotypical or completely absent black and Latinx characters in the games, which invalidates and degrades.
There are 2.5 billion players worldwide, a group that includes consumers of all ethnicities and ages (especially in mobile games, the largest market segment). Quartz noted that "57% of video game players in the United States aged 6 to 29 will be people of color in less than 10 years." In the United States, black and Latinx youth spend an average of more time per day playing mobile and console games than white youth. For hundreds of millions of gamers around the world - especially in the demographics that drive the rapid growth of the industry - there are very few games whose stories are centered on characters like them. It is also a missed business opportunity.
"Telling these stories is not as niche as people think. Watch [the Marvel movie] Black Panther "Says Rashad Redic, co-founder and creative director of Brass Lion Entertainment," Content is defined as entertaining, period. "
Beyond the skin color of the characters, there are subtle aspects of the development of the game that contribute to under-representation or false representation. The consistent view among game executives and researchers I interviewed for this article is that the lack of diversity among the employees of major game companies means that leadership remains largely oblivious to this.
Making this simple criticism is not always welcome. Game industry journalist Gita Jackson, for example, described the criticism she receives each time she mentions the race of characters in a game. "I think the presence of more video game characters who are women of color is good ... These should not be controversial statements - I am just saying something that I appreciate, something that concerns me, "she wrote last year," and yet some the readers responded as if I had suggested to all the players to amputate their little finger. "
Representation of the characters
One of the most in-depth studies on racial representation in games was a 2009 study that analyzed 150 of the most popular titles. Black characters represented 10.7% of the characters, roughly on par with the most recent census data while 12.3% of Americans were black, and only 2.7% of the characters were Latinx (compared to a 12.5% representation in the American population). But Dmitri Williams, a professor at the University of Southern California and lead author of this study, says that the representation of blacks is even lower if you only look at the main characters and in any case "the athletes in the games sports make up the bulk of the black characters in these games. "
Kishonna Gray, professor at the University of Illinois - Chicago, points out that just tracking the number of black characters in games misses out on how they are portrayed. "In the film, there have historically been three roles in which you see black characters: Black as violent, Black as companion, Black as helper. This is also true in video games. "
In addition, she argues that "sports games should be removed from these scans because they only copy real people from the real world" and hide statistics that would show how rarely do black characters arise from the creative process in most game studios.
The dissemination of specific demographic data in a certain light in any form of media has an impact on consumers' perception of this demographic data in the real world. At least one academic study found that white participants were more likely to associate black faces with negative words after playing a violent video game as a black character than after playing a violent video game as white character.
When the only option for discovering the fantasy worlds of many games is to use white characters, it is obvious to many players that these fantasy worlds were not designed for them. "Everything is possible in games," Gray tells me with reference to his passion for the industry, "But everything is only possible for white characters. When they add black characters to a game, they only root them in their real context ... why can't black characters ride on dragons? "
Game developer demographics
Data has shown that the representation of different races in games is correlated with the racial makeup of the game development community. According to Williams. "It was pretty much a one-for-one representation."
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) found in the 2019 edition of its annual survey that among game developers around the world:
- 81% identify themselves as "white / Caucasian / European"
- 7% identify as "Hispanic / Latinx"
- 2% identify themselves as "black / African American / African / Afro-Caribbean"
"People are inspired by their experience," said Gray, "which is why we always have a representation problem." Redic said that during his career - which includes roles in big game companies like Bethesda and Crytek - he has often been "the only - or one of the very few - black guys among hundreds of developers of games in a business. "
Tanya DePass, founder of the non-profit organization I Need Diverse Games, argues that for companies wishing to improve the diversity of their content, "the most important is the diversity of staff and the diversity of staff at the level of direction". In addition, his advice to game studios is to hire external experts who can review their development plans and give their opinion on the places where their content can stereotype or distort an ethnic group: "Use diversity consultants at start, not a month before launch, and take it seriously. "
One company that uses consultants is Niantic, the studio behind Pokémon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. He also set up "diversity and inclusion check-ins through the concept of a game, the preproduction and postproduction phases", according to Trinidad Hermida, responsible for diversity and inclusion of the society. "These check-ins cover everything from character design to assessing the diversity of Niantic's internal team working on the product," she said. "Every new game we publish has to go through this process to be launched."
Good intentions, slow progress
This IGDA survey from last year also found that 87% of game developers said the "diversity of game content" is "very important" or "somewhat important", which offers optimism that representation can improve as developers are pushed to think less about diversity in the abstract and more in the context of the specific games they are working on.
The number of Black or Latinx characters in popular games is indeed increasing, even if this progression is quite slow compared to the rate at which the demographic composition of the gaming community is diversifying. Examples can be found in the list of games from Moby Games with black protagonists until 2017 and the list of black video game characters on Wikipedia.
Giving users many options to customize the appearance of their avatar goes a long way in helping different demographics of players feel welcomed and emotionally attached to a game. This is becoming more common in games, but there are often more limited options for black avatars, such as the ability to choose natural hair styles. DePass says game developers "often don't think that there are other people who also want to see each other [in creating their avatar]. "And when they do, the homogeneity of their team can lead to predictable errors. For example, DePass said that" if black hair is available, it looks bad. Sometimes there are 5 inches between the braids ; or Afros looks like steel wool. It's like "Have you ever met a black man or seen pictures of black hairstyles?" "
Internet harassment
Cyber-bullying is a big problem in games, MMOs in particular, and in their efforts to combat it, game managers should recognize that the players and founders of Black and Latinx are particularly targeted for abuse, often denigrated by racist insults and jokes.
According to Gray, a small but important step that developers can take is to give players the opportunity to mark racist behavior as the reason for filing a complaint against another user. Many games have added the ability to mark a complaint as being due to sex discrimination, she notes, but the lack of a similar option for racism keeps game studios from knowing what to do. how often racism occurs on their platform. Collecting data on a problem allows us to better measure this problem and take more effective measures to remedy it.
Building for an underserved market
As DePass noted in our appeal, "There are not many black game creators, but there are many black game buyers." There are business opportunities in creating content that better caters to the often overlooked segments of the gaming community.
The natural question here is this: if creating games with stories centered on black or Latin characters is a convincing business opportunity, why has it not already been exploited? Leadership in established gaming companies "has an idea of who East a player, and who is not is very archaic, "said Glow Up Games CEO Mitu Khandaker, whose studio is developing a mobile game using IP from the HBO show" Insecure ".
Likewise, she explains, entrepreneurs who have found their own studios with this thesis quickly realize that the main sources of funding (publishers and venture capitalists) are made up of ethnically homogeneous teams who quickly judge these games as niches .
As a result, game developers focused on creating games aimed at Black and Latinx audiences get stuck in the indie game space, lacking resources or credibility in the industry to develop an AAA title.
There is a long list of societal issues that contribute to the disproportionately small number of black software engineers entering the gaming industry or in management positions in the industry, with reduced access to STEM education. high quality in kindergarten to grade 12 to employers devaluing diplomas compared to black history. colleges and universities with well documented CV models with white-sounding names receiving considerably more job interviews.
Khandaker noted that the perceived lack of representation and models for black engineers examining the gaming industry means that many shun the industry altogether, and many who enter the industry leave it in frustration.
Take responsability
During our recent call, Williams shared his memory of speaking to a panel on racial prejudice in games at the DICE conference for game leaders: "In the few minutes of transition from the previous session to my panel, about 90 % of the public is gone. "
One sentiment that was repeated among many of the people I interviewed for this post was that the problem was not so much game leaders with harmful intent as game leaders lacking in interest or empathy to treat diversity as a problem they should personally spend time solving. The discussion of diversity, whether at conferences or otherwise, is still too often treated as a symbolic question for the sake of political correctness, and not as an urgent trade problem to be resolved.
If the current news cycle is helping to change this attitude and energize industry leaders, the most effective action they can take is to address diversity as a product development priority, not a problem. public relations.
