Game Characters Are Too White, Too Male

What if they design video games to fit these demands? You would have to have a black woman killing elderly Arabs. Imagine the civil rights complaining with that game.

There is a reason why video games show a lot of young white men. That’s who plays video games. Just wait 30 years, then today’s 40-something gamers will be 70-something gamers. That’s when you’ll see old people in video games.

“Ironically, they may even be less likely to become game makers themselves, helping to perpetuate the cycle. Many have suggested that games function as crucial gatekeepers for interest in science, technology, engineering and math.”

Really? How many hard core gamers are sequencing the human genome?

“The study itself was limited in two important ways. Many games feature non-human characters, and many are first-person games where the player never sees himself or herself. The study only included visible characters that were clearly human.”

How odd, up until I read that sentence, I thought I was a green elf in a Roman legionnaire’s uniform. I do believe that sleeping tonight will be difficult, as I am now in a profoundly critical identity crisis.

Heck, I might even have to call off of work tomorrow!

Also, compounding this psychological angst for me is this “fact”:

“Games developers are failing to reflect diversity, according to the first survey of game characters. Latinos are nearly invisible, and women and other groups are woefully underrepresented.”

Well, the diversity sages had better get on the ball, or else I will have to call a tolerance coven:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZzfM05tSfM&feature=related

Oh the irony of it all and of course, God help us all!

We need Hispanic heroes in video games so that Hispanic kids will become scientists? The last thing I’d do to try to interest a kid in science is plunk him down in front of a TV.

“Games developers are failing to reflect diversity, according to the first survey of game characters. Latinos are nearly invisible, and women and other groups are woefully underrepresented, [said] Dmitri Williams, a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication.”

A survey of game characters? Good grief! Another source of discrimination uncovered.

What in the world will they come up with next to whine about? Will they find that the pictures on coins,postage stamps and cereal boxes are under-representative? Is this damaging to children’s self esteem and hampering their emotional development? No wonder they have fallen behind! Of course! Once again, it’s all the white man’s fault. A nefarious white plot to damage “minority” children’s self-esteem and keep them down.

Oh, btw, I wouldn’t be surprised if all those games are imported
from the Orient — as as everything else is nowadays. Those Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese don’t seem to be suffering from self-esteem problems. Do they even care? They just laugh all the way to the bank.

This is what we get for patiently, politely listening for 40 years to the wails and gripes of the PAM (Perpetually Aggrieved Minorities), when we should have just laughed them out of the room.

So now it comes down to this. Game characters! You’ll never satisfy them … not until all white presence is completely expunged from every last cranny of our culture.

Affirmative action in video game character design?
I always thought the appeal of the video game universe is that it isn’t ‘the real world.’ It’s like comic books, animation or Sci fi cinema in the respect that only your imagination is the limit. I use these things to get away from reality personally.

My circle of friends are (or at least were) game designers/developers, being coders and/or animators and artists.
And yes, they are mainly White males from technical or math backgrounds with the programmer’s specfically.
I remember them saying ten years ago that they wanted and/or needed more females in the industry and sure they got a couple, mainly in the art side of things.

But it’s not glamorous work, they sit on their backsides maybe 10-12 hrs a day and when deadlines loom the pressure goes on. As when deadlines or project milestones aren’t met, the developer would lose money as per their contract with the publisher who has marketing and release date obligations to meet.
Its thankless work, especially if you’re working on a title for six months that holds no personal interest like ‘Pony Island’ that is mentioned in one of my links.

The gaming industry is now so competitive with so many platforms, consoles, hand held devices and online PC games. For instances my best friend is now working as a game developer contracted to one of the larger mobile phone companies.
Titles have a very short shelf life now and the licensing fees alone that the publishers have to pay to use a recognizable brand can be astronomical.
And as a result publishers and developers are often going bust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclaim_Entertainment
It just takes a couple of dud titles.

In the last couple of days I’ve watched a couple of Robert Rodriguez (Mexican/American director) and both his films I watched he had lots of Hispanic actors cast in lead roles (with white female leads, sigh) http://tinyurl.com/bl7bmc
Incidentally he cast no black actors in speaking roles at all and both of these films were box office bombs.
I can understand why each ethnic group wants to see their own people in lead roles (as do I), but it doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful.

As usual it comes down to the green; if there’s money in it they’ll do it.
The main markets for games are the States and Japan; the Japanese have always animated their characters with European features with round blue eyes and blonde hair etc.
So if you want to see more Hispanics in games how about training Hispanic programmers, artists and animators. Get a Hispanic developer to make the game and then get a Hispanic publishing company to make market and distribute the game and then get Hispanics to but it.
And then see how it goes.
It’s probably easier to just whine and get mainstream (majority White in the U.S.) companies to just put ‘their characters’ in for them.

And the thing that is stopping these minority groups from kick starting themselves is that they are lacking the self esteem gained from seeing people who look like them in the games.
In my experience, strangely the lower the IQ the non white group is, the higher the self esteem they seem to have (don’t ask me how or why this works.)

In saying all of this, the way my friend had his mindset cultivated to get into video game design (via Electrical Engineering) was from his father getting him to take apart a working clock and to then reassemble it for a small prize.
Which enabled him to see how things can be deconstructed I suppose.
As opposed to plonking your kids down in front of a game with a character that looks like them and hope for the best.

Makes me wonder is the goal to make these guys feel good about themselves or to get Whites to feel good (or used to) seeing them.
As our populations become more mongrelized over time these people will no doubt get their wishes eventually anyway.

On a related point, Sci Fi films vision for the future-

1950’s- http://tinyurl.com/kmuvlh (I’m not a Nordist per say.)

As opposed to recent- http://tinyurl.com/no8acx (Look at the colours of the good guys and bad guys, hmm.)

Or http://tinyurl.com/krh7pd (If this is the future, machines take us now!!)

And http://tinyurl.com/monld6 ‘Goo Backs,’ watch it if you can Amreners, as it’s amusing and somewhat prolific in a similar vein to ‘Idiocrisy.’

Would they also go to Japan and complain their animated characters such as anime are also too white, and do not reflect Japanese society?
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/anime/images/chibi.jpg

Ironically, most of these game characters are also created in Japan. I envy the freedom of creativity they have there. No PC multicultural whiners nagging them every step of the way.

What about Grand Theft Auto?

Well, characters in the gaming universe are mostly white because the game developers are young males who are either white or Japanese. And nearly all Japanese males see a Japanimation white avatar when they look in the mirror. Also, many of the story lines come out of the highly effective, dominant martial traditions or science fiction fantasies of Western culture. (Of course, there are plenty of cute Asian women in the game universe.) But let’s cut to the chase: computer game development, highly dependent on the right tail of the IQ bell curve, excludes people of color. Inevitably, the population of intellectually gifted people will create things that reflect their own identity and obsessions.

To GenX in Oz,

An excellent and informative post above. I can’t say that I agree with all of it, but about between 97% and 98% of it I did. I particularly enjoyed your clips from the Sci-Fi films and your insights about their implications, at least from the Hollyweirdo Crowd.

Ironically, I have always found this strangely (for lack of a better word) declarative scene from the original Matrix film elucidating of the multicultural positions of the media. There is an irony in the sequence to be sure, but that is only when you peel away the obvious techno-Marxism.

Enjoy and all the best to you GenXin Oz:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXQozTxQSiE&feature=related

John PM!!!

Here we go again, Whites finance, engineer and bring to market a product, and THEN non-Whites come in for THEIR piece of the pie. Can’t they create THEIR OWN games? These idiots are suppose to be such great inventors, but I can’t think of ONE THING that they’ve invented in my lifetime- -and I’ve been around for awhile. And shouldn’t Africa be the hub of futuristic inventions to this day if that were true? As someone posted here awhile back, it seems that blacks were more ‘inventive’ during slavery and segregation than they are today with unlimited opportunities.

To John PM.

From the POTUS himself…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTIw7XaS_A4&feature=related
Reality and art colliding.

Here’s another ‘behind the looking glass’ type clip from an 80’s Sci fi classic that you may enjoy.
http://tinyurl.com/md3pnn

Or on prolific cartoons again, there’s this 50yr old short talking about the danger of big Government and how passively accepting ”ism’s” destroys various freedoms.
http://tinyurl.com/m7y294

Correct. There are plenty of black games out there: NBA and 50 cent and others.
When you design and engineer the game yourself, you can make the characters any way you see fit.
Plenty of minority characters in Grand Theft Auto where one would expect them.
In Legend and Lore, you’d expect knights and princes to be white because that is white heritage and culture.
It’s like putting blacks in a Dukes of Hazzard game, it would just be stupid.
My prediction is that sales and profits drop, the more black characters you have.
At this point in America, they are force feeding blacks to people and it’s really repugnant.
Let the latinos have their characters, you could make Zorro or Aztec or Mayan games. Maybe bullfighting games. Or an MS-13 game.
Thing is, it’s the culture and tech that makes these games popular and science and tech has been white nerd culture, so where’s the problem?
Maybe another Latino game could be tagging and defacing pretty buildings with graffiti.
Or maybe selling Oranges to people. Maybe a Pinata game.

Interesting article. What I would like to know is if the gaming populations would respond well if the cast were darker skinned. For example in most sci-fi on TV the cast is White. Take Star Trek, nearly all of the crew were White yet with current demographic projections for America in 2387 all of them should be a shade of brown because Europeans will be a footnote in history.

Something to think about.

Perhaps the offended minorities should begin producing their own computer games. I can see it all now; in a decade we will be hearing black and hispanic thugs killed in gang shootings, described on the “news” as “aspiring software engineers.”