Do you believe that diversity is an issue in today's game industry?
Yes, of course. The game industry does not stand apart from the rest of society.
If so, how should we, as developers, go about resolving it?
By engaging with the larger societal discussions that are ongoing about diversity, representation, bias and equality; by looking around our offices and studios and actively working to correct the obvious and severe imbalances that exist there; and by soliciting input from underrepresented classes about their cognitive and emotional response to the issue in our work as appropriate.
I really don't think that racism is a thing anymore.
Oh, I guarantee you it's a thing.
If you're talking about EMPLOYMENT within the industry, I don't think the problem is at the studios.
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If there is a problem of employment discrimination I don't believe it to be an issue of corporate discrimination. Any problems there are likely to not be something inside corporate management. There is a lack of gender and racial diversity in games employment and in tech jobs generally. But I don't blame the employers for that lack of diversity. Employers can only hire the applicants who are in the job pool, and from that pool they'll choose the ones with the most documented experience that they can do the job.
This is a common, comfortable refrain. And it's also entirely false.
Employers can do a lot to encourage more applicants to enter the job pool, most prominently by not discouraging applicants from entering the job pool. Consider the workplace culture in most male-dominant technology shops. Bros. Brogrammers. Dick jokes. Keggers. Mom jokes. One Twitter department recently had a "frat party," even as the company was embroiled in a sexual discrimination lawsuit, on the very day that one of its Code Camp for Girls classes was graduating. Technology shops vastly underrate the signals they send about how hostile the workplace will be to women.
Then consider the variety of ways in which professional advancement is lubricated by extracurricular socialization, typically around alcohol. For women, this is far more risky than it is for men, especially when they are already outnumbered. Overt sexual harassment is a rampant issue in the tech industry.
Then consider the rates at which the women who do make it into tech jobs leave those jobs, vs their male colleagues. What, women are simply statistically less capable of "cutting it" in tech? All populations regress to the mean.
You mention women leaving CS jobs to "be a parent to their children." This is a broad social inequality in that men still do less of the childcare in a home, so professional women are structurally disadvantaged and less able to invest the extra time and effort into advancing their careers. But tech companies also tend to have shitty attitudes about maternity and parental leave. Don't get me wrong: nearly all US corporations have abysmal parental leave practices, but male-centric tech companies are worse than the mean. I've heard of cases where they didn't even have a maternity leave policy in place!
Then consider the variety of ways in which minorities are marginalized, from the near-total lack of recruitment effort in minority-heavy schools (it's like Silicon Valley doesn't realize the United States has Historically Black Colleges and Universities—some of them all-female—and that they have engineering programs!), to simple but rampant cultural insensitivity. When Apple brought The Weeknd on stage to close out their Apple Music announcement shit show, guys at my office were making all sorts of snide, "who the fuck is this guy?" type comments. Like, the one time they don't bring out some aging white dude, I gotta put up with your ignorance?
It's easy to say "we only hire from the candidates we find," but a lot of that depends on where you look and what you communicate about yourselves.
Yes, many larger social and structural issues are at play, and bias the field in favor of male overrepresentation, but the way the computing technology industries treat the women they do have is poor, and needs to get a lot better.
if you're talking about CONTENT OF GAMES, I also don't think that is a problem generally.
Again (unsurprisingly) I disagree.
Games where humans are depicted make up an extremely tiny slice of all games. Easily under 1%, most likely under 0.1%. So for this 99% and maybe 99.9% of all games, there is no human diversity issue.
This is a red herring, as is the sport thing. Why even bring it up? Diversity is only pertinent to games in which the gender of the depicted human character is not forcibly constrained by an external invariant. The question is how diversity is within that subset of games. I submit that it's poor.
Edit: Though sports are less gender-constrained than you realize. Not only are there female equivalents of most professional male sports (that would get video games), but there have sometimes been female participants in the "male" leagues. Right now there's a French female shortstop, Melissa Mayeux, who's expected to participate in the MLB draft; Lauren Silberman, the first woman to participate in an NFL combine (she sucked); the NBA's Indiana Pacers invited UCLA standout Ann Meyers to tryouts and signed her to a no-cut contract in 1980, and I've seen an unsubstantiated report that a "Jane Martin" actually played for them in 1972.
Edit2: Nancy Lieberman played on the Los Angeles Lakers 1980 summer league team. In 2009 she was hired to coach the Texas Legends NBA Developmental League team, becoming the first woman to coach a men's professional basketball team in the United States (and maybe the world).
Games that do have humans very often have building tools where you can customize gender, skin color, hair color, clothing, and more. For online games where everyone can bring their own avatars, no diversity issues. Each person built their own avatar, and as long as all the options are available, no diversity issues at all.
Incorrect. Even in games where all of the races are alien/fantastical, gender is often problematic because the recognizably female characters will tend to be more overtly sexualized. The whole RPG trope of female battle armor consisting of a chainmail bustier and leather thong…
Race can also be a problem because the darker-hued characters are invariably portrayed as more negative and bestial. It's a reinforcement of our human "light is right" skin color complex, and those of us who are naturally darker-skinned notice.
Remember that first and foremost, games are entertainment in fantasy worlds. Different people have different preferences in their entertainment. In movies they run the gambit from children's animations to Korean dramas to action, horror, drama, sci/fi, fantasy, art flicks, and even hardcore adult films. There is an enormous variety in entertainment options. If your film is set in Japan it makes sense to follow their demographics, lots of Japanese race characters and Japanese themed environments; if you've got a Korean drama it makes sense to have almost exclusively Korean actors and Korean settings; a film set in India is going to have a lot of Indian actors. The setting and story are going to define the race and nationality.
This glosses over the issue rather amusingly. Are you familiar with "yellowface"? There was a phase in the US film industry where movies would be set in Asia, and all the extras and secondary characters would be played by natives, but the heroic lead (and often the primary love interest) would be played by white actors with tape over their eyes to give them epicanthic folds. Even in cases where there is no yellowface, the primary characters are often white, set against a backdrop of yellow, brown and black faces.
Now, you can argue that this is an expected reality of films produced by a majority-white nation, but when the narrative is deliberately set overseas and certain trope-y distinctions in attributes are seen (the darkies are bad guys, except for the one who helps and perhaps sacrificially saves our white heroes), it raises questions of Other exoticization. Diversity, in other words.
People have talked bad about race and gender in Disney's princess movies. But it makes little sense. You've got Cindrella and Sleeping Beauty and more that are set in various late-medieval Eurpoean times and locations. Unsurprisingly, 1700's Germany was almost exclusively Caucasian, 1600's France was mostly Caucasian. When the set a movie with native Americans in Pocahontas, they drew the natives with light brown skin and the English colonists as white, and that isn't racism.
They also gave Pocahontas European features, and made John Smith the real emotional center of her own movie.
And, really, nobody watches Cinderella and thinks, "Ah, this is seventeenth century France!" Disney movies occur in ahistorical everyplaces, and the narrative could easily have been adapted to protagonists of any race. The correct rationale here is not "it's based on European folklore!", it's "the creators and their target audience were white." Which is perfectly normal and OK.
The difference today is primarily that the target audience is not exclusively white. White developers aren't racist for creating avatars that look like them; it's a natural reaction. The problem is simply that their audience is far more diverse today, and that audience is asking for representation. And the savvy economic thing to do is to accommodate their demands.
If so, how should we, as developers, go about resolving [the issue of diversity in today's game industry]?
I suppose that this depends somewhat on how much say the developer in question has over the game. Where feasible, developers might push for casts with greater diversity. If the developers have a hand in the design and storyline of the game, then consider reducing the number of stories that centre around white male protagonists.
One thing worth bearing in mind is our own prejudices and cognitive biases, some of which can be quite insidious. Consider this article describing a study in which participants evaluated identical resumes, but with a male or female name randomly assigned: the "male" resumes were consistently assigned higher perceived competence and starting salary than the "female" resumes, despite being otherwise identical. Further, this bias seemed to exist in both male and female evaluators. (I'll note here that I haven't followed the research myself, and so don't know whether it has stood up to peer review; I'm reporting what I've seen elsewhere.)
We are all products of the global pop/entertainment culture, which is white male dominant and has historically cast them as heroes and saviors and others (women, non-whites) in less positive light, whether as agency-less props in need of saving or mindless brutes or sexless or sexual trophies or… We are also all products of local cultures which, nearly to a one, are male-dominant as well. We all thus suffer deep levels of bias that, even when we are aware of the literature and latest terms in the advocacy of social justice, we may still act in accordance with. So, yeah, seeing pro-male bias in female resume reviewers is unsurprising.
