We have talked in private a bit about this, and while I agree with every point you make, I'm still kind of unsure how exactly are you supposed to *enforce* that kind of change in an industry, while we still operate under capitalism and, when all is said and done, is about minimizing costs and maximizing profits. In another system altogether, you can imagine the state passing laws that say "we won't even give you premission to run a business if you don't meet certain diversity standards". But under capitalism? If we take a white/male - dominated tech company, what incentive is there for the "heads" to spend (considerable?) resources in order to bring more women, for example? One thing I can think about is public image, when we talk about companies like MS, Facebook, Google and the like, but most tech companies, and where most jobs are, don't actually have to face the "public" in any significant way - what incentive is there for them to spend capital for social justice issues?

Profit.

After the abolition of slavery in the United States, it entered an era known as "Reconstruction." It was supposed to be a time of righting wrongs done to the enslaved population, measures of reparation and explicit aids to help elevate them toward parity with the majority. What actually happened was that those who had fought (politically, if not necessarily militarily) to preserve slavery turned to the creation of a repressive system of laws that collectively came to be known as "Jim Crow laws" that mandated racial segregation under the guise of "separate but equal," but in fact ensured that facilities available to African Americans were consistently inferior.

In addition to legal challenge, economic action helped put an end to such laws. When African Americans began boycotting bus companies that insisted they sit at the rear and give their seats up to white riders (thank you, Sister Rosa Parks), those companies suddenly found themselves losing three-quarters of their business. The same thing happened to department stores and other establishments that served but discriminated against blacks.

For the content industries, they need to recognize that women and minorities have growing economic power. Women already purchase over 50% of all games, and they play a growing percentage of them. If they continue to feel marginalized by said games they could simply stop supporting them. It's the same with any other technology industry, large or small: what's Facebook if even 40% of its female users boycott?

The value in actively seeking out underrepresented classes as employees and contributors is that their perspectives organically help you craft product that is more appealing to and less disrespectful toward these growing consumer categories. It's basic capitalism.

I have a question ...
If 12% of all "STEM" graduates in the US are "minority",
how can 34% of them be working in the STEM field ?

Immigration.

Besides, you read the stats wrong: "African-Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics between 18 and 24 account for 34% of the total U.S. population but earn only 12% of all undergraduate degrees in engineering." Only 27% of US STEM workers are non-white, per your own link: "A whopping 73% of scientists and engineers are white."

Interesting enough, a lot of folks elude to hiring people based legal racial quotas, not qualifications.

a.) "Allude."
b.) Those people are stupid.

Interesting enough, a lot of folks allude to hiring people based legal racial quotas, not qualifications.

Unless I'm mistaken, affirmative action doesn't apply to private sector jobs, only to public sector ones (and may knock on to those fullfilling government contracts). Plenty of the private sector have adopted practices more in line with that, but they're not legally bound to any quota. They are legally bound to not discriminate in hiring, but it happens and its difficult to prove when it does.

Women already purchase over 50% of all games, and they play a growing percentage of them.

I would actually be interested in looking at any comprehensive stats about all that. In this day and age, saying "~50% of gamers are women" is almost a truism: Almost anyone that owns a smartphone is invariably going to use it for playing some games too. At this point, I'm not really interested in the classic "casual/hardcore" distinction, and I have no problem believing that women dedicate equal or larger amounts of time in playing games; however I am a bit of skeptical, based on my own limited experience, about how much *money* they spend on games. At this point, I think my own sister spends more time playing games than me; she gets hooked from time to time to games like Fruit Ninja, or word/puzzle/hidden picture games, etc...however I spend way more *money* on games; I purchase games on Steam just to check them out and then never really play them, while I don't believe she has ever actually *bought* a game, let alone caring to invest money on "gaming hardware"(graphics cards, controllers, etc).

Most women I know(family, friends, colleagues) behave the same. I realize, of course, that this is my own limited experience, and at the end of the day women generate revenue for game companies even if the games are "f2p", but nevertheless I would be interested to find out, say, the percentage of console owners that are women, or the amount of money women spend on buying games, or gaming hardware. I can't seem to find any statistics that depict those figures.

I don't really understand.

You realize that definition says that racism, prejudice, and discrimination are not mutually exclusive, right?

It tends to be a fruitless digression into semantics in any case, but the broad strokes of what I believe Oluseyi is getting at over the application of the word racism is that usually institutionalized discrimination towards a race is simply called racism, if somewhat colloquially. Institutions (businesses, ideological parties, law enforcement departments) are bigger than individuals and more able to unfairly discriminate -- one upset white guy isn't as powerful as 20, or 2000, or 2 million -- in fact, the power the institutions wield has the effect of creating not only deleterious conditions for those they target, but also beneficial conditions for those who are unlike them. This is what a lot of people are calling "privilege" in the media today. Long story short, even if you yourself are not actively discriminating, its likely that you're benefiting from the "privilege" that arises out of the disparity that institutionalized racism creates. What's more, because you receive these benefits detached from any wrong-doing, its hard for most people to identify them as part of a playing field that has been tipped in their favor -- and equally out of favor for others. Unconsciously, people who benefit from this system will reinforce it as rational (that is, self-interested) actors, unless and until they begin to understand and value the experience of those on the other side of the field.

To head off one argument before it begins, no one is saying that those with privilege should not accept its benefits (though, I would argue that those who actively bend it to their favor at the expense of other's are sociopaths supreme), but that we should try to see them not as benefits to us, but as penalties for those who do not experience them as benefits. The goal is not to remove privilege, it is to remove penalty.

Ok, I understand. Thank you for clarifying this. I didn't mean to come across as dense or anything; I was just a little confused. I get Oluseyi's point now.

I don't really understand. It only applies to individuals. Pardon me if I'm missing something.

See Wikipedia's entry, particularly the sections "Sociological" and "Supremacism." It is more than just individual, and that is what makes it so pernicious.

It seems that I did miss something.

On the topic of representation in games, I was unaware of Rust's character generation mechanic, but I'm an immediate fan for all the reasons Extra Credits spoke of, and doubly so for demonstrating it through an entirely cosmetic difference. In a way, the fact that there is no functional difference makes it essentially a part of the meta-game, which I think elevates it out of the realm of rules and code and art assets and much closer to our human experience. That someone might experience racial discrimination in even some small way, for the first time because of that is just awesome, IMO. That someone might feel left out or attacked on the basis of their virtual skin color -- something that is beyond their choice and irreversible -- is potentially a portal for even a small bit of honest, in-real-life self-reflection can only be a good thing. On the flip side, I suspect some equally illuminating observations will come from those of a real-life minority background who play white characters in-game.

I also thought it was interesting that they cited people who said "I can't get into the game because I don't look like myself". All along there have been people, usually those who are a part of the 'majority', who have insinuated or outright said that minority gamers should essentially be happy with what few (oft token) options they're given, when given at all. There really is not better way to understand another person's distress than to experience it yourself. Try to imagine what it might have been like to grow up without heroes that looked like you, and either having to do without, or to side with one who looked differently than you (and very possibly battled people who did look more like you). We in the majority are used to being spoiled for choice all our lives, and its a crying shame that all some will take from having to walk a virtual mile in someone else's shoes is that it makes us feel uncomfortable and we'd rather just take our ball and go home.

This is a very good point.

I hadn't heard of Rust beforehand either. It was interesting for me to hear about such a title, its effects on the players (whether intentional or not on the dev's side), and Extra Credits' take on it.

I think that most of the arguments that I might make at this point have been covered, but I'd like to add a few things:

When most of your talent pool is the stereotypical White Male getting anything other than White Male characters is going to be tricky; would you trust a white guy to be able to write the character for a black transsexual woman and get it 'right'? Writing outside your experience zone is hard, you can get better with time and practice (I like to refer to Terry Pratchett here who, over the course of his novels, got better at writing women characters simply due to practise and feedback), however the nature of the industry does not tend to allow for that; you can't take 4 games to get writing of characters correct because the series will be dead after the first two if the writing is poor.

One potential answer might be to start looking--depending on the internal structure of the development studio in question--for game writers or game designers that already have experience as writers, including experience in non-interactive media. While writing for games is somewhat different to writing for a non-interactive medium, I do think that the experience with writing characters would largely, perhaps entirely, carry over. (Additionally, doing so might further improve the average quality of the narratives in games.)

We have talked in private a bit about this, and while I agree with every point you make, I'm still kind of unsure how exactly are you supposed to *enforce* that kind of change in an industry ...

Oluseyi gave one answer, but a thought that occurs to me is that change needn't be enforced. Instead, I feel that it can be encouraged via social means: the more that the issue is discussed and adopted, and the more that people indicate that it's a type of change that they want, the more that these ideas might come to be taken up by those already in the industry, and the more that people might enter the industry with such changes in mind.

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!

Adding to this, based on this study, that men are actually more likely to be granted "flexi-time" than women; to quote the abstract:

Study 1 found that managers were most likely to grant flextime to high-status men seeking flexible schedules in order to advance their careers. In contrast, flexible scheduling requests from women were unlikely to be granted irrespective of their job status or reason.

(The abstract doesn't mention the region or job-field in which the studies were performed (unless I missed that information), so I don't know how this might vary by culture or field. As in the case of the previous article to which I linked, I don't know whether the article has withstood peer review.)

One potential answer might be to start looking--depending on the internal structure of the development studio in question--for game writers or game designers that already have experience as writers, including experience in non-interactive media. While writing for games is somewhat different to writing for a non-interactive medium, I do think that the experience with writing characters would largely, perhaps entirely, carry over. (Additionally, doing so might further improve the average quality of the narratives in games.)

Finding people with that experience is likely to be a problem, however it doesn't get over the major problem which can be summed up by misquoting Turk from Scrubs; this is a white ass industry.

Even if you could improve your talent pool (and not distract them from their current roles), you are only likely to succeed in increasing the number of White Dudes working on a project. You might get a couple more women involved but again likely to be White Women which suffers the same diversity problem.

The fix is to have more diverse people working in the industry to give more diverse output; how you get there remains a problem and a problem which won't fix itself over night.

The fix is to have more diverse people working in the industry to give more diverse output; how you get there remains a problem and a problem which won't fix itself over night.

Oluseyi did point out that recruiting at schools or regions that are not predominantly white is a start.

This topic has always irked me (What we're discussing now, not necessarily the OP). TL;DR available below.

To clarify my background, my grandparents were dirt poor on both sides of my family. My mother's side had 8 children, and 5 of them live in the same house (With my grandmother). 1 is in a mental hospital from wet brain, 2 others have heavy alcoholism and are in and out of the street/rehab programs.

My parents didn't have much more money, but got a huge sub-prime mortgage on their house. My dad's goal was to own his own business, so he got a second huge sub-prime mortgage on a house and opened a hardware store. Shortly after that, a home depot opened up 2 minutes away and took all his business.

Instead of complaining/asking for handouts, my dad went into technology and got a job where he was just barely able to pay off his mortgages, however, we made too much money to qualify for welfare/benefits (Even though all of it was consumed by his loans). They got by only because of amassing credit card debt, and they had to declare bankruptcy several times.

I got a job at 16 in the coop program to save money for college, and I dedicated myself to studying programming (having been doing it for years prior, already). In fact, to save more money for college I dropped out of highschool and got my GED instead, and started working full time as a cashier (The same job I had in coop), later being promoted to a janitor (They make slightly more where I worked).

After a few years, I entered college with my GED, however, my parents had medical bills bearing down on them after my father suffered a leg injury, and he was laid off from his longtime position. It would be a good 4-5 month period before he would get a job again, during which he needed to sell off all of his stock options/cash in his 401K early. With basically no alternative I turned to some dark hat ways of making money, and developed/sold some malicious code, which gave my parents enough money to just get by, and kept me going to college.

One thing to clarify is that I worked extremely hard at my job as a janitor. They actually started giving me more hours which annoyed my co-workers, but they did it because I was always doing my job, as well as pro-actively helping other departments with theirs. Everything from pro-actively de-cluttering the receiving warehouse to sweeping every aisle every 45 minutes. Because of this, I was offered a promotion to assistant manager. I refused it because it wasn't what I wanted to do in life, but this frustrated one of my co-workers immensely as soon as it was proposed by my store's manager. In fact, he (A latino) immidiately made it racial, and claimed it was because I'm white.

Fast forward a few uneventful years, and I graduated college on the dean's list, in the international honours society, and with some awards. For my final project I worked extremely hard on a team of 3 white girls, 1 Indian girl, and myself. Not mincing words, I worked much harder than the other 4 team members. I actually took time off from my job and worked on my project 14 hours a day on it. I documented everything I did, and gave all the information to my team members, but they slacked through most of the courses/hadn't really programmed anything considered "professional", and didn't really get it. In fact, they didn't really care to "get it". They just did some art, and the Indian girl helped with the design since I'm terrible with that.

In the end, our project was impressive enough to get me hired on the spot at a fortune 500 company when they saw it, and they actually ended hiring me into a new highly accountable management role for a division they were creating (performance lab). That experience was amazing, since it was exactly what I wanted. In fact, I ended up managing one of my best friend's parents who had 30~ years experience, and moved here from the Ukraine on H1B visa's (They both worked for the same company). I constantly joked about the raw sexual tension with his mom in the air while I was at work when hanging out with him.

A couple months into working, I was curious to see what was going on with my old classmates, and I stalked facebook. 3 were hired, 1 of the white girls spent her days complaining about how no one will hire a girl in tech, and that all the tech jobs were going to Indians.

A year or so later, Life threw a curveball and I fell in love with a girl in the midwest, and I moved to a different state to be with her (We met 1/2 way pretty much. I went west and south, she went east and south). Of course, being young and stupid I moved before getting a job, and I ended up with like $18 in my bank account and needing to pay $850 in rent in a month. Which is honestly similar to my living situation from when I was younger, so it didn't really phase me much.

During this time, I was essentially living in the generic ghetto with my girlfriend. 70% Black, 20% white, shootings/stabbings/muggings all the time. People coming up to our windows to see if there was anything worth breaking in for. My car was broken into 3 times. Before that point I never really saw a need for guns in my life, now I'm a GOA member.

I got a job which was a 60% pay cut, which also turned out to be a scam. I developed what was asked of me in 1 week, then they fired me/never paid me (They owned an "office" and only had 3 developers. Should have been a red sign for me, but hey, needed a job), and claimed the customer didn't approve of what I did. I actually called the customer and they were thrilled with what I made. I later learned that the guy who hired me was previously outed as a scammed/changed his name. He actually ended up becoming a quadrapalegic in a car accident a few years later, so karma caught up eventually I guess.

After that ordeal, I had around 14 days to come up with $850, and I applied everywhere. Seriously, I walked around the city and went up every office building/applied in person on every single floor, I talked with every headhunter, and went everywhere popular around here.

Simply because of how much I shopped myself around, and showing applications I've developed I got 3 job offers. 1 that stood out was actually involving a nascar team developing a system that would take data from an underground wind tunnel, and apply it to car configurations in realtime on the racetrack. Seriously, those guys set up servers in their team's trailers, and communicate with the cars in realtime. They gave me an awesome tour of how they build their cars too. They actually have an underground fabrication plant where they print their own parts, and assemble the cars completely underground.

Anyways, I ended up working for a financial-based startup for way less than I was worth, however, I learned a ton while there (I was hired as a CTO). I primarilly worked with the 2 main owners of the company (Both very intelligent black guys who went to Harvard (I went to a community college because of money)).

After a year or so there, I moved to where I am now where I'm making 7 figures, and directly accountable for our IT department's performance.

Tl;DR. I'm white. I worked my ass off to get to where I am now, I make good money, and no magic "CIS White Privelege fairy" ever came down and sprinkled money or opportunity on me. Simply put, The whole "privelege" concept is ridiculous and insulting.

My view on this whole situation is that it's just part of the human experience. Human biodiversity does exist. But not at a level where it has a signifcant impact to individual interactions. Because of that, there will always be racists. Seriously. It's ingrained into cultures. Whether that culture is the deep south hating on blacks, Blacks in the Ghetto hating on whites, Muslims hating on Jews, Russians hating on Gypsies... It's simply not worth worrying about, because it's always been that way, and doesn't impact anything important.

As for diversity in games, I think it's fine as it is. Games that force you to play a certain character are usually trying to tell a story about that character. Games that are more open (like RPG's) usually let you design your own character. I think if this is a problem, and there are people out there who are turned off by current game characters, the free market will probably adjust to fix it, regardless of whether or not people approve.

*EDIT* As for workplace equality, I have noticed that women tend to not negotiate for more money as much as men. I think that has more to do with how women learn/are raised. Not completely sure why, though. I've got an interview tomorrow that I can ask if that happens.

As for needing diversity in the workplace, I've found that diversity doesn't lead to any real productivity increase in our organization. Then again we have a very unique office culture that wouldn't fly in most companies. During our morning sprint planning one of our Senior developers (female) slapped our Project Manager's (male) ass and said "Hey Gringo, you need me for your project, don't complain!". Maybe it's different for other industries/office cultures.