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…

But that's not what I said. I was quoting an old ESA stat I assumed would be familiar to this audience, which is about game purchases, not play—i.e., women may be buying games for their children or significant others to play. The closest source I can find is this press release (the report is linked within), but it focuses more on women comprising "40% of gamers"—whatever the fuck that means.

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.

Indeed, this is how most positive social change happens. Individuals don't so much change their behaviors in aggregate, as are forced to confront a growing population of new market/workplace/societal entrants (i.e. youth) who have a different set of values on an issue (the degree of difference being variable). For instance, this, with the efforts of groups like M.A.D.D., is how drunk driving came to generally be viewed as reprehensible, whereas 40 to 50 years ago it was "normal."

<a whole mess of bullshit>

Cool story, bro.

<more rubbish>

I'm going to assume that you've never heard of the Pew Research Center; it has been conducting long-running polls and surveys on social, demographic and economic markers for the United States for over 20 years. That means that, rather than parroting assumptions, you can actually locate data to test your hypotheses against.

Here is information on 50 years of demographic trends, including income and wealth. Click on the tabs to see the graphs. It should be readily apparent that even when median Asian household income briefly surged past white, the wealth gap never narrowed. It should also be noted that Hispanics have generally remained better economically positioned than Blacks by both markers.

Your data is wrong. Your conclusions are pretty much useless.

For the employment at studios, within the game industry specifically, at the studios I have worked at, at the studios I have personally seen, the answer is No, the places I have seen did not have specific issues with discrimination. There may be broad cultural bias, but that is not specific to the industry.

Summary: game studios thus have no responsibility to do anything to challenge discrimination since it is a "broad cultural bias," and will just wait until the rest of the world figures this stuff out?

For the content of games, which is what the original video was about, I think that the number of games with discrimination is a problem is vanishingly small. Only the smallest number of games involve humanoids at all. Of those games, a large percentage are "build your own avatar", so again no discrimination by the studio. In the remaining games, some of them have issues.

Re-rank them by revenue, or cultural impact. People tend to recognize, remember and cite said humanoids in popular culture in vast disproportion to their raw title count.

But you're looking at a very tiny number of games from a small number of studios, not an industry-wide issue.

LOL.

And you've just contributed to the lack of diversity in video games.

Did it ever occur to you that correlation may not be causation? You think you should use white male characters because you think your audience is white (despite a lack of evidence to that effect). But what if it's the other way round? What if your audience is white males because you only include white male characters?

No, because since we're talking about the USA we want to go for a demographic that has the size / free spending money. Since whites are the majority of the country, and have the second highest income in the country, it makes sense to target them. The only other important choice is to market to males or females, and when we're talking AAA games, males play the vast majority of them (Purchase statistics are flawed, because Females can buy the games for their male relatives. If a son asks his mother for a game, it's recorded as a female purchase).

And how do you think all the people who aren't white males feel about most games not having characters that look and act like them?

See, that's the cool thing. There ARE games where you can play as non-white males/females because that market niche has already been fulfilled. Some studios obviously saw the opportunity to reach out to disenfranchised players,

Maybe not a call of duty, because they need to target the biggest market they can to make the money back, but risking a game's profitability just to increase diversity is crazy.

I'm going to assume that you've never heard of the Pew Research Center;

I have, and if you'd read your own link Asians have earned more money then whites every single year since 1988. Wealth only has 3 data points reported for Asians, and they have more wealth in 1/3 of those as well.

In fact, with a bit of google-foo you'd see that Indians/Filipino's make quite a bit more then the other races, but their incomes (In the Asian race category) are tied down by mainly South Chinese Migrants.

I also like how you threw in "generally" because your interpretation of the data's wrong. In the income section, for the past 10 years (since the data ended) Hispanics have made less than blacks for 8/10 of them. The 2/10 they made more, they made it by about $300 in each year.

Summary: game studios thus have no responsibility to do anything to challenge discrimination since it is a "broad cultural bias," and will just wait until the rest of the world figures this stuff out?

It's been figured out, and businesses have optimized themselves to look for talent instead of worrying about social issues, unless PR necessitates it.

Either way, this has gone off course so I'm going to refrain from posting any more in here. Simply put there are disagreements in data interpretation and in fact of whether there's not a problem at all.

I think that if a problem currently exists, the market WILL (Eventually) shift to having more minorities/women in games.

But you're looking at a very tiny number of games from a small number of studios, not an industry-wide issue.

LOL.

The original post was about the CONTENT of games.

Let's look at the top 10 on one platform:

1. Agar.io, a growing dots game.

2. Despicable Me. Discrimination, they're all yellow. But that isn't the fault of the game.

3. Subway Surfers. You can change the gender, skin, and hair colors, visible people are random.

4. Inside Out. Perhaps you can call discrimination against the characters (Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness) but that's from the movie.

5. Clash of Clans. With a wide range of colors including white, black, green, and blue. Maybe the Clan aspect is a problem.

6. Cooking Fever. Looks like the character is an asian woman, so that's bad. A woman in the kitchen, shame. People in the restaurant range from medium dark to white, male and female. So maybe some discrimination because they don't go full black in the video clips I can see.

7. 8 ball pool. Is billiards racist?

8. Solitaire by harpan. Their face cards use letters, not pictures.

9. Candy Crush Soda Saga. Clearly racist.

10. Taichi Panda. Also discriminatory, they're mostly asian.

I think that if a problem currently exists, the market WILL (Eventually) shift to having more minorities/women in games.

Let's check back in another 5 years.

The original post was about the CONTENT of games.

Let's look at the top 10 on one platform:

Top 10 by what metric? Review scores? Sales units? Revenue? Q scores? What I'm saying is that while you are correct that only a tiny sliver of titles released relative to the entire market are potentially demographically problematic, those titles have an outsize social, cultural and even political influence. Suggesting that Gears of War should be compared to Taichi Panda as equally culturally relevant in questions of representation is amusing at best, absurd at middle, and deliberately obfuscating and intellectually dishonest at worst.