The daily protests in the US following the killing of George Floyd to end police brutality and racism against Black Americans have raised awareness among major gaming companies such as Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Sony Interactive Entertainment/PlayStation, who have donated money to advocacy organizations and support this effort. However, the most important thing gaming companies can do is take a more internal action in games on racial discrimination. Specifically, racial discrimination and prejudice are often reinforced, often unintentionally, through games. This creates a recurring pattern of Black and Latino characters being stereotyped or, worse, no characters representing these racial groups, which is demeaning.
There are an estimated 2.5 billion gamers worldwide, a group that includes consumers of all ethnicities and ages (especially in mobile, the largest segment of the market). Quartz noted that in less than 10 years, 57% of video game ages 6 to 29 will be people of color. Black and Latino youth in the U.S. spend more time per day, on average, on both mobile and consolethan whites. For hundreds of millions of gamers worldwide, there are very few games whose stories center around characters like these.
This is a business opportunity that has not been properly exploited by companies when it comes to racial discrimination. Beyond the skin color of the characters, there are aspects of game development that contribute to the underrepresentation or misrepresentation of certain groups. It has been found that the lack of diversity among employees at leading game companies results in leadership not taking all of this into account.
Character representation
One of the most extensive studies on racial representation in games was a 2009 study that analyzed 150 of the most popular games. Characters of color made up 10.7% of characters, corroborating the most recent census data, which found that 12.3% of Americans are people of color, and only 2.7% of characters are Latino (compared to 12.5% representation in the U.S. population). But Dmitri Williams, a professor at the University of Southern California and the study’s lead author, says that representation of people of color is even lower if you look at just primary characters, and that in any case, athletes in sports games make up the bulk of characters of color in those games.
Kishonna Gray, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, points out that simply tracking the number of characters of color in games misses the point of how they are represented. In movies, there have historically been three roles in which you see characters of color: Person of Color as the violent, Person of Color as the companion, Person of Color as the sidekick.
This is also true for video games. Furthermore, he argues that sports games should be removed from these analyses, since they simply copy real-world people and reflect statistics showing how rarely black characters emerge from the creative process at most game studios. Casting certain demographics in a particular light in any form of media has an impact on consumers’ perceptions of those demographics in the real world. One academic study found that white participants were more likely to associate people of color with negative words after playing a violent video game. When the only option to experience the fictional worlds of many games is through white characters, it sends a message to many players that these fictional worlds are not designed for anyone but white people. In the games developed by companies, it seems that White people can achieve everything, which is not equally true for People of Color, which indicates that there is racial discrimination in this area as well.
Data races in the games that companies develop is related to the racial composition of the game development community. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) found in its 2019 survey that among game developers worldwide: 81% identify as “White/Caucasian/European”, 7% identify as “Hispanic/Latino”, 2% identify as “Black/African-American/African/Afro-Caribbean”. People draw inspiration from their experiences, which is why there is a problem with the representation of some groups. Tanya DePass, founder of the nonprofit I Need Diverse Games, points out that for companies looking to improve diversity in their content, the most important thing is to have a diverse staff at both the employee and leadership levels.
Additionally, her advice to game studios is to hire outside experts to review their development plans and identify where their content might foster or reinforce racial stereotypes or even misrepresent a group of people. One company that uses consultants is Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. It has also implemented diversity and inclusion check-ins throughout the game’s design, pre-production, and post-production phases, according to Trinidad Hermida, the company’s head of diversity and inclusion. These check-ins look at everything from character design to assessing whether Niantic’s internal team working on a product is gender-neutral. Every new game in development should go through this process before it’s released.
87% of developers said that diversity in game content is “very important” or “somewhat important,” which raises optimism that representation can improve as developers are asked to consider diversity less in the abstract and more in the context of the games they work on. The number of characters of color or Latinx in popular games is increasing, even if the progress is quite slow, relative to the rate at which the demographic composition of the gaming community is diversifying. Giving users many options for customizing their avatar’s appearance goes a long way in making different demographics of players feel welcome. There are often more limited options for black avatars, such as the ability to choose natural hair styles. Game developers often don’t consider the fact that there are other people who also want to see themselves depicted in their avatar creation. And when they do, the homogeneity of their group can lead to predictable mistakes. For example, if black hair is available, it looks bad.
When it comes to cyberbullying, it’s a big issue in gaming, and in their efforts to combat it, game executives need to recognize that both female gamers and Black and Latinx founders are targeted and often maligned with taunts and racist jokes. One small but important step that developers can take is to give players the ability to flag racist behavior as a reason to file a complaint against another user. Many games have added the ability for players to flag a complaint about gender discrimination. Collecting data about a problem allows for more measurement of that problem and more effective action to address it.
Finally, it highlights the fact that the main problem is not game executives who intend to harm, but rather game executives who lack the interest or empathy to address diversity as an issue they personally need to dedicate time to addressing. The discussion of diversity and racial discrimination, whether at conferences or other events, is still too often treated as a fundamental issue for the purposes of political correctness rather than a critical business problem to solve. The most important action that companies and developers can take is to approach diversity as a priority in the development of their products rather than as a public relations issue.
