Fixing Discrimination in the Gaming Industry

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Brian McIver, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Discrimination; It’s shockingly rampant in today’s society. We see it in the different ways men and women are treated. We see it in the way people of color are treated in all kinds of situations. We see it in the way people of varying religious beliefs are treated by those that have differing beliefs and views. We see it in the way the LGBTQ community struggles to get the same rights and privileges as straight people all over the world. And we most certainly see it in gaming.

As a microcosm of society, the gaming community can easily be viewed as a magnifying glass for the larger world, and as such it shows the flaws of our society in sometimes drastic relief.

Now, as with a large portion of the world, the gaming world tends to be good. They are accepting and generous people that are just looking to have a good time. However, much like the larger world, some of the loudest most obnoxious voices are often the most racist and sexist voices out there.

The gaming industry, i.e. those that make and publish the games, suffer from what a lot of the tech world suffers from, and that’s a lack of diversity. This wasn’t necessarily the intention of these companies starting out. The world has been setting gender roles since time immemorial, and good luck getting a PC into the hands of a young black kid in the 80s and early 90s. This led to middle class white males to become the programmers and animators of the big tech and gaming companies of today like Google and Electronic Arts.

Video games in particular during the 80s and 90s were a “boys” toy. Male heroes like Mario, Link, and Duke Nukem were the dominant gaming figures of the time with one of the few exceptions being Samus Aran from the Metriod series. These early trendsetters were part of what led to the hyper-sexualized characters of Laura Croft and the all too common skimpy armor of every female video game character of the last decade or more.

Fast forward to today and you see the modern day boys club being faced with some fairly well publicized controversies about gender and diversity both in the companies that make the games, and the games themselves. The biggest of these controversies being what’s been dubbed GamerGate.

The controversy began in 2013 with a female game developer named Zoe Quinn. She had created a critically popular game that was soon released on the game distribution platform known as Steam. After said release, Quinn became the target of some pretty nasty comments and threats from the Steam community, so much so that she had to change her phone number and which became "an ambient hum of menace in her life, albeit one that she has mostly been able to ignore".

In August of 2014 the Twitter #Gamergate came into existence after a writer for the gaming website Kotaku was accused of writing favorable reviews of Quinn’s game after being in a relationship with her. The whole thing spiraled into a campaign of threats and misogyny on a level that seemed more akin to women’s suffrage in the 1920s rather than a supposed journalistic conflict of interest in 2014.

Those of the #gamergate movement claimed that what they wanted was integrity in gaming journalism while in the same breath issuing threats of rape, murder, and terrorizing nearly any women that spoke up about gender diversity or equality in games.

Much of that chatter has died down now, however the issues are still present. Many gaming companies refuse to release reports about the diversity of their companies, and while we have seen some stronger female roles in games, Ellie from The Last of Us and even Laura Croft have become great examples of strong female characters in really good games, the landscape of video game characters is still very white and very male.

How to fix this? Take a moment and listen to how your kids play video games, particularly shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield, or play a game yourself and listen to unbelievably reprehensible things that come out of some of their mouths. Listen to what they say when they think no one is listening. This is where it starts. So much of this is tied to educating your children to respect others. Showing them that women are as important as men. Telling them that using derogatory terms for gays or people of color is wrong, and drilling that message into their brains so that when they become adults and they see this kind of behavior they can stand up to it. The more this happens, the more that males are made to see others as equals, and girls of all backgrounds are told they are equal, then not only will gaming change for the better, but all of society.

You can see this change happening in little steps each day. There is pressure on gaming and tech companies to make diversity a priority. There is pressure on big game makers like Ubisoft and Square Enix when they release popular games with no significant female or racially diverse playable characters. There are movements that push for more girls and minorities to become interested tech industries and programing.

One of the biggest examples of gamers standing up for equality lies not with video gamers, but tabletop gamers. With the recent signing of “The Religious Freedom” bill by Indiana Governor Mike Pence that allows businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ customers, the largest gaming convention in the nation, GenCon, that brings in an estimated $50 million each year, has plans to pull up stakes once it’s contract is up in 2020.

The gaming world, like the larger world as a whole, has problems. Facing these problems and confronting them, and not accepting them as the status quo is the only way to make issues of equality better. Teach your children that people are people regardless of color, gender, or sexual preference. Stand up when you see racism, sexism, and bigotry. Teach your girls that they can do or be anything they set their minds to. By doing these things it won’t just change the gaming industry, but all industries, and our children and grand children can look back on this time as something silly and archaic, as they play a holodeck game about a transgender Somali knight that rescues white males in distress from the evil clutches of Pat Robertson.

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