There’s this pattern that I see often: a person from a minority who comes across as cross-cultural and smart, will somehow end up fighting for said minority.
I’m thinking of that looking at a lot of smart black dudes. They all in some ways, fight for black people, even when they are the result of a multi-cultural blend or are where they are because of a broad audience.
Ethnocentrism is like a black hole in the game industry. It absorbs every attempts to change it. In a comment on an article about how to attract non-white male audiences, Ian Schreiber describes it perfectly:
I once had a situation where, in a classroom setting, I asked students (on a written survey) if anything would offend them, since we talk about video games (and therefore, things like sex, violence, and profanity tend to come up). Once I had a Black student who wrote "racism."
My first thought: oh, good, I wouldn’t want racism in my class either.
My second thought: wait, there’s racism in games?
My third thought: wait, maybe there’s racism in games all over the place, and I just don’t notice because I’m a white guy. How would I know? Now that I think about it, I don’t even know if it’s better to say Black or African-American or something else, what’s correct and what’s offensive, so I could very well be bringing all kinds of racism into my class without even realizing it. Crap.
My fourth thought: I know, I’ll just ask someone I know in the industry who’s Black about this. Wait, I don’t know anyone. I am so screwed.
13 years in the game industry I read this and I want to kill myself, so to speak. I know he’s not the only one. Guys, just do more interracial stuff in your lives and fucking hire more diversity, if you want to address a lack of diversity it’s that simple.
Am I going to have to make games about the really disturbing lack of (my) diversity in the game industry? I don’t want to do this, I just want to make games. Career wise though, that could be good: talks to make at the GDC about what it feels like to be part of a microscopic minority, connecting with people, throwing burning facts at developers, making scenes etc
But I refuse this. It’s like I’m in denial. Addressing these issues is recognizing a massive failure and how much of an exception -in a lonely way- I am. It’s going for the easy whiny way from my point of view, I know how bad black history looks like and I feel like it shouldn’t bring me down but motivate me to push the envelope. But it’s so insanely hard to abstract that from my life, yet I don’t want to make it the main thing in my mind. Just fighting internally, ad vitam eternam.
I don’t know. I just see that it seems like what smart people from a minority do: battle for their minority. Minority that I’m part of, though at a very atomic level with no community to go for. That makes me fragile to those things I guess.
What a clusterfuck, man.