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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n13 years in the game industry I read this and I want to kill myself, so to speak. I know he\u2019s 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\u2019s that simple. <\/p>\n
Am I going to have to make games about the really disturbing lack of (my) diversity in the game industry? I don\u2019t 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<\/p>\n
But I refuse this. It\u2019s like I\u2019m in denial. Addressing these issues is recognizing a massive failure and how much of an exception -in a lonely way- I am. It\u2019s 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\u2019t bring me down but motivate me to push the envelope. But it\u2019s so insanely hard to abstract that from my life, yet I don\u2019t want to make it the main thing in my mind. Just fighting internally, ad vitam eternam.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know. I just see that it seems like what smart people from a minority do: battle for their minority. Minority that I\u2019m part of, though at a very atomic level with no community to go for. That makes me fragile to those things I guess.<\/p>\n
What a clusterfuck, man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s 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\u2019m 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}