{"id":2063,"date":"2015-09-04T19:26:05","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T19:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=2063"},"modified":"2015-09-04T19:26:05","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T19:26:05","slug":"lack-of-diversity-in-game-industry-exhibit-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2015\/09\/lack-of-diversity-in-game-industry-exhibit-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Lack of diversity in game industry exhibit A"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had totally missed that story this week. For those who didn\u2019t hear about it, there\u2019s a game on Steam called Playing History 2 – Slave Trade<\/em> in which there\u2019s a mini game of Tetris where you have to put as many slaves as you can inside the boat. Slave Tetris. The game is 2 years old but a recent video put it on the Internet front page.<\/p>\n

Obviously, it escalated quickly.<\/p>\n

Serious Games Interactive is a Danish studio and it\u2019s not difficult to understand that they probably don\u2019t have access to a lot of black people in their lives because about the mini game any sane, not self-hating black person would have been like:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The main issue here is a lack of diversity in the game development world. Gamasutra is quick to be verbose about ludo-narrative dissonance but I\u2019m going to go ahead and say that it\u2019s not the fucking point, the point is that the very white game industry lacks subtlety about non-white stuff. Simple.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t try to make a serious game about Poland or Ukraine without having at least half the team connected to those countries and that history (which is complex and insane and painful).<\/p>\n

You can make games about everything, no doubt. However you can\u2019t use a mechanic like that on a subject that is far from you \u2013I suppose you are a Danish game designer up there in Europe- that is just too easy<\/em> and displays a lack of empathy. SGI has apologized and removed the Tetris bit.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Guys, that\u2019s the thing: you tackle sensitive subjects that you\u2019re not involved in, for which you are pretty much total strangers. That\u2019s the problem. Using Tetris in a game about slavery when the country with the biggest black diaspora born from slavery and what followed, is still talking about reparations. Over a thousand black people have been killed by police or others as of September 2015 in the US. We witnessed a dude kill people in church being escorted to get a burger. Hundreds of African refugees trying to reach Europe, dying.<\/p>\n

Think a little bit. Think about black people\u2019s mindset and feelings when they see that Tetris game. That\u2019s not censorship, that\u2019s just being smart and human. You wouldn\u2019t have a rape simulator using a Track and Field mechanic in a serious game about sexual harassment and present it to rape survivors. You don\u2019t need that gameplay to pass the message across. We can make games about everything, it doesn\u2019t mean we have to.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I think the all going towards a closed society made of plenty of communities who can barely bear each other<\/em>, is a problem we are already in. We might find that it\u2019s a nice short term solution but it\u2019s not helping us. It doesn\u2019t develop empathy, it does create entitlement. Like Danish developers who sincerely think that they can make a game about black slavery, make a not so good game about it, and not have to be that<\/em> accountable for it because people who take issue with it are too sensitive and\/or eager to jump on the bandwagon.<\/p>\n

TL;DR: we really, really, really need more diversity in game development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had totally missed that story this week. For those who didn\u2019t hear about it, there\u2019s a game on Steam called Playing History 2 – Slave Trade in which there\u2019s a mini game of Tetris where you have to put as many slaves as you can inside the boat. Slave Tetris. The game is 2 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063"}],"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=2063"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2064,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063\/revisions\/2064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}