Equality In Games

Interfectorem is a murder mystery game being created by a team "made up of four middle school age girls (ages 10-14) who participated in a 2015 Girls Make Camp in San Francisco, CA.” These young women won the Grand Prize at this year’s Girls Make Games Demo Day  at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

A little about the game:

Interfectorem (which means ‘killer’ in Latin) is a top-down murder mystery designed by a game development team (called the "Team Who Must Not Be Named") made up entirely of young women. It’s a nail-biting suspense thriller where the only way to find breaks in the case is to get up close and personal with everyone in town.

Striking a delightful balance between humor and horror (think Nancy Drew meets Shaun of the Dead), Interfectorem will keep your attention from beginning to end!

This isn’t a game-specific link, but it certainly deals with an issue that is very relevant to games: a lack of understanding among the audience about what it means to be transgender. In the broader context of inclusivity, equality, and acceptance, it’s important to understand on a human level not just what it means to be in a given group (transgender, straight, gay, black, white, etc.), but also what it feels like in today’s society.

#WOCinTechChat is a group that gets together online twice a month to discuss issues facing women of color in tech:

We are a community of women and non-binary people of color. Some of us are technologists in the making and some of us are technologists by trade. All of us are here to help each other succeed.

In addition to discussing the current environment and offering support to one another, they also strive to highlight companies that emphasize diverse hiring.

While today’s post deals with Hollywood films, the problem of diversity is just as prevalent -- if not more prevalent -- in games. On his Tumblr, the Venezuelan American actor/playwright Dylan Marron took a very simple approach to highlighting the problem: he made videos aggregating all of the lines spoken by people of color in a number of popular films.

The results were awful, coming in at less than a minute for some films and a flat zero for others.

Black Game Developers is a simple site that is exactly what it sounds like: a large list of black game developers. The site’s tagline:

A list of black game developers, designers, artists, and more. Here they are. Hire them. Buy their stuff.

Jelani Greenridge has written a great article discussing the ways that lack of diversity in games is so harmful to marginalized groups. He sets it up best:

According to noted game journalist Leigh Alexander, #GamesSoWhite was initiated as a companion to a much less confrontational hashtag, #INeedDiverseGames, in response to a series of articles (this one, then this one, then this one just yesterday) that all seem to indicate that the video game industry has a problem with lack of diversity in developer personnel, and the evidence of this is how few video games feature characters of color, either as protagonists, or at all.

So in response to the pushback from defensive gamers who think lack of diversity is not a problem, the sarcastic hashtag #GamesSoWhite has sprung up, much in the same tradition of the “yo momma” joke.

Many, if not most, of these responses have coalesced around one particular question — why is this lack of diversity in the industry a problem?

Here are multiple reasons why it’s a problem.

He goes on to lay out three specific ways in which the lack of diversity is a real issue, then names a number of practical ways we can all improve the situation.

We’ve posted about The Unicorn Files in the past, and they’ve now launched a Kickstarter to fund a book full of pictures of geek girls! From the Kickstarter:

For the past year, Terra Clarke Olsen (founder and art director) and Nate Watters (photographer) have been photographing women for "The Unicorn Files: Debunking the Myth of the Female Geek". The Unicorn Files aims to capture the diverse body of female geeks by featuring individual geeky women, giving women in the community a chance to tell their story. We aimed to capture a wide selection of women, from fans to people in the industry (such as Kelly Sue DeConnick and Angela Webber). The photos represent them and what they love. Every shot is unique (some women have a lot of geek memorabilia while others have none; some women are comic nerds while others are tech geeks), but the one common theme being that the photos are taken in their home (a safe space that is reflective of them).

Just a quick post to congratulate Tale of Tales on launching their game Sunset, which takes place in a fictional Central American country. It's always good to see non-white-male representation in a prominent indie game!

It’s 1972 and a military coup has rocked Anchuria. As a result, you, Angela Burnes, are trapped in the metropolitan capital of San Bavón. Your paradise has turned into a warzone. You take up a job as a housekeeper. Every week, an hour before sunset, you clean the swanky bachelor pad of the wealthy Gabriel Ortega.

Years in the making, the feature documentary Gaming in Color is out now!

Out of the closet and into the arcade! Gaming In Color explores the queer side of gaming: the queer gaming community, gaymer culture and events, and the rise of LGBTQ themes in video games.

Diverse queer themes in game storylines and characters are an anomaly in the mainstream video game industry, and LGBTQ gamers have a higher chance of being mistreated in social games. Gaming In Color explores how the community culture is shifting and the industry is diversifying, helping with queer visibility and acceptance of an LGBTQ presence.

A recurring statement in the fight for equality and representation, whether it be in the sphere of gender, race, sexuality, or other areas, is that while it’s great when a developer bucks the status quo of having a gruff white male hero, the real victory will be when we have equal representation and it isn’t a big deal.

In other words, when it’s completely normal to have heroes, characters, and stories of all varieties, and developers and audiences take it as simply how things are. In other words, when equal representation has been normalized.

This article from Liz Bourke takes a look at how the female version of Shepard in the Mass Effect series takes very positive steps in the direction of normalization.

Since Shepard’s interactions with other characters remain substantially the same regardless of whether one is a John or a Jane, it’s established that Commander Jane Shepard isn’t remarkable because she’s a woman. She’s extraordinary because she’s Shepard. This is reinforced by the ubiquity of other female characters who possess a wide array of competences: Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams, asari archaeologist/information broker Liara T’Soni, quarian engineer Tali’Zorah vas Neema, Doctor Chakwas, Miranda Lawson, the asari Justicar Samara, and human weapon of mass destruction Jack (“Subject Zero”).

...

The dialogue will be different depending on the game one plays. But the sentiment is the same. Commander Jane Shepard isn’t an extraordinary woman. She’s simply extraordinary. Full stop. No qualifiers. When one considers the amount of crap extraordinary people who are also women have directed at them even today —-- the likes of Hilary Clinton and Angela Merkel in the political realm, household names like Lady Gaga, writers like Toni Morrison -- — this is immensely validating.

The PBS Digital Studios show Game/Show recently posted a video about how your avatar affects the way you play games. Starting with Rust’s decision to assign players permanent random races, the episode goes through the numerous studies that show just how powerful avatars -- and the races of those avatars -- can be. They can reinforce existing stereotypes, cause people to change their behavior, and have other profound effects. It reinforces much of the research in Manveer Heir’s classic GDC talk about racism, sexism, and other -isms in games.

Women Who Code is an international non-profit dedicated to inspiring women in the tech world, connecting them through free events and a growing membership list. As described in this article, they seek to keep women in tech and turn around the trend of women -- who are already a minority in most tech companies -- also having a higher rate of leaving the industry for other careers than men:

Most media outlets continue to focus primarily on the lack of women and people of color currently represented in tech, ever since a handful of Silicon Valley companies released their diversity numbers last year. In response, there has been an immense amount of public and private initiatives to get young girls in elementary and junior high school interested in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

But where everyone else is focused on filling the talent pipeline, Percival is focused on maintaining the current pipeline, which for all intents and purposes is starting to leak.

Based on the diversity numbers released by some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley, including Apple and Google, men outnumber women 4 to 1. But that number becomes even more stark when you learn that women are also much more likely to leave their tech careers for other jobs.

EIG was recently reblogged in a post sharing various sites dedicated to equality and representation, and one of the other Tumblrs that jumped out was Just Like Me. Though games are only one type of media they cover, it’s a great resource for reading and thoughts on representation. From the site:

Character Like Me is a collaborative project to change mainstream media like TV, film, books, comic books and video games. Minorities are being represented poorly when they are being represented at all. Maybe you've noticed how difficult it is for people of different genders, ethinicities, sexualities, disabilities and more to find characters in media that they can relate to. At Character Like Me, we feel like that affects the way we view ourselves and the way that others view us, too. To help change this, we've made a space for minorities to speak out. If you feel like a group you belong to is not being represented well or if you just want to see more characters like you, we want to know. Help us give a voice to groups who have been ignored while offering references to creators who want to add diverse casts to their works.

Todd Harper from Paste Magazine went to the Different Games conference this year and wrote an excellent article about his experience. It sounds like a fantastic initiative, highlighting and celebrating voices that are, well, different from the mainstream ones found at GDC or E3:

The central aim of Different Games is to focus on supporting people who love games and who are “different” in some way. It’s a conference where the safe space policy rotates regularly on big screens across the venue. It’s a conference where the first day’s opening remarks included the organizers sharing a conference-wide policy for politely but firmly calling out problematic language. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard con organizer Mariam Asad demonstrate the signal – which had its origin in the planning committee’s meetings – by gleefully imitating a game show buzzer into a mic for a crowd of grinning attendees. Different Games felt even more needed, more relevant and more jubilant this year.

Congratulations to Anita Sarkeesian for being named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People! Readers of this site no doubt know who Anita is (we posted about her new series recently), but in case you’re unfamiliar, here’s a snippet from her Time page, written by Wil Wheaton:

In 2012, after observing that women represent about 40% of the gaming audience, she launched a crowdfunding campaign for Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, a web series that would “explore five common and recurring stereotypes of female characters in video games.” She hit her goal of $6,000 on the first day and ultimately raised more than $150,000. But she also became the target of vicious, misogynist harassment that included death and rape threats, pornographic vandalism of her Wikipedia page and a coordinated effort to have her Kickstarter flagged as terrorism.

[...]

In the face of hysterical and childish abuse, Anita has refused to back down. She continues to speak around the world about the role of women in video games and popular media.

Polygon recently posted a great story about Kiro’s Games, a company from Cameroon creating a game called Aurion that puts its African setting and traditions at the forefront:

Its design and feel are unmistakably fresh, offering a bold color palette and interesting unit designs. Its fiction is rooted in stories of exploitation and division, and in a desire for harmony. A Kiro'o Games corporate video talks of gaming's "crisis of innovation," and an over reliance on a limited pool of "social and mythological inspirations." Aurion is based on "a magnified view of [African] traditions." "Games can and should carry the seeds of wisdom that Africa can offer," continues the video narration. "We want to create an inner awakening through video games."

Positive Female Characters in Video Games, Anita Sarkeesian’s new series as part of Feminist Frequency, recently kicked off with its first video. The name of the series says it all, and here’s the summary of the first episode, which focuses on The Scythian in Sword & Sworcery:

In the debut episode of our series on Positive Female Characters, we celebrate the Scythian, the protagonist of Capybara Games’ 2011 release Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. This episode examines how Sword & Sworcery employs widely recognizable action adventure game tropes to make the Scythian’s quest feel like the stuff of video game legend, and how in doing so, it asserts that women can fill the role of the mythic hero as effectively as men can.