After female players, the largest group of players that is often implicitly excluded from videogames are potential players from culturally diverse backgrounds, of which the most economically significant is probably black consumers in the United States. Many people in the videogames industry believe that taking into account the needs of different cultures and ethnicities is political correctness gone mad, but there are sound economic opportunities to be gained from incorporating diverse cultural voices in game development. The next step towards making better videogames for everyone is considering the opportunities gained from including new developers and new audiences.
There are great opportunities for a new developer to develop new games for a new audience. Why new developers? Because it is quite obvious the games industry is overlooking a financial opportunity because of a silent closed-door policy. We suffer from a lack of diversity in our industry.
When we look at our financial portfolio, we ask how we can diversify our finances for maximum returns. We never place all our assets into one financial instrument and pray for good returns; instead, we diversify. Although diversification is not the same as diversity, it does share with the latter the objective of investing in assets diverse enough so that the return on investment is maximized.
It can be argued that whereas diversification deals with financial assets, diversity deals with cultural and human capital assets. Thus the words will be used conterminously. The issue of diversity is such a pressing one. I view diversity as an opportunity to enhance creativity through people contributing their own unique experiences to humanity’s culture.
The process of expertly using cultural differences to increase wealth, in the context of worldwide economic integration, is a hot topic for the new millennium. The videogame community, with its international appeal and its proven track record as a successful entity in the financial arena, would benefit economically, educationally, and ethically if it were to diversify (that is, be culturally diverse) for maximum returns.
Diversity involves creating an inclusive environment where a team of professionals creatively uses their differences and appreciates the opportunity to weave a multitude of new ideas into best practices. Creatively speaking, it’s like composing a symphony in our organizations that utilizes the spirit of improvisational jazz.
Diversity touches the core of our existence because we all have deep-rooted cultural awareness. We continue to appreciate the richness of our own cultures, but the pure essence of diversity is to take the best of all cultures, give them a place and a voice, and create an atmosphere of creativity and inclusion.
Demographic changes over the past decade predict that by the year 2050, racial/ethnic groups will make up 48% of the total United States population, and this percentage speaks volumes. Never before in the history of our country have our children been exposed and adapted to the information technology so readily available. They are far more advanced technically than earlier generations. Each generation changes our nation. As the impact of diversity moves through the gaming community, it must adapt to the changes.
A culturally diverse initiative on the part of the industry’s leaders would create a new environment of creative entertainment. We all have a story to tell and the compelling stories of our diverse communities have not always been told with sensitivity. If the game business community were to explore the diverse community, it would find a grand opportunity to engage young minds and experience the rewards of its labor.
There is a whole generation that is changing the style, the music and marketing, and the complexion of our nation. They are the underground artists creating non-commercial styles. It’s a sound so new and fresh with the spirit of jazz as its essence; an improvisation lyrically waving its new brush of creativity across the canvas of our lives. It is an invisible generation filled with diversity and a new vision. I await the day when the videogames industry lets them dance across the fingertips of a nation steeped in the all-consuming monitors, TV screens, and theaters of consumers, clamoring for more.
The bottom line is in the cultural statistics: AllHipHop.com receives 121 million audited impressions per month and growing. The average age of the AllHipHop.com users is 23 years old, with 63% of their audience falling between ages 19 and 31 [Creekmur08]. User demographics for the site are as follows:
58% Male
42% Female
32% African American
31% Caucasian
25% Latino
12% Asian
This is a huge market, and videogames are an active part of the community. The hip-hop market is one of the most coveted, elusive, and lucrative markets in the world. The 2008 Packaged Facts report, “The U.S. Urban Youth Market,” conducted among 37 million young urban consumers between the ages of 12 and 34, analyzed the consumer choices of the tens of millions of people who connect with hip-hop music. Findings showed that young urban consumers enjoy an aggregate income of $600 billion, much of which is disposable income. These trendsetters and influencers who affiliate with hip-hop culture exercise a powerful impact on the direction of the fashion, media, entertainment, and other key consumer-focused industries [PackagedFacts08].
Over the past 20 years, hip-hop culture has permeated popular culture in an unprecedented fashion, and although it originated in the African-American sector, this study reveals that now more than 75% of the rap and hip-hop audience is non-black. From the street corner to the boardroom, hip-hop’s potential to create unity across all ethnicities is substantial. Much in the same way that “beat culture” challenged the status quo in ways that unified liberals and prompted change in the 1950s and 1960s, the hip-hop culture has challenged the system in ways that have unified individuals across a rich ethnic spectrum.
The report includes information from other media outlets, too. USA Today reported that hip-hop is the fastest growing music genre in the US, and The New York Times reports that the preferences of youths in suburban America have shifted from the Rock-n-Roll sound of The Byrds, The Doors, The Eagles, Van Halen, and Guns ‘N’ Roses, to hip-hop giants such as Jay-Z and OutKast. Similarly, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, rap music’s share of sales began increasing by 150% in the 1990s and is still rising.
The evidence for the increasing influence of black culture in music is undeniable. In a few decades, hip-hop has exploded across the globe as a creative, cultural, and financial phenomenon. But where is the equivalent influence of black culture in videogames? Contemporary U.S. videogame development is the equivalent of The Eagles; where is our OutKast?
Hirokazu Yasuhara, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog (Sonic Team, 1991), is one of the great heroes of game design. In the August 2008 edition of Game Developer Magazine, he discussed with Brandon Sheffield a question that brought a new sensibility to the cultural style of developers [Brandon08]. In terms of cultural output, they compared the U.S. development Gears of War (Epic Games, 2006) with Japanese development, Pikmin (Nintendo, 2001). Do these games represent the cultural differences of the people who made them?
Hirokazu Yasuhara said the following:
Yes, exactly and this process keeps repeating itself. You see some culture differences come to the surface with this, too. For example, a lot of Japanese people attain a feeling of security via creation, or making themselves look nice, or saving money. Not that Americans or Europeans aren’t like that, but Americans may be more likely to take a more “destructive” process toward feeling safe. I think a lot of that is because the things that you “fear” can be very different between nations—not real, palpable fear, but more the lack of feeling at ease with yourself. Something you don’t like very much; something that stresses you out—another word for “stress,” really. And since sources of stress can be different between Americans and Japanese, it follows that the methods both populations take to relax would be different, too.
To say that cultural difference creates development style is a perfect example of what is called cultural sensibility [Thompson95]. The basic idea is that people from different cultures approach the world with different ideas about how to think, feel, and interact—moral, emotional, and aesthetic assumptions. You can be aware of other cultures, and know that they are different than your own, but you cannot actually acquire the cultural sensibility without being from that culture.
If you have never had experience of a particular culture, game developers can vicariously give it to you. For instance, if you have never been to Hong Kong, you can play Shenmue 2 (Sega AM2, 2001) and you can get something of the feel of living in this city. But what you get isn’t really the cultural sensibility at all—it’s a stereotypical experience that fools you into believing you’ve had some experience of Hong Kong culture.
Similarly, you can play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar North, 2004) and feel that you now know what it is to be a young black man in a street gang. But in fact, what has been delivered is a valorized fantasy based around the idea of street gangs—you have acquired none of the cultural sensibility of this world from playing this game. Only someone who actually was in such a gang could have this sensibility. There’s nothing wrong with creating these fantasies—it was encouraging to see a game with a black leading character sell so phenomenally well—but there is something amiss when the games industry isn’t taking advantage of the variety of cultural sensibilities at work in the audience for videogames.
The games industry in North America is predominantly comprised of white males. 83.3% of the people who work at game developers are white, 7.5% Asian, 2.5% Hispanic, 2.0% black, and 4.7% other ethnicities, and 88.5% of these employees are male [IGDA05]. This inevitably means that those cultural sensibilities possessed by white males dominate the development of videogame titles. This can occasionally devolve into unintentional racism.
Let me give you a tangible example. I am the chairman of the International Game Developers Association’s Diversity Advisory Board, and I have been holding a round table at the Game Developers Conference for the past four years. At the last summit there was a developer there who said: “I do fantasy online games; however, I do not have any black or brown people in my game because I don’t want to offend anyone.” There is a strange kind of logic behind this claim—a concern that people might be offended by the inclusion of ethnic diversity, whereas being oblivious to the idea that it could be tremendously offensive to exclude that diversity (particularly if you happen to be from the culture excluded)!
Similarly, at another round table at GDC one attendee told a story about a young, black girl who had been playing and enjoying Guitar Hero (Harmonix, 2005). She confessed that she had great difficulty choosing an avatar for herself. “Am I supposed to pick the black man, or the white woman?” she asked the developer in question, apparently genuinely confused by the options presented to her.
It may seem excessively politically correct to be thinking about supporting avatars for every conceivable combination of ethnicity and gender, but at the same time this is a game supporting seven basic avatar choices: four white males, two white females, and one black man. That actually matches the demographics of the people who work for game developers in the United States quite accurately, but it doesn’t match the demographics of game players in the US quite as well!
The only way to get a new cultural sensibility into your company is to hire someone who has that sensibility. But perhaps even this is looking at the problem the wrong way around—perhaps what is needed is not to increase the diversity inside the existing game development companies (although this would be welcome), but rather to support new developers who embody different cultural sensibilities. The phenomenal success of hiphop music demonstrates the real commercial benefits of doing so—there is a significant cultural difference in innovative creativity, and the only way to access this is to allow new voices to be heard.
I am excited to work at one of the first African-American game developers in the US, and I am captivated when I see a team like Nerjyzed Entertainment (an African-American Game Developer out of New Orleans led by CEO Jacqueline Beauchamp) making unique games like Black College Football Xperience (Nerjyzed, 2007). It says something about the state of the games industry that we can finally make games targeting a black audience [Gamespot07].
To found a game developer takes more than just money—to make a successful career in videogames, you need to have paid your dues. You need to have put in the time to learn the skills and build the industry relationships that are required for making publishing deals. The existence of companies like Nerjyzed shows that even though the employment statistics are still biased heavily towards white males, other cultures are making their way through the games industry and are finding a way to make their voices heard.
It’s easy to dismiss concern for diversity issues as being mere political correctness, paying lip service to minorities out of a feigned sense of obligation. But diversity is not merely the concern of the minorities—as I mentioned earlier, in another 50 years or so every cultural background will become in effect a minority, as there will no longer be one ethnicity with a majority percentage!
Diversity is not a black thing, it is not a white thing, it is not a women thing or a disability thing, it is not a Latin thing, it is not a gay thing—it is the right thing. It is right for your company’s bottom line and for the survival of the videogames industry (or any other industry). It has been written about by researchers from Harvard to MIT to Stanford and so on, across the planet [Alensina03]. The choice is simple, so why is it such a difficult challenge for the games industry?
Those of us dedicated to diversity issues represent a collective of people from across the planet, and together we believe we see the big picture. We know the issues and we have looked the dragon in the eye. We have felt his heated breath and we are confident and dedicated to change, and that a change is “gonna come.”
What’s more, I believe it will come swiftly for the games industry because there is really no one in the way. No one is trying to stop the movement with dogs or fire hoses—no one holding signs, no picket lines, no politicians telling lies. No bombs, no lynching, no opposition at all. The predominantly white males who the industry has employed thus far don’t have time to be concerned about diversity issues one way or the other, because they are far more troubled by the poor quality of life they currently enjoy as a consequence of endless working hours and crunches [IGDA04a].
Almost every teenager, high school student, and college student across the world wants to get involved with creative technology. Universities throughout the United States have research development initiatives, curriculum development projects, and government contracts, all for interactive media [USAToday05]. The mobile interactive games industry is also exploding, as well as the international market.
Content, content, and more content, but whose will it be? There are so many videogames that could be made to express the diverse voices in the population, but right now we can only guess at what those games might be like. I want to know what a black man’s Final Fantasy might be like, or a woman’s Half-Life. I want to know what someone who is physically challenged would be able to show us about their life experience if only they were given the chance to make that game.
The challenge facing the videogames industry is accessing the wealth of untapped creativity that could be brought to bear if only the lack of diversity could be addressed. This involves not only hiring more people from diverse cultural backgrounds, but setting up developers who can develop their own unique development culture. All this will take organizing and education. It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.
For those of you who are African American, Latin American, Caribbean, or Asian, we have to rise to the occasion and become professionally visible. We need a legion of educated young people to pave the way for what has to come. I feel the pure essence of a nation in transition, an industry waiting to fuse creativity and technology for the next generation. And solving these problems in the United States is just the tip of the iceberg—there are so many cultures out in the world whose unique vision has yet to be explored in the new digital technologies.
Every once in a while it would be nice to change up the team just to get a bit of spice in the mix. If it works for the music industry and it is beginning to work for the film industry, why is it so hard to move the new developers into the videogames industry?
There are questions we can ask about whether our current business practices encourage innovation and creativity, or stifle it. In the music industry, money is made available for what is called artist development, which is to say, finding new talent and helping them bring their creativity into the marketplace. When I go to a corporate office in the music industry, I ask for the urban music department or the rap music department or the hip-hop department and someone directs me to an office. But there are no such departments in the videogames industry. No one has even considered that there might be a commercial niche worth pursuing in this vein (despite the phenomenal impact of diverse cultures in other media).
There are no finances made available for the exchange of ideas in the videogames industry. There are few if any mechanisms for newcomers to show a promising demo to industry leaders, so that the opportunities for new development ideas could be pursued and developed into finished products. The absence of this kind of artist development in videogames isn’t just a failure to provide pathways for new voices from ethnic backgrounds, it effectively blocks all new voices from being heard, except in those rare and exceptional cases where a particular mod or student project manages to create a stir, as with Counter-Strike (Le and Cliffe, 1999) or Narbacular Drop (Nuclear Monkey, 2005), the student project that led to Portal (Valve, 2007). These games are certainly the exception and not the rule, and both achieved their success thanks to the efforts of just one company, Valve. Why can Valve see the benefits of this kind of artist development when no one else can?
Often when I speak for minority interests in the games industry, people seem to assume that what is needed is some kind of entitlement program, but that’s as far away from the mark as it could be. We don’t need developers from diverse cultural backgrounds because we need to pay lip service to some notion of political correctness or affirmative action, we need it because there are diverse audiences out there who want games they can play, and the most prudent way of satisfying the needs of those audiences is to create developers who share the same cultural background. I can put this idea more flippantly: to make a better game that reaches a new audience you don’t just need a better mouse trap, you need a different kind of cheese.
I spoke earlier about the vast success of hip-hop music. The urban community is a huge arena; a lifestyle that was originally the black cultural lifestyle experience is now a global phenomenon in music, fashion, and entertainment. If the bottom line is financial, we have an opportunity to capitalize on a community that clamors for creative innovations. A community that uses technology to communicate beyond boundaries of race, creed, or color. A community that challenges social norms and expects more as a consumer. A consumer who you cannot fool, who is looking to identify with characters’ lifestyles and stories not yet told. A community that wants to be included in the videogames they play and the interactive entertainment they consume. A youthful spirited community who is changing the very way we do business in all corners of entertainment and the world at large.
We are on the brink of an innovative technological surge of creativity and a convergence of interactive entertainment across all boundaries. The new developer brings a new audience; the new audience demands a sensibility that reflects the cultural and global experience. The new audiences bring billions of dollars of disposable finances, and represent a powerful collective of collaborators who experience creativity in a social community that reaches beyond the traditional.
New developers from diverse cultural backgrounds can offer new videogames with as much innovation as jazz gave to the music industry in the early twentieth century: they can give a new vision of what a game might be. There is a global improvisational movement in the arts that rivals art deco and the renaissance, but it still struggles to make a foothold in videogames. We need to provide these new developers direct access to finances that will assure an entry point into the industry, an area where they can comfortably create innovative stories and develop videogames for the next generation.
In November 2008, Barack Obama became the first black President of the United States, carried in on a message of change. When I look at the world of videogames I really don’t see anything like the changes that I have been looking for in terms of new developers and new audiences. I would like to see in the games industry a reflection of what I can see in the political arena—a movement of cultural change.
That I have to say this at all should show you how the industry is struggling with this subject. Sometimes it is better left alone in a dark place where little demons hide, hidden behind the daily grind... there are a few people from unique cultural backgrounds who have managed to make it into games, and many of them don’t want to talk about this subject. Perhaps they don’t want to rock the boat. But I have to say it. When will there be a company who steps outside of the comfort zone and really looks at the possibility of a non-stereotypical movement in the videogames industry?
I am not talking about giving anybody funding in the name of diversity, and it would be absurd to expect to get something for nothing. But a chance to produce a console videogame as a creative work of art with a team of developers from a unique cultural background is necessary if we are serious about fulfilling the potential of this unique interactive medium.
The new developers and new audiences exist in an exciting arena of innovation and creativity. Herein lies an amazing opportunity for our industry to exchange ideas for products that can create new revenue streams. In the untapped potential of new cultural voices lies yet another resource to move the industry forward into the next generation, the chance of developing, discovering, or uncovering new genres for the videogames industry to explore. Cultural diversity is a challenge we cannot afford to overlook. As I said earlier, diversity is not a black thing, it is not a white thing, it’s not a women thing, and it is not a gay thing—it is the right thing if we want to make better games for everyone.