DICE Panel On Diversity

Gamasutra has an in-depth report on a panel that was conducted on diversity at DICE. Moderated by Jamin Brophy-Warren, of Kill Screen Magazine, and joined by Manveer Heir, Dmitri Williams, and Navid Khonsari.

Williams is a professor at USC, who recently had a study that showed how certain races in games were overrepresented, as well as pointing out the 85/15% gap in representation of sex. What was shown was that games were overrepresenting not based on the U.S. Census, but on the developers themselves. People make games about themselves, in essence.

Heir had the following suggestion, in particular about how Prey went about it, "We have to find mechanics in our games that can support the kinds of characters we're creating, so their backgrounds actually matter. Where do they come from? It could be racial, gender, or being homosexual." In a later discussion with the article's writer, Brandon Sheffield, asked him about games that allow character creation, a la Fallout 3 or the BioWare titles of late.

Heir pointed out that these titles often ignore the choices you make about your race, sex, et cetera, so they don't really have as deep an impact as they could. Of course, the article also brings up the business side, both mentioning that they need more diverse developers who want to take these risks, and looking at the markets they could gain if games were more inclusive.

The article points out two important points for the future of gaming: developers need to be willing to take risks in exploring demographics of which they are not a part (preferably with an educated view of such), and that one way the industry also needs to expand is getting a more diverse scenery on the development side of things.

Where I feel mixed from the article is in the last paragraph, "In my personal opinion, we should see more games like Fallout 3, in which many races are represented, but the race of the character is far outweighed by how they interact with you. We don't need to deal with all of society's problems in games, but having demographics represented even just visually seems worthwhile."

Representation is a good first step, but I also want to see how games can explore these issues. Video games are such an untapped medium for these things, considering their level of interactivity and ability to draw in a player. Just being present will not have the same impact as acknowledgment and exploration.