Study: Games Fail To Portray Gender and Ethnic Diversity
Interesting find, reminds me of a conversation I was having just a few weeks ago with a game designer named Vance. We were talking about the advancement of narrative in games, or lack thereof following a discussion we had with high school students in his game design seminar at AU’s summer program. They held that RPGs had great stories, because the point of the game was to imagine a storyline (or play pretend), while games derived from movies or franchise titles were more about action. There was only one girl in the group, btw.
Vance mentioned that the lead on a recent Tomb Raider title kept fighting off the story to keep the game “playable.” I theorized that while titles like Call of Duty 3 and GTA had pushed interactive narrative farther, things kind of came back to explosions in those lines… because explosions are kind of like game porn for guy markets.
“A new study has found that game characters tend not to reflect cultural diversity. According to the paper from researchers across four universities (PDF): ‘A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. … The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly.’ The researchers also note that games ‘function as crucial gatekeepers for interest in science, technology, engineering and math,’ and that without these groups represented properly, ‘it may place underrepresented groups behind the curve.’”
via Slashdot Games Story | Games Fail To Portray Gender and Ethnic Diversity.
Sims 3 is out, and the line is very girl friendly. We’ll see where it goes from there. I wonder if there will be a similar study to this regarding the development of Xbox avatars, and how closely they resemble the actual person who creates them.
