The article's title claims it's going to show why the people making the games are white, but the article makes no attempt to actually do so. (And, no pointing out statistics is not the same as explaining why).
Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
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Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#92I was a game programmer at EA for eight years. > The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity, This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me. I worked on one game where more t…
I agree with everything you've said except for one thing: Giving it up. EIther making games or making music.
Both of these pursuits are entirely compatible with having kids and a normal job, so long as you pursue them in a way compatible with your lifestyle. You don't have to go on the road and live out of a van to be in a band; you can pick up some cheap hardware and software and record at home. Record a vocal take, change a diaper, add some reverb, let Dropbox sync the file for your bandmates to add to tomorrow.
Same thing for games. There's no reason you can't make an indie game when you're older and have more responsibilities; you just need to work with the right kind of team, on the right kind of game, with the right kind of scope.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#93This helps explain why I'm starting to feel the games industry isn't catering to people like me as far as storylines go.
I find that AAA games are often very disappointing in as far as they're full of one-dimensional characters, terrible cliches and limited understanding of anyone who isn't young and male. (I'm relatively young and male, but enjoy stories that aren't entirely filled with people like me.)
There's a market for video games with a storyline written by someone with some maturity. It might even pay for sane office hours...
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#94Statistically, the odds are that for any random thing being done in the US of A, the majority doing it will be white and male. Age and childlessness are probably relatively well co-related, so we only have to account for one of those. What is comes down to is that the steady supply of labor entering a field causes it to be a buyers market.
Hardly the "majority". White males are less than 40% of the US population. I don't think we're going out on much of a limb to say that they are overrepresented in the game industry.
"Plurality" then, still the odds are on the white guy for any random task. I'm not really making a judgment, just trying to frame thoughts on the significance of the correlative factors. For non-random tasks (such as game development) we can certainly look to see why the variance of the population diverges from the variance of the general population and hypothesize to our hearts content.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#95I've said it before and I'll say it again: Crunch time, or working more than 40 hours a week, is Producer Failure. Either they didn't make the schedule correctly, or they let feature creep in.
More than once I've walked around the dev people and told them to go home after 8 hours.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two tangential points I want to hit quickly. First, most software developers are taught "computer science" (or an imitation of it) in their formal education, not engineering. Second, software is mostly not engineering. Engineering is very measurable. But software includes a lot of design and craftsmanship. If software dev. were restricted only to the portion that could reasonably be called pure engineering it would b…
So if it isn't science, and isn't engineering, what is it closest to in terms of other endeavors?
I'd say artisanship, craftwork, architecture, or industrial design are all much closer to what we do than either of those.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#97Using "white" as a casual negative adjective is weak. I can respect non-whites using it as a term of anger or hatred. We're all big boys. But seeing it used as a term of self-hatred leaves me feeling more than a little disgusted.
I wouldn't call it self-hatred. It's point out a glaring reality that's invisible to a lot white people. If they hadn't put that in the headline, it might otherwise have gone unremarked that it's mostly white people. Whiteness can be quite difficult to see if you are yourself white. Put another way, it's not the whiteness itself that's objectionable, at least not exactly. It's the lack of diversity. It just so happen…
Sorry but if you're going to downvote me at least do the courtesy of explaining why. I have been polite and constructive.
I thought whether you agreed with a comment or found it to your own liking was supposed to be orthogonal.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#98I'm also a 29 year old childless white man working in the games industry and yes, the numbers and discussion surrounding the demographics of games workers are accurate. The problem is, it doesn't prove the premise made in the article.
The argument being made is that game are bland and homogenous because they're made by childless white men. The childless white men the article is talking about aren't actually making the decisions about anything that goes into the game. They are assembly line workers, not management. You could replace them all with an outsourced team from India or hire an all female team and the only thing that would change is the bug count and level of productivity.
The end product would remain the same because it's being driven by executives.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#99This helps explain why I'm starting to feel the games industry isn't catering to people like me as far as storylines go. I find that AAA games are often very disappointing in as far as they're full of one-dimensional characters, terrible cliches and limited understanding of anyone who isn't young and male. (I'm relatively young and male, but enjoy stories that aren't entirely filled with people like me.) There's a ma…
A big part of that is that the whole of the game is built in a rush by people with no free time who are probably chronically sleep deprived. The machinery of the game ends up being essentially propped up on sticks and held together with bailing wire. As such the stories that you can fit in such rickety and uncertain machinery is typically the most linear. The more complex and dynamic a story is the harder it is to avoid big bugs within the story itself or due to the interaction of the story and the game engine. It also makes testing much more difficult, which is already short on resources for most games.
There's so much churn in the basic technology of gaming systems that it makes it difficult if not impossible to concentrate on only story telling.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#100I was a game programmer at EA for eight years. > The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity, This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me. I worked on one game where more t…
I agree with everything you've said except for one thing: Giving it up. EIther making games or making music. Both of these pursuits are entirely compatible with having kids and a normal job, so long as you pursue them in a way compatible with your lifestyle. You don't have to go on the road and live out of a van to be in a band; you can pick up some cheap hardware and software and record at home. Record a vocal take,…
I thought about adding some caveats when I said "gave it up", but didn't for simplicity's sake. I do still have my gear and every now and then I pluck on it.
Yes, you can still record solo, but that's making music. What I gave up was being in a band. Keeping up with bandmates, practicing regularly for several hours a week, and playing shows in bars is possible but much harder when you have kids. I also find it much harder to keep up momentum when it's just me and just in my free time.
Ditto for making games. You certainly can make them in your free time (and I do), but it's a different experience from what you can get jammed in the same room with a few other inspiring people for hours at a time. In today's "everything digital, everything asynchronous" world, I think we seriously undervalue to importance of being there with people.