Blog Roll

Do games need a gender and racial face lift?

In an article, I ran across here, ("New Media and Society" by Sage Publications) the authors investigate the game representation of age, culture and gender with a focus on whether games reflect them accurately. First, the actual outcome - that games have a different population between the categories than real life - should come as no surprise to anyone. Indeed, if they came out to be the same, I would cry foul as that means reverse descrimination is going on - or more specifically that people are creating characters and their roles according to mathematical formulae rather than merit. However, if we analyze the data and notice trends that are arbitratry, then perhaps the highlighting of that data can serve some good in getting people who write stories and create characters to think more about a wholistic view of everyone and everyone as equals.  More...