Assessing Gender and Racial Representation in the Board Game Industry

I guess no surprises in this article, but these are the numbers.

Assessing Gender and Racial Representation in the Board Game Industry

"The board gaming community, like online digital gaming, based on the available data, appears on its surface and in many layers underneath as a white male-dominated space."

"While it is understood that quantitative analysis has its limitations, the stark absence of diversity in this sample is laid bare. These numbers have a weight, a thud factor that doesn’t allow for much equivocation or grey places in which to hide. This study will give neither aid nor comfort to those who argue that there is ample representation in board gaming or the hobby has somehow, in recent years, succumbed to political correctness, and over-corrected in favour of traditionally marginalized groups."



cheers

Jur

By looking only at the top 100 games they invalidated the study. All it proved is that the games people liked the most happened to be made by white men. All it shows is that white men make the most popular games, as determined by as wide a cross section of gamers as possible.

I read the whole article now. I can tell that she put a lot of time and effort into it, and some of the numbers are pretty striking, although not surprising.

I've said before that Plaid Hat does a good job with respect to representation, but it probably helps having an openly gay Latino run their art department.

My wife (and son) are (half) Hispanic, so one of my D&D campaigns was 80% Hispanic because it was them plus the maternal grandparents.. (My North and Eastern European-ness and Jewishness ruined it, and I was the DM; why are the DMs always white males)? A Filipino friend regularly hosts gamedays, but except for him, my wife, and son; nearly everyone else is usually White or Asian. I don't have any close trans gaming friends (that I know of). When I was running the shop I found that it really depended on the game. MtG was very stereotypically white male dominated. Final Fantasy TCG less so. Pokémon and pretty much anything with japanese/anime art style are was pretty likely to pull in asians and Latinos. RPG groups tended to be evenly split, genderwise, except for the weekly Starfinder game. Our board game night, run by a woman, was typically 25-50% female.

Race is weird. Is someone from Spain Hispanic/Latino and not White? I'd argue that they're whiter than me since they live in the EU. It seems like only North Americans care this much about race, or maybe I'm wrong. My extremely nerdy friend who was born in Poland insists that he's not "white" because he's an immigrant, and always puts "Other" on forms. He's a bit of a contrarian and a sociology/anthro student, so there's that too.

This whole revolution of gaming started in very white spaces. German family games. Dudes playing wargames or D&D. Mormons and other religious groups and their family game nights. Also nerdy spaces. There's social pushback for girls to not be nerdy (although san il defanso made a great point about Harry Potter), and the same goes for other minorities. If you're othered and ostracized, why get into weird hobbies? It's nerdy shit, and as Donald Glover* has pointed out, there ARE black nerds out there, but for a long time they haven't wanted to come out of the closet with THAT either. Michael Barnes played and ran games in Atlanta, I'm sure he has seen some more diverse groups around from time to time.

Before my wife met me, she had basically played Chess and Hasbro/Parker Brothers stuff. My closest friend from college (the only one I still talk to on the phone really, and he's black and latino...) DM'd for his grad school friends and loved playing RftG, Summoner Wars, or Power Grid with me, but now that he lives in California his main hobby is just watching movies since he doesn't have any friends out there who game. So there's definitely a networking effect where it's harder to get into the hobby if you don't know anyone who's in it, and people tending to stick to their own ethnic/social/etc groups when making friends is probably to blame for it.

I feel weird race and gender dropping like this like it's some kind of competition. Is it wrong to only have friends of your own race? Some people live in small towns where that's all there is.

"Cultivation theory" is a new concept to me, so I thank the article for introducing me to that. The article focuses more on representation and design than I am here.

I've been thinking about writing an article for weeks now, but I've honestly kind of held back on it because it'd be yet another white dude yammering on about games. [With the exception of Gary Sax I'm not sure who else would like to know why I believe that Into the Breach is a triumph of game design].

*
www.cc.com/video-clips/tir2mu/comedy-cen...-presents-black-nerd

SuperflyTNT wrote: By looking only at the top 100 games they invalidated the study. All it proved is that the games people liked the most happened to be made by white men. All it shows is that white men make the most popular games, as determined by as wide a cross section of gamers as possible.

And it's a site dominated by white men. A lot of the everyday gamers and customers I found in the store hadn't heard of BGG. We have to ask how closely BGG reflects gamers and gaming as a whole.

Jexik wrote: It seems like only North Americans care this much about race, or maybe I'm wrong.

Having lived in other countries, it is my impression that many people are more racist than we are in the States. For example, I heard a lot of comments about blacks when I lived in Korea. I have heard a number of comments about skin color since moving to Indonesia. Even though everyone here has darker skin color than me, they still make distinctions over just how dark. It was the same in Korea. Once, I had college students in class. One guy's skin was slightly darker, but, to me, almost indistinguishable from the rest. However, the students made comments about it.

I think the reason why there are not noticeable problems with racism in many countries is because most countries are homogeneous. In the US, we are very mixed. Before I moved to Korea, I had a Taiwanese neighbor, and one half of the street was Hispanic and the other half was black. We were one of three white families that lived on the street. Everyone got along nicely there.

In a place like Korea, every neighbor is Korean, so there are no opportunities for confrontations over race.

I think that the predominance of white people in gaming is likely due to historical factors. Europe and North America were the wealthiest areas and are mostly white. Because of wealth, people were able to spend more money on hobbies than in other places of the world. (I know that most cultures have abstract games that have been played for centuries, but those do not appeal to everyone.) Now that other areas are becoming wealthier, they have money to spend on hobbies. However, with computers and smart phones being available now, most of the gaming happens on those, rather than face to face.

As an example, Korea was very poor after the Korean War. They worked hard to make their country productive, so by the end of the 1980s, they were doing okay. They had some difficulties in the 90s, but they worked through it. At that point, Starcraft caught on. Nowadays, people there play tons of smartphone games. There are some boardgaming cafes, but they are a drop in the bucket compared to electronic gaming.

For us, board games have always been a couples night thing. So it’s usually about 50/50 on gender, though mostly white.

Best way to combat this is for gaming groups to be more inclusive.

Tying into some of what Whoshim was talking about, I've also spent a lot of time in other countries (admittedly all European/Mediterranean) and among immigrants/immigrant families because I'm in the latter. The homogeneity of other countries cannot be overstated. America is VERY unique in that regard. I'd be lying if I said I fully understood the current dynamics, but people here seem hyper-aware of race as of late. This is not really the case in a lot of other places.

I grew up playing Xeri with my grandparents, but grandiose modern-style board games weren't really a thing. This wasn't because of race/ethnicity/how many generations we'd been here, it was just because it wasn't what they did to begin with. For this article to serve any use you need to consider a couple things:

- BGG's userbase is a small niche of everyone that plays games

- the games in the top 100 aren't nearly enough of a sample size of games on the whole

- these kinds of games (in many ways) originated in predominantly white subcultures (nerds)

I wasn't overly impressed with the article, I guess is what I'm saying. The data isn't really useful. The closing paragraph in particular confuses me because I don't really understand the author's goal with it.

"This pastime flourishes and can be made entirely more fun when there is an equal playing field. It is best, I believe, when we play fairly with one another. Fair play means we must listen, learn, measure and improve. I am hopeful that the discussion will continue and we will, as a community, find a way to solve the problem of marginalization, ensure inclusion and achieve diversity. Only then will our hobby truly level up."

A few decades ago the metrics would have been 50% white americans making dice games and 50% white germans making cube pushers. It's changed dramatically as games have reached a wider audience. Where is the issue?

The thing is that the members of BGG are as diverse as you’re ever going to get and they like games made by white men best.

Diversity of IDEAS matters, but “diversity of representation in creation” is largely a waste of time to study because you’re presuming that “nonwhite, nonmale” people want to make games and are somehow being denied that opportunity. Which we know isn’t the case - companies are actively seeking POC and non cismales to make games.

Honestly, the whole “white male domination” concept is biased. It’s as if it matters. I’m as white as they come and my games have all included people of color, men, women, and LGBT alike as avatars for players.

Race is a hateful construct with no internal consistency.

^^^ this.

For example:

Born in New Orleans, LA, USA....African American.


Born Pretoria, South Africa....White.

Barnes has been using the scathing "games of ours" for the hobby for a while and I think that's important to keep in mind. My guess is board games, card games, dice games, non-hobby games are very deep in every group but the empirical observation about BGG style games has a lot of face validity to me.

I think it's pretty undeniable that there are issues with representation in gaming, boargaming, roleplaying and every other form of media. However, I do not think the metholody of the article is sound. The Boardgamegeek Top 100 is not a representative sample, the United States census is not an universal measuring stick and the American definition of race or what a "white" person is can hardly be considered an unbiased.

There are also somewhat spurious arguments about film, toxicity in videogames, the cult of the new and several lenghty disgressions to adress typical Gamergate points or what have you that really distract from the main point.

Ultimately, I think the article does little that isn't readily apparent from a quick glance.

Jexik wrote: Race is weird. Is someone from Spain Hispanic/Latino and not White?

Spaniards are brown when they speak in their language but white when they conquer the Americas.

Race is a hateful construct with no internal consistency.

(Strictly speaking, Latino = Latinoamerican, so Spaniards aren't latinos. Hispanic has several meanings but in this context and in English it refers to Hispanicamericans, not people from the peninsula)

Vysetron wrote: I've also spent a lot of time in other countries (admittedly all European/Mediterranean) and among immigrants/immigrant families because I'm in the latter. The homogeneity of other countries cannot be overstated. America is VERY unique in that regard.

The United States is diverse by American standards of diversity. And by those standards, I don't see it being any more unique than the vast majority of countries in its continent. But I disgress.

BGG RSP forum for further insight? This article is just trolling.

Erik Twice wrote:

Jexik wrote: Race is weird. Is someone from Spain Hispanic/Latino and not White?

Spaniards are brown when they speak in their language but white when they conquer the Americas.

This made me laugh out loud.

Race is a hateful construct with no internal consistency.

I agree with this.

There's this big trend in the U.S. for people to take these DNA/genealogy tests to see what % German or whatever they are, and I think it's the dumbest thing. The methodology behind it is kind of suspect even if the results meant anything useful in the first place.

This is a thread that needs to die before page 3.