Assessing Gender and Racial Representation in the Board Game Industry

Came across this article which has some rather depressing, if unsurprising, statistics in it.

Article Link


I was hoping we could use it as a springboard to highlight diverse designers, publishers, artists, graphic designers etc.

Iain

I've seen that study doing the rounds on Twitter and I would be wary of drawing conclusions from it. It's heavily flawed and has very little, if any, scientific validity.

First, the Top 200 games on BGG is not a representative sample of games. It's a popularity ranking on a single American website and hence, highly biased.

Second, the study is extremely americentric. It uses the US census and its culture, including its race-based classification, as baseline for the entire world despite Americans not being even half of the designers listed. The demographics of, say, German and the United States are extremely different and can't be directly compared.

Third, the US census classification is racist in and on itself. I mean, it's still the same scientific racism of the early XX century with the names changed a little. There's no such thing as "white people", Asians aren't an homogenous group and neither are "Hispanics". Above all, race doesn't exist. It's an idea invented by bigots who compared humans to dogs. There are no human subspecies, the concept of "race" is as valid as phrenology.

Do you know which word does not appear in the article? "Ethnicity". You know, the non-racist, scientific term to talk about human population groups. It's mentioned in the comments and in a tag, but that's it.

The entire concept of "race" is so deeply bigoted that it's banned in most of Europe. The European Union passed a resolution banning the use of the term like 20 years ago and now refers to the proper, less Nazi-adjacent and not stupidly colour-based "ethnicity". Racism is not just treating one race worse than another. It's not treating Black people worse than Whites. It's the entire assumption that these are different groups with large inherent characteristics.

Either way, even if you accept this terminology, it's just dumb. I mean, are Middle Easterners and North Africans considered white in the US? Let me doubt that.

I'm also tired of Americans treating slavs as if they were WASPs. It's galling that the people seen as subhuman by Hitler and masssacred for it are now "too white" to be diverse. It's even more galling when Germans and Brits do the same, because they are perfectly aware of how badly they treat slavs. After all, you can't be racist to slavs if you can't be racist to whites.

Note this means that Turkish designers in Germany are also "white". Again, actual diversity and racism is erased. The same goes for Jews, which , again, are too white for diversity but not white enough for racists. The author also gave us the little nugget of classifying a Spaniard as "non-white", which is itself some racist nonsense.

Lastly, I dislike the narrow and Americentric meaning that is given to "diversity" in the articfle and the anglosphere as a whole. Diveristy is not just four americans of different colours, it's also different cultures, ideas and languages. Think about it: How much German media do you consume on your daily life? Have you ever seen a Polish or Greek movie? What about the Middle East? Is their culture as white as that of the US, or is it also diversity?

TL; DR: I don't think the article is any more revealing that casual observation would. I'm not fond of it.

thegiantbrain wrote: I was hoping we could use it as a springboard to highlight diverse designers, publishers, artists, graphic designers etc.

I wanted to add: I am hwoever very interested in this. For example, I'm immediately attracted to Japanese games because they have very different views of design and cover topics that aren't covered by the Western mainstream at all. So I'm all ears.

Erik Twice wrote: Have you ever seen a Polish ... movie?

If you do, make sure its not "365 days"

This article might be the reason why RSP is being shut down. That supposedly hidden forum is used as representing all of us. LMAO, what goes around etc.

That is a really long article that is dense with data, so I will have to read it at some later point in time. But I did skim it just now, and this line jumped out at me: "There is a disheartening study which points out that consumers are more likely to find a sheep on the cover of a board game than a woman." This confirms at least one of my suspicions about the bias at BGG.

This is interesting data mining but I'm not sure she is drawing the correct conclusions. White men on the cover most likely represent the THEME of the game, which are usually historical (often european) and conflict focused. Not surprising on an American centric data set.

As for the creator side, it is a bit puzzling. Where are the female and POC led kickstarters? Why haven't a group of black guys created a dungeon crawler drawn from their own experiences? Or a trading game made by women? Seems like the bar to game creation has never been lower, so what is the problem?

I suspect it lies with children. How many kids games, especially 20-30 years ago, were widely played across all demographics? Why did black boys abandon board games while white boys stuck with them (and then go on to make games as adults)? Is that the fault of the game or just the culture of the players? Is it aversion to risk taking that prevents women from launching kickstarters or something else?

Well, you could go the shortest route of making sure every game has every ethnicity and gender.

Or, really, solve the world's unequal distribution of wealth so these underrepresented groups can have better access to both play and design games.

Sevej wrote: Well, you could go the shortest route of making sure every game has every ethnicity and gender.

Or, really, solve the world's unequal distribution of wealth so these underrepresented groups can have better access to both play and design games.

Coma Ward went the opposite way, with each player using a genderless, raceless, featureless pawn in hospital gown.

That really sucks. Do you think this is a problem with producers, creators, the audience? Or does it affect all three? On the consumer side I always see a pretty good amount of women at gaming events and the game clubs I've been involved in were often female led. I've not met many many game designers (and know none well) but none of them seemed particularly misogynistic (Launius in particular seems to include a broad diverse character set in his games).

So it seems like the audience isn't necessarily the problem (other than a signal boosted vocal minority, a problem that plagues every industry). Which is why I thought kickstarter would be the leading edge for innovative game concepts coming from underserved voices, amplified by a site such as this. Then is doesn't really matter what FFG, Asmodee, Iello, or whomever thinks, the publication process bypasses them completely.

But given the blow-back GMT had for their "Scramble for Africa" game it seems like the winds may be changing. Is Puerto Rico going to see a fundamental design alteration, or at least a meeple color change? Are historical european based games going to be less gendered/ethnic or will the settings drift to imaginary worlds where the art department can have free reign?