www.Tobold.com
Tobold@GMail.com
A blog with my thoughts regarding games I am playing and other stuff in life. Please read my Terms of Service
RSS Feed
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
Diversity in board games
Unfortunately the culture wars constantly spill over into hobbies that I am interested in. The latest attack on board games is an article called Why is board gaming so white and male?. It suggests that male, white people have been successfully excluding female and non-white people from playing board games by not representing them sufficiently on the cover art. Quote: "The cover art images on the boxes of the top-ranked 200 BoardGameGeek ranked games with games such as Gloomhaven (2017), ... skewed heavily toward white-presenting males.". I would invite you to see for yourself, by looking at the cover art of Gloomhaven:
:strip_icc()/pic2437871.jpg)
Do you find this image "skewed heavily toward white-presenting males"? The only humans I see on this cover art are definitively female, and as far as I can make out not very white. There is a lot of racial diversity on this image, albeit fantasy races. While the publication has a tag line of "Academic rigour, journalistic flair", the one thing actively insulting the reader's intelligence is a survey held with 320 respondents described as "a set of respondents who were mainly from North America (73.8 per cent). The majority of survey respondents identified as women at 60.4 per cent, including trans women which represented 4.9 per cent. More than a quarter of my survey respondents identified as men at 25.3 per cent and 9.4 per cent identified as non-binary.". If you take a small enough sample for a survey and make it sufficiently different from the actual population, you can prove pretty much anything with survey results.
The sad thing is that there is a perfectly good answer to the question why board gaming is very white. And unsurprisingly it has nothing to do with cover art. Instead it has a lot to do with socio-economics and Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
If you look up Gloomhaven on Amazon.com, you will find that it costs $140. When we are talking about board gaming as a hobby, we aren't talking about $20 retail games like Monopoly or Scrabble. We are talking about Kickstarter campaigns that currently often are at least $100 for the most basic pledge, and can easily get to $500 for an all-in pledge including taxes and shipping. A typical board gamer is somebody who A) has hundreds of dollars in disposable income, and B) has sufficient disposable time he can spend playing games, which according to Maslow would definitively fall into the upper part of the pyramid of needs, somewhere between cognitive needs and self-actualization.
In an ideal world, these requirements would be met by many people, and regardless of skin color. In the real world, especially in the real USA, white Americans are significantly more likely to have the sort of income, time, and needs for playing these expensive board games. That isn't exclusionary, it is statistical. YouTube has some great channels of black content creators playing board games, but statistically they are underrepresented, because blacks are statistically underrepresented in the upper income percentiles. Putting a black person on the cover art of an expensive board game is not going to change that.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
<< Home
Newer› ‹Older
I think there is more to culture than wealth and free time. Different groups of people, even if they have the same amount of disposable income and time for entertainment - and in practice, most people have a significant amount - will spend it differently.
This is the type of things leftists get all up in arms about instead of focusing on real issues that can help minorities, like the wealth inequality that you pointed out. While I do believe representation matters and we should diversify characters where it makes sense to do so this case is one that's dumb to get mad about in my opinion.
This reminds me of that one Kotaku article a while back that attacked Critical Role for being too white and for including an Asian cultural setting without having any of the cast be Asian. Mind you this was literally when they had a minority on as a guest on their main show and right after a one shot that had a black DM and a diverse cast. Oh and they hired actual cultural consultants to help them build their Asian setting and Matt Mercer tried realistically incorporate these elements into his campaign setting. So even when people try to be inclusive there are still leftists who will complain.
This reminds me of that one Kotaku article a while back that attacked Critical Role for being too white and for including an Asian cultural setting without having any of the cast be Asian. Mind you this was literally when they had a minority on as a guest on their main show and right after a one shot that had a black DM and a diverse cast. Oh and they hired actual cultural consultants to help them build their Asian setting and Matt Mercer tried realistically incorporate these elements into his campaign setting. So even when people try to be inclusive there are still leftists who will complain.
Next up they'll complain that Chess and Go are representative of racial conflict, and they'll be especially upset that women are under represented in Chess pieces. :P
Post a Comment
<< Home
