Inclusive Gaming

For Digital Reflection 2, I wanted to make a more informational poster, which provides insight to the gaming industry. I created this poster about Inclusive Gaming using the Canva app. My poster attempts to connect the three course concepts of inclusive game design, diversity in gaming, and qualification bias. The video game Never Alone inspired me because I wanted to represent one of the accessible features of the game in this poster. Like the game, this poster had a grayscale color pallet, which means that color blind people will have the same experience with the poster (or game) as someone without color blindness. Similarly, Never Alone has fairly basic graphics and a grayscale color pallet in an attempt to make the game accessible to more types of people. Another aspect of gaming that I wanted to explore in this project is diversity in gaming, both in the consumers and producers of games. What I found was that females make up more of the demographic of gamers than I previously thought. I assumed that at most about a third of gamers are female, but it turns out that 45% of gamers in the United States are females. This is surprising to me because the underrepresentation/misrepresentation of women in video games made me think that females would be less interested in the medium. However, where the issue of women being underrepresented/misrepresented in video games comes from is that there are not enough female video game developers. This is also where the last course concept comes in, which is qualification bias. Video game development has been a historically male-dominated field and it has been very hard for women to breakthrough in this industry. Unfortunately, female game developers have reported issues of harassment in the workplace simply because they are female. Weirdly, gaming is both very diverse and not diverse enough at the same time. There are enough female gamers for positive depictions of women in a video game to be successful. However, there might not be enough female game developers to create an accurate, positive representation of women in video games, so they are still misrepresented, with oversexualization as an example.

Increasing diversity in video games can only be a good thing. It would result in video games being created more passionately and targeted toward specific audiences, so they could get exactly what they want out of the game. The same goes for increasing accessibility. In either case, increasing diversity or accessibility, the video game industry would benefit because it would result in a larger player base. A larger player base then leads to lots of benefits, from more market competition, to more types of video games.

Works Cited:

11 Female Gamer Statistics Marketers Must Know