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Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

That's a grossly unfair mischaracterisation of the piece, did you actually read it?

Yes, and the self-loathing white male undercurrent runs throughout. The idea that gaming is a solely white male affair is itself a very parochial view. Calling it a male affair is probably reasonable based on the statistics, although that's still already a bit of an insult to some of the successful developers who sell female-dominated genres, but it's not white male; plenty of non-white males play games, and they're already playing different games than the author does. As a single for instance, the word "sports" doesn't seem to appear in that article at all. (Not that sport games are exclusive non-white male; from what I see, they're popular with almost everybody, except "gamers".) As another for instance, Japan has been making and playing video games for as long as the West, and as far as I know, they are not white; again, no trace of the immense and incredibly diverse Japanese industry appears in the article.

You have to throw out a lot of evidence to come to the conclusion that video gaming is even remotely the exclusive domain of "white males".

I'd submit that rather than building games based on your political conception of what other people might want, you'd be far better off bringing in the non-gamers into the design process directly. Or even just letting other groups of people build the types of games they like instead of taking it upon yourself to build the games that somebody else might like, which is already sort of, shall I say, culturally imperialistic? They're doing it already, after all. I know; I've played some of them, and enjoyed them, and they didn't need permission, help, or angst from the "white males" to do it.

The problem may not be "the industry", so much as a game player who doesn't realize that even within the context of gaming as a whole, they are less widely-experienced than they think. If I were to try to entice my wife back into gaming, who plays Mario Kart with the family and a mean Dr. Mario, "Skyrim" would not even make my top 50 suggestions.

The author doesn't want more games for black males, or white women, or even minority women. Though the author may not realize it, that kind of demographics are a red herring.

What she really is looking for is games for what she feels is an under-served demographic: The kind of person who lives in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation" like her friends do. Her friends just happen to not be white males, so she latched on to that.

> under-served demographic: The kind of person who lives in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation" like her friends do

Out of interest, what would such a game look like, to compete with such a state? Farmville? Candy Crush?

I don't feel over-stimulated, so I can only guess that such people would indeed prefer games like Farmville and Neko Atsume.

But the author's friend, in addition to being overwhelmed with constant shock and stimulation, is also a bit of a snob, so she won't play those low-brow games. I don't know what high-brow relaxing games are like. Maybe Papers, Please and Dear Esther?

No it's not and yes I did, unfortunately.

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