Systemic inequity and discrimination don’t just crop up overnight. It takes decades and centuries of cultivation and reinforcement. In the case of gaming, the roots of gaming as a contested space reserved for only a lucky few are long and entrenched. Huizinga (1955), in his foundational work on gaming and conceptualization of play, was describing a world in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century where games were played by a homogenous community of predominantly white European men, and specifically, men of leisure and means (Montola et al., 2009). The assumption of leisure, indeed many hours of leisure, and an unfettered ability to play without concern for work, childcare, eldercare and household maintenance responsibilities, is the world of players as understood by Huizinga (1955).
The core assumptions and ideological foundations about whom games are for can run deep in our understanding of game design, production and play. Through the lens of social shaping of technology theory (SST) (Wajcman, 2009; Mackenzie & Wajcman, 1999; Baym, 2015), we can understand game creation and play as cultural activities designed to privilege some people and exclude others. Games, like other socially constructed innovations, as SST illuminates, come encoded with oppressive, exclusionary, hegemonic worldviews. Games are complex cultural and social constructs created by people who are themselves socially shaped and influenced. Created by homogenous teams, games become products and experiences created by and for a specific in-group. In the case of board games, these labour groups are, based on some samples, predominantly white and male (Pobuda, 2018).
Gaming, online and offline, is plagued with the same set of issues present in every other part of our culture. As James Baldwin said in a speech to high school students: “When the world talks about culture, they are not talking about culture, they are talking about power” (Baldwin, 1963). Games, like any other art form or cultural practice, can either reinforce or subvert the hegemonic privilege of the white male that allows white male players to “create a virtual and lived reality where white maleness is empowered” to gate-keep and exclude the Other (Gray & Leonard, p. 4). Gamergate, for example, shone a bright light on the symbolic and actual violence of white male supremacy in the gaming community.
Feminist media and game studies illuminate how pervasive gaming tropes and stereotypes about women and BIPOC identities can impact how these marginalized players are treated in game cultures and society, and how these tropes and stereotypes lay bare our ideologies, values and biases. Tropes such as the predominantly white male hero in video games who saves the world (usually through killing and destruction) and claims the damsel as his prize, can result in a normalization and naturalization of certain values. Ideological messages, explicit and implicit, can signal that a dominant class, in this case, white males, are imbued with unique status in real life as in virtual life, even to the extent of possessing ‘superhuman’ powers (Campbell, 2018, citing Sarkeesian; Harvey, 2020).
In a foundational work of feminist analysis, Nochlin (1971) asked the provocative question, “why have there been no great women artists?" Her answer was that a complex and insidious sociocultural, economic and political mix of factors, rather than innate biological impediments, ensured that the work of women in the visual arts was either ignored, or women were actively discouraged from pursuing artistic careers. The systemic disappearance of women’s contributions that Nochlin (1971) describes in this foundational work is still broadly applicable today: women’s presence in popular media, including board games, continues to be downplayed and denigrated (Pobuda, 2018; Thomas, 2017; Harvey, 2020). We see significant evidence of the erasure and marginalization of BIPOC and women across a growing range of empirical studies. A study by Smith, Choueiti and Pieper (2015) “Inclusion & Invisibility: Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment” (CARD), looked at participants of the film, television and web series industries both behind the camera and in front of the camera. The CARD study revealed that 71.7 percent of the speaking characters in films, television series were white, 12.2 percent were Black, and 5.8 and 5.1 percent were Hispanic and Asian respectively (Smith, Choueiti & Pieper, 2015). According to an analysis of 1,100 films, women in speaking roles hovered around 30 per cent over the 11 years analyzed, peaking at 31.8 per cent at 2017 (Smith, S.L., Choueiti, M., Pieper, K, Case, A & Choi, A., 2018). The Williams et. al. (2009) research found that, in the 150 video games analyzed, male characters represented 85.23 percent of all video game characters with only 14.77 percent of characters representing female identities. In another study of 200 randomly chosen casual games, only 6 percent or eight games out of a sample of 130 games with human characters had BIPOC primary characters, and an analysis of 54 of the most-downloaded digital casual games, 92 percent of the human characters were found to be white (Wohn, 2011).
Media plays an important role in the socialization and enculturation of members of a community, helping to shape daily behaviour, performative gender roles, education and career paths, how they speak and act, and what values they engender. Popular media such as the films we watch, the books we read and the games we play act as part of a system by which we, as a culture, transfer ideological ideas, values and beliefs (Harvey, 2020). Feminist media studies as articulated by Harvey (2020) looks at the social, economic and political implications of a lack of representation of women and POC in media. Board games, like video games, film, television, literature, the fine arts, and other forms of cultural expression hold up a mirror to our everyday ideologies, hegemonies and political structures.
Feminist media studies also looks at the economics of representation in film and television, and confronts the systemic myths in production and publishing that media properties with prominent representation of women will generate less profit. In fact, family films with a woman in the lead role generated 7.3 per cent more profit than those with men in the lead; family films with people of colour in the lead generated 15.4 percent more revenue, grossing $21 million more than those with a white lead character (See Jane Lead, 2016). Nonetheless, white male actors predominate on the advertisements that run on traditional broadcast content, with women representing less than a third of all people featured in advertising (Geena Davis Institute, 2017). A comparison of 2006 and 2016 ads revealed that women’s presence in commercials experienced only a 3 per cent increase from 33.9 to 36.9 in a decade-long time span with only 5 percent of ads in the sample featuring women only (Geena Davis Institute, 2017). Percentages declined further when researchers looked specifically at women of colour, with only 19 percent of speaking roles on commercials given to Black women, with Asian and Latina women represented 6 and 5 percent respectively (Geena Davis Institute, 2017).
Interestingly, studies focused on marketing reveal that this imbalance can negatively impact bottom-line results for publishers and production companies. A study of box office returns on 109 Hollywood films confirms the unprofitability of racial and gender homogeneity, uncovering that it can cost big-budget films as much as 20 percent of their budget in losses on opening weekend when there isn’t robust and authentic representation of BIPOC and women in the film production and on the screen; for a $159-million film, the production will lose $32.2 million opening weekend (Higginbotham, Phil, Zheng & Uhlis, 2020) Indeed, demographic representation in the marketing and advertising strategies of consumer products has been correlated to increased sales and higher revenues (Henderson & Williamson, 2013).
In my study of the designers responsible for the 200 top-ranked BGG games, I found that 93.5 of the game designers were white men. Establishing that the labour groups who create popular media such as board games are overwhelmingly white men may help us to understand why conditions might exist that result in limited representation of other demographic groups within the games themselves. This data might also help us to hypothesize the reasons for the narrow, derivative and limited themes available in some board games. There is an evident correlation that supports this hypothesis: looking at the artwork of the Top 100-ranked BGG games, research found that white male imagery was overrepresented on the cover, back and side panels of popular board games (Pobuda, 2018). There were 869 white characters displayed on the covers, sides and backs of the boxes of 100 top-ranked board games investigated. Of that total, there were only 169 representations of Black, Indigenous, people of colour in 100 BGG-ranked games. In this, white persons made up the majority of the characters that appeared on boxes at 83.7 percent, while illustrations of BIPOC rested at 16.3 percent (Pobuda, 2018). This would appear to lend some credence to the claim that often white men creators can tend to produce games that reflect white male-presenting identities. Again, a demonstration of how an affinity group, an ‘in-group’ might create cultural products that are skewed toward and attract people in that same in-group.
As noted earlier, board games have been criticized for a limited set of themes and approaches. Indeed, popular hobby games are often based on other games, requiring the new board game player to understand the necessary game play behaviours, as well as the semiotic and linguistic signifiers of the games that came before. Tabletop role-playing games writer and designer Woodruff (2016) also observed that co-operation was a key game mechanic that women and girls want to see in games, where players can share in a win or support each other in a loss. An analysis of the Top 50 BGG-ranked games revealed that only 20 percent of board games feature some elements of cooperation (Pobuda 2019). A wider analysis of the full list of all 111,300 BGG games reveals that only 6,920 are listed as fully cooperative games in the BGG database or 6.22 per cent (Pobuda, 2019). It can be argued that the inequities within labour groups can lead to a wider system of exclusion threaded throughout a cultural practice.
The problem is interwoven, complex and systemic. In this, publishers and game designers can really help to determine whether new players are attracted by and subsequently, welcomed into the hobby. Indeed, all the choices made in game design communicate a value system, from the way the game is proverbially skinned, its representative artwork, its thematic choices, even the mechanisms in games are communicating a set of values (Flanagan, 2014; Booth, 2021). A greater diversity of game designers, and more diverse perspectives feeding into the creation and production processes might help to expand the stories told within games, and change both the stories and the values these games communicate.
These inequities and patterns of exclusion may not necessarily be consciously malicious; therein lies the challenge of systemic discrimination. Speaking about video games, Anthropy (2012) noted white male in the mainstream game design community tend to “make copies of existing, successful games” (p. 5). The very same indictment might be made of the board game industry. There are various factors at play in the derivative and recursive nature of game design, a perfect storm of risk aversion by publishers, the design grammar and proclivities of homogeneous and closely-knit gaming communities, and affinity groups. Cultures and established patterns of practice evolve and are cultivated over time. The structural barriers to greater representation in gaming are myriad and entrenched. Some values are punished, and others rewarded, further entrenching the current state of board gaming praxis. Robinson (2014) identified that, in some spheres of board gaming, particularly in European game publishing, broader demographic representation is simply not prioritized nor privileged, as evidenced by the industry benchmarks such as the Spiel des Jahres.
Started in 1978, Spiel des Jahres is considered the top award in the board game industry, with no rival in its international scope, impact and reach, Spiele des Jahres criteria privileges rule structure, game concept, layout and design elements as award categories, while “(p)olitical justice or fair representation are nowhere to be found in these criteria'' (Robinson, 2014). The Golden Geek award by BGG, and the Origins award from the Origins convention mirror Spiele des Jahres categories in their focus on theme, game mechanics and quality of game artwork. Mensa International honours board games on the basis of their educational content with the Mensa Select honour. The newly announced American Tabletop Awards, created in 2019, have categories for young or early gamers, casual, strategy and complex games only. These institutions, however, do not reward games or publishers for metrics based on equity, diversity and inclusion. All of these factors, and more play a role in cultivating board gaming communities, and privileging certain board gaming participants over others. These are ideas I’ll explore in greater depth in the next podcast, establishing the research context, and laying the groundwork for my research and analyses.
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