Inclusivity

Equality in general is a hot topic discussion in our gaming industry today! What do I mean by equality? It means tearing down the walls of the gaming industry and coming together as gamers united! Being able to bring a variety of different people (countries, race, gender, sex preference, culture, and so on). So the question here is how do we make the video game industry and video games more inclusive?

Let’s start off with why are there a few women working in this field? Me being a female, I feel that it’s the feeling of trying to belong with the guys. Since there are more men than women working in the industry, I feel like we need to outreach to more females to join. I think many women don’t know that there are schools out there for this kind of career, I remember when I was in high school there were many different college recruiters to major in such as business, law, nursing, dentistry, but never I seen a recruiter for the entertainment side.

It is too damn high! That is why we need to recruit females and different ethnicities such as Latinos, African-American, Asians, Samoans, etc. To be able to make ourselves more inclusive we need to find a variety of people in different places, make speeches at events, and perhaps pass out flyers. Go to a high school and outreach to the students telling them that we have space for any type of person that has a passion for games to come aboard. Going to events like E3, Comic Con, and Anime Expo could help us network with different kinds of people that can broaden our search and even go to events no one would think that people would be interested in games such as car shows, beauty pageants, or a fair. Remember sometimes in life not everyone knows what they want to do for a career so helping them paint a pathway into the gaming industry is a way to help bring in the variety that we need.

It's the year we start making different people feel welcomed in our game community Robin! Duh! Making our staff members of all sorts feel like they belong and not make them an outcast! Make them feel as important as a best friend and make them feel like their opinions and feelings count as a team! Just because they’re females it doesn’t make them your personal assistant or just because their skin color is brown it doesn’t automatically make them Mexican, these are the kinds of example we need to fix in our gaming community to be inclusive.

Now that we got that out of the way, how do we make our games more inclusive?! Well we can start by making the main characters of a game to be females or even of different ethnicity. We need more of this sort of gaming in our environment, our society has to see that we can change and are willing to be more open minded on this subject. I know it’s a touchy topic but being able to put in different cultures (in a good way) would help put in uniqueness to a game. If anything it’ll help the players that don’t travel learn about other countries through the enjoyment of their game.

Yes Fry! I'm being very serious! But besides that I think that we should stop making females look like sex symbols! It’s okay to do so from time to time but always doing so causes the audience to start seeing women that way too. It doesn’t always give us the rightful respect that we deserve in and outside of a gaming company. Don’t make us this type of person:

and don't be this guy!

This is the kind of stuff that drags women away from wanting to work in the gaming industry. So instead of always portraying girls as sex symbols let’s try to be more positive and make them look more like heroes. The same goes for different races and cultures lets show more of our positive influences in the near future instead of seeing us as stereotypes or sidekicks because we have more to offer in a video game.