Washington – To teenagers everywhere – well, at least the ones tied to their Xboxes, PlayStations and GameCubes – the ultimate dream job is creating their own video games.
“My friend and I came up with this love story. See, it’s for the girls,” Jonathan Martin, a tall, lanky, quick-witted 16-year-old, starts to say, chuckling.
Jonathan is one of 25 students at McKinley Technology High School at the five-week Urban Video Game Academy. Most are African-Americans, the rest Latinos. Nearly a third are girls.
The new academy, like similar camps at Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaches the ins and outs of game design, exposing the joystick generation to the possibility of careers in the multibillion-dollar industry.
But unlike elite camps that cost as much as $999 a week, the D.C. academy is free. Furthermore, it underlines the young industry’s need to diversify a workforce that is the biggest white male ghetto in entertainment.
The International Game Developers Association, a San Francisco-based professional society, has developed the first demographic snapshot of the U.S. video-game industry, which in 2004 racked up $7.3 billion in game sales. It reveals that 80.5 percent of members are white, 2.5 percent black, 3.5 percent Latino and 8.5 percent Asian, with the rest filling out “other.” Seven out of eight are male. The report was based on a July online survey that drew 2,000 respondents who work within the industry.
To Mario Armstrong, Roderick Woodruff and Joseph Saulter, the three founders of the Urban Video Game Academy, the lack of diversity results in here-we-go-again stereotypical story lines.
In some of today’s hit games, they point out, black men are either athletes with major bling or ex-cons wielding pistols; Latinos, with heavy accents, are either ballplayers or gangbangers; black women and Latinas, if they’re even there, are rarely more than minor characters.
Armstrong hosts a weekly local public radio program on digital technology. Woodruff runs AAgamer.com, a website for African-American gamers. Saulter is CEO of Atlanta’s Entertainment Arts Research, one of the rare black-owned video-game development companies.
If video games represent the next evolution of storytelling, as hard-core gamers and industry insiders insist they do, then who are the storytellers and what kind of stories get to be told? “There’s got to be a balance in the storytelling,” Woodruff says.
“You can’t portray all Arabs as terrorists. You can’t portray all African-Americans as thugs.”
Room 153 at McKinley Tech is the kind of place where kids’ laps are full of game magazines such as Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Pro and Game Informer. Neil Dixon, 14, is perusing a story on the upcoming PlayStation 3.
On weekdays, Neil plays for “at least three hours,” either Destroy All Humans, a first-person-shooter game, on his PlayStation 2, or Twisted Metal, a car-combat game, on his PlayStation Portable. On weekend days, “at least three hours” becomes “at least seven hours.” He says he wants to be either a game programmer or a game tester.
Says Woodruff: “I tell the kids, ‘Stop thinking about these games from a consumer level and think about them in a creative level. What does it take to create this game?’ There’s a reason why rappers like 50 Cent and Snoop are jumping on the bandwagon and making their games.
There’s a reason why major film studios now have video game divisions, Woodruff says. “These kids here grew up with video games, and they need to have a say as to what the industry will evolve to.” The D.C. academy is one of three the three men started this year.
What takes up most of class time is the actual learning of game design – the computer science, the graphic art behind it all. Students plow through Maya, the design software used by many video-game developers. Before they talk about story lines, characters and design, however, they first learn to make a ball. How to animate it. Make it bounce. Get it to jump through a ring of fire.
Woodruff makes the rounds, visiting students. “Hold down the alt key,” Woodruff tells Simpson and Washington. “That’s how you zoom in and out.” Later, the students take a telephone conference call with Mike Chubb, 27, an artist for Sony Online Entertainment, from San Diego, as Armstrong facilitates. A graduate of the Illinois Institute of Art-Schaumburg, Chubb was featured in last month’s Black Enterprise magazine as “one of the relatively few African-Americans” making headway in the gaming industry.
Chubb, as it happens, was one of the respondents in the IGDA’s demographic survey.
“I’m a little bit surprised at how low that is,” he says upon learning that 2.5 percent of the 2,000 respondents are black. “I thought it’d be at least 5 percent.
“Granted it’s only a cross section of a couple of thousand folks, but that’s still an accurate picture of the industry. The industry is young – so young if you compare it to the music business or Hollywood,” Chubb says.
“Only time will tell what will happen when blacks and Latinos start getting behind the scenes. When they start designing and programming and producing games in better numbers, what kind of stories will they tell?”
