Thread by @enibolas

Day 5/10 of my anti-racist #gamestudies thread series.

It's half time, folks ♥️😊

Time to continue talking about Indie games & our hopes that they will solve racism.

Today: "Precarity and Why Indie Game Developers Can’t Save Us from Racism" by @ssrauy journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

This is an interview study in which Sam Srauy asks AAA devs from US and Canada about their views on racism.

Note: The data is different from yesterday: No industry statistics but a qualitative, narrative look at North American game dev culture. What do devs think, hope, expect?

They think that the games industry does have a racism problem but that it can be solved (you guessed it) by throwing Indies at the problem.

We already encountered this hope yesterday, it's quite common:

https://twitter.com/enibolas/status/1258349503113048064?s=20

The interviewees assume that Indies have more creative freedoms because they are smaller and more flexible. It’s logical, right? Indies can be more edgy so they can push for more diversity in the workforce.

The question is why then are Indies demographically similar to AAA?

Srauy says we overestimate the influence of indies and underestimate how racism regulates creative markets. Social norms affect the products we make. Basically, ‘we’d love to put a Black character in our game but would it sell?’

Diversity is still perceived as a risk.

and IF a game takes this ‘risk’ it’s pushed into a niche. Games by devs of colour are supposedly for players of colour, while games made by whites are supposedly for everyone. Srauy calls this 'the racialising logic of capital'.

This logic creates real pressures for Indies.

Because the racial logics don’t magically change just cause you're Indie. “Indie game developers may replicate extant inequalities (e.g., game content that is racist, sexist, or homophobic) to mitigate some market risks”. In a broken market, racism is a valid business strategy.

There’s still the hope that Indies can make a difference through innovation? Isn’t that a good thing?

It often puts the responsibility for solving racism on the shoulders of those most affected by it. Devs of colour are most likely to do (unpaid) ‘diversity’ labour.

More problematically, AAA is let off the hook:

“Responsibility for contesting racism in games is offloaded from relatively powerful AAA developers and publishers to relatively powerless indie developers.”

The ‘industry lore' that Indies are creative ironically harms indies.

In conclusion, the narrative of the ‘free indie’ is dangerous in 3 ways:

1) it downplays the precariousness of Indies
2) it burdens Indies with the responsibility to “fix” a broken industry
3) it lets AAA empires off the hook, framing them as incapable of structural change

Overall, this research shows how hopeful celebrations of Indies are not enough to battle racism.

Rooting for Indies to save us pressures them into inclusion labour which reinforces oppression.

The root of the problem is the “racial logic of capital”. AAA must change this.