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Huh. The first few stock images that come to mind are a mixed bag. Harold, old white guy. “Why can’t I hold all these limes,” young black guy. “Distracted boyfriend,” three white people, one of whom is male. Maybe those are just dated?
Googling “stock photo” and looking at the first page of results gives a bunch of white people, mostly solo. The first black guy is playing a saxophone—does that count as stereotyping? There are a few Middle Eastern men, a couple Indians, and a single dog.
So I’m not really seeing it.
I work in video games, you may recall. I've recently been making art for the in-game stories, and for promotional material. It has been communicated to the art team that representing diversity is a requirement in every image by default, with rare exceptions. Diversity means non-white and/or female, preferably both. Exceptions are images depicting individual characters (some of whom are still allowed to be white, but of course are balanced by the requirement that other characters be non-white) or bad guys, who are of course not subject to diversity requirements. Assuming you aren't depicting a villain, white characters are required to be balanced by diverse characters. Diverse characters are themselves, of course, balanced already and need no corresponding balancing.
I'm a little amused that we're still debating whether this sort of thing is happening. It's absolutely happening.
Can you describe how these instructions are given to you? Does your manager tell you this directly? Are these commands issued to your whole team from somewhere else?
Every time we made a piece of art that didn't have POC/gender balance in it, our boss told us it wasn't diverse enough and we had to remake it to be more diverse. This complaint never was made for anything involving villains. It took a dozen iterations before we started internally discussing where to put the diversity in a given image during the planning stage, and we still frequently are told that the images aren't diverse enough and we need to add more. Any time we do an early mockup with stock images that aren't themselves diverse, we're reminded that the finished version has to be diverse. I'm indy; the boss tells us directly.
Have you ever asked why?
Video games with more diverse characters don't seem to sell more.
I don't need to ask why. I've sat through a couple impromptu diversity lectures over the years. Both the indy space and Triple-A are completely dominated by progressive voices. The entire gaming press ecosystem is rabidly progressive. Influencers are more balanced, but everyone the boss knows and everyone the boss respects, cares about, and wants to impress are all on one side. You want to show your game at PAX, you want buzz, you want people cheering you on and giving you good press, well, there's a set of beliefs and behaviors that get you that, and there's another set of beliefs and behaviors that definately will not.
I could give more examples, but I'll leave it there for OPSEC purposes.
So it's more a matter of placing the company on the map of 'good guys' or for individuals to make sure that they can keep finding jobs in the same type of companies.
Making a good game with innovative, fun gameplay, interesting visuals and story, compelling characters etc, would definitely make you (commercially) successful as well. Insofar your company is not banned from payment processing I suppose.
Of course that's much harder so the sea of average workers of the industry just go for the low-hanging fruit.
Sure. But while you're doing that, you also want to be a good person, and you want the extra boost of being seen to be a good person, and you definately do not want to be called out as being a bad person, because that could be disastrous.
The fear of failure is considerable. The desire to do anything possible to increase the chances of success is likewise considerable. And that's why I burned a couple days some time ago making art for a progressive fundraising campaign that I absolutely despise and that had zero to do with our product, but that my boss thought might get the company some good press. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
But why is that the option? From a manager's POV, they can either get staff to spend X hours working on getting progressive acceptance or X hours on making the actual customers want the game more. For example thinking of ways of making the game more fun or more mesmerizing, the story more compelling, etc.
Wouldn't a brainstorming session 'give me the most controversial idea that you think could create press / make more people interested in the game you can think of' be just as valuable if not more? I can't imagine what kind of pressure the people working there are working under, being creative within extremely narrow guidelines.
Perhaps having a character say dirty, sexist or racist jokes could make the game more interesting. Unless there is no dialogue whatsoever.
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