Video game developers need to fight against stereotypes and issues

Mar 21, 2014 00:36 GMT  ·  By

Manveer Heir, one of the veteran designers on the Mass Effect series, has just held a passionate speech at the Game Developers Conference of 2014 in San Francisco about social injustice in games and how developers can start eliminating this major problem.

Video games still have some growing up to do and developers use events like GDC to talk a bit more about the ways the industry is progressing, from technical standpoints, like game engines, to core themes, like social injustice.

BioWare's Manveer Heir held a great speech at the big event, according to Polygon, directly addressing the lack of minorities in games, not to mention same-gender romances, while emphasizing just how popular some stereotypes are in various games.

According to Heir, because video game developers aren't taking a stand against these problems, they just perpetuate the age-old issues.

"These negative stereotypes effect the identity of individuals in these groups," Heir said. "They affect the way people think and treat others in the real world, and [they] perpetuate the social injustices that occur in these different groups."

One key example is the lack of female protagonists and the excuse that such titles don't sell. Heir emphasizes that this is just because developers and publishers aren't willing to invest in marketing or the creation process, thereby handicapping the game from the get-go.

"When a game starring a woman comes out," Heir said, "the marketing and the development spends are simply less, which can overall impact the quality of the game and [its] success, which skews the numbers in the negative."

The developer also dismantled excuses for such stereotypes, like the desire for a realistic portrayal of an experience.

"We need to stop giving into the realism excuse," he said, "especially when most of our games are fantasy games … and not historically accurate, and [instead] question whether realism even makes any sense for our game. If it does, then we need to make sure that the realism isn’t boiled down into such a simplistic model that it creates more problems. "

Last but not least, Heir also emphasized how video games in particular can play a big role in dismantling such social injustice issues due to their interactive nature.

"We should use the ability of our medium to show players the issues firsthand, or give them a unique understanding of the issues and complexities by crafting game mechanics along with narrative components that result in dynamics of play that create meaning for the player in ways that other media isn’t capable of."

BioWare as a whole has certainly tried to deliver open games in a variety of ways, but there are still plenty of developers out there who aren't willing to take risks.