Industry needs more minority programmers...

[Diff-chan]

Taxi was a heavily black centric movie. Did you even see it?

No, of course I didnt. If you saw it, I wouldnt exactly advertise that fact.

[MVS]

Taxi was a heavily black centric movie. Did you even see it?

They should have made it heavily funny centric instead.

[kedawa]

From the link:

"Roughly 80 percent of video game programmers are white"

Which corresponds nicely with:

July 1, 2004 Census White 235,990,895 Percentage of US Population : 80.4%

I think this bears repeating.

I really don't see the relevance of GTA SA to the whole discussion, either, since it was made by scots who's only knowledge of black americans comes from pop culture.

It's funny how this whole argument gets reduced to rich whitey versus the poor black man, and totally ignores the fact that there are tens of millions of dirt-poor white trash that have only a slightly better chance at making it in life then poor minorities do.

The fact that the american upper class is primarily white has more to do with the fact that the first rich americans were white and knew how to hold on to there wealth than any inherent racism in modern society.

If wealth weren't passed on from one generation to the next, or if everyone started out with the same resources, then most of the disparity in wealth would be gone.

I really don't see how that could ever happen though, so you might as well get used to it.

[Brisco Bold]

Affirmative action, quotas, and the like are counterproductive and stupid. Hire the best person, period.

IBTN

[MVS]

Unless it's a woman who plans to have kids.

[Yoshi]

Unless it's a woman who plans to have kids.

She, by definition, is not the best person.

[Brisco Bold]

She, by definition, is not the best person.

I wonder what your wife thinks about that.

[Yoshi]

I wonder what your wife thinks about that.

She's not here to ask, but I suspect she'd agree.

[galvatron]

This never happens. They move to the big money neighborhoods and never look back. Worse yet, many have no sympathy for people of their minority living in poverity. Those types of people end up being bitter because of years of taking shit for working hard instead of going out to play basketball and listen to rap with the guys. They had to work really hard to get where the are, and they are pissed at the people they grew up with for how lonely they made he/she feel while striving for something better.

You're on the right track, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not bitter and people didn't really make me feel alone, so much as I often felt the need to pull away to keep on track. I had it better than some, in that I had nice clothes to wear and lots of video games to play, but as far as a work ethic, such things were only mentioned in passing. In fact, I learned a lot more about succeeding by looking at all the failures I knew. Drug dealing didn't work, as evidenced by the people I knew who got locked up. Drinking and doing drugs didn't work due to the addicts I saw blow opportunities...

I honestly think that I, emotionally speaking, raised myself. I realized I wasn't going to find someone else going where I wanted to go, so I had better make my own way morally and academically. The thing that lots of people don't realize is that at the top colleges/universities, they have need-based financial aid. If you're able to get in then you really don't have too much to worry about in terms of affording college aside from accruing debt. They'll give you grants and loans to make up the difference if you don't wanna work part-time or your parents come up short on their end of things (which comes down to state tuition levels) like mine always did. Oddly, enough I am in the game industry as a programmer, but I don't really get to draw on my time in the ghetto too much... it's not exactly something I think about often, except as motivating me not to end up there again and enjoy doing things that I couldn't afford to do before. Maybe once the industry matures a little more there'll be a place for less mainstream storytelling (like indy films), but if you're just ripping off hollywood style plots for your games, stereotypes will do just fine. Most game characters are shallow, anyway...

[kedawa]

Most games have such thin narratives that you could insert any sort of plot you feel like, as long as the gameplay and visuals hold up.