Demographics Musings
Feb. 1st, 2007 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Saw an ad in a magazine today for the forthcoming Lord of the Rings: Online game. The main image was of a vast crowd of gamers, encompassed by a giant One Ring. I took a few minutes to survey the distribution of these people, which I presume to be representative of what the advertisers think their players will be.
Majority white male, no surprise. Maybe 20-25% women. Interestingly, many of the women were all in one clump, as if huddled together for protection. A significant number of Asian faces.
At first, I thought that there were *no* black faces. But then I spotted a lone black female, quite near the front, as befits a token.
Kind of reminded me of a moment at Arisia. During a panel discussion, the point was raised of, "If fandom is so 'welcoming' and 'inclusive', how come there are so very few black people here?"
Are there fewer black fantasy gamers, also? Or is LotR unpopular with them? I've heard academic discussions of "Tolkien's racism", but never met anyone who took it personally. But then again, I don't know very many black people, do I?
Majority white male, no surprise. Maybe 20-25% women. Interestingly, many of the women were all in one clump, as if huddled together for protection. A significant number of Asian faces.
At first, I thought that there were *no* black faces. But then I spotted a lone black female, quite near the front, as befits a token.
Kind of reminded me of a moment at Arisia. During a panel discussion, the point was raised of, "If fandom is so 'welcoming' and 'inclusive', how come there are so very few black people here?"
Are there fewer black fantasy gamers, also? Or is LotR unpopular with them? I've heard academic discussions of "Tolkien's racism", but never met anyone who took it personally. But then again, I don't know very many black people, do I?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-02 06:58 am (UTC)* Fandom/gaming is correlated positively with IQ
* Being black is correlated negatively with IQ
* Even though fandom is accepting, it still feels weird to be a minority there, so the IQ effects are amplified.
I expect there are other amplification effects as well - for example, you tend to game more if your friends are gamers, so an underlying effect that modestly reduces the number of black gamers may be amplified by loss of the positive network effects.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-02 12:49 pm (UTC)Which makes me long for the Victorians, who never felt the need to justify the superiority of their culture: they just KNEW it to be true.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-02 10:04 am (UTC)I have one good black friend, also in the SCA, also much into WoW. He's a programmer.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-02 12:27 pm (UTC)Black kids (even those who you'd think can't afford a gaming console) play plenty of video games, with the same fervor and excitement for their brands and products that fanboys have for LotR. But, most of the games that they're playing are street-racers (Need for Speed, Project Gotham and the like) and modern/sci-fi FPS (Ghost Recon, Gears of War, FEAR).
And, in my personal experience, their reaction to LotR is about like my reaction to Snoop Dog: "Meh, that's great and all, but it's not really my thing."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-02 06:51 pm (UTC)I wonder whether the women were clustered together to make it clear that they aren't just "gamers' girlfriends."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 04:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-05 06:20 pm (UTC)And let's get real: racism is with us in the form of those network effects. Even if an *individual* has no racism in him at all, it takes only a statistically smallish amount of it in others near him to have a disproportionately unbalancing effect on his social network. (I think -- it would be interesting to see a formal study of this.) Does that make the network racist, or simply an unfortunate side-effect of a few peoples' racism?
Or to put it in the terms that started the conversation, there aren't many black people in fandom because there aren't many black people in fandom. I'm honestly not sure that there's anything more complicated to it than that...