Looking at the diversity of Xbox’s July Showcase
This story is a cross-post from LittleGreenBox.net
Microsoft touted their July showcase as the most “creatively diverse games line up in console history”. So I thought I might break down what they could mean by that statement, and ask myself what that diversity looks like for Xbox.
Before we get into this, here’s how I approached this task: I decided to watch the conference again and took notes on things like genre, whether characters presented as male or female, and whether main characters presented as white, or as a person of color. This is an imperfect estimation, and I encourage you to watch again for yourself and reach out to me with your questions, corrections and more.
Genre diversity
I hoped Xbox would be showing things beyond shooters, let’s see how they did. These count just the games in the 60 minute showcase, not the ones showed before.
- Shooters — 5
- Narrative — 2
- Arcade — 1
- RPG — 2
- Adventure — 2
- Action — 1
- Horror — 1
- Survival — 2
- Racing — 1
- Unknown — 1
- MMO — 1
Gender diversity
Here, I’m including main characters shown in each of the trailers, and presenting speakers. If the person shown was in the background or just on screen in b-roll, they’re not included in this count. Again, these are estimates, and based off of how people are presenting.
- Male* — 26
- Female* — 18
*Presenting, Estimated
There were other games like Destiny 2 that presented overwhelming male, even down to enemy designs, and tiles like CrossfireX and Warhammer: Darktide which was in generally the same boat. STALKER 2 seemed to have a protagonist designed pretty ambiguously to my eye.
Racial diversity
This is again going to be imperfect, since I can really only estimate who was shown on screen to be presenting as a white person, or people who would be deemed as a person-of-color.
- Latinx* — 3
- Black/Brown* — 8
- White* — 20
*Presenting, Estimated
There was just three female presenters, and just one presenter was a woman of color, the awesome Sarah Bond, Head of Partnerships and Ecosystem. Light-skinned people found themselves represented in almost every trailer, with few exceptions like State of Decay 3, and The Gunk. When I don’t include the Tetris effect trailer, my count for Asian people was at 0 or 1 depending on how you view the PSO2 character. For Psychonauts, I decided to count the protagonist as a male, but didn’t assign him a race.
It’s also important for me to call out here that while I’m bi-racial, I present as a cis-white-man, and get many of the privileges there in. It’s impossible for me not to be bias, but I’m trying my best to read these characters as a video game consumer, and interpreting how these characters are designed by artists.
TETRIS
As far as I could guess that Tetris Effect: Connected trailer alone featured:
- 19 White Men*
- 17 Asian Men*
- 10 White Women*
- 6 Women of Color*
- 5 Men of Color*
- 4 Asian Women*
*Presenting, Estimated
We’ve still got a lot work to do.
So, all told, the Xbox Games showcase was about 70% male presenting 65% white-or-light-skinned, and about 27% shooters. While watching it, it felt at first blush like an improvement on diversity. But that is easily the perception when any characters that stray from the presumed white male antagonist stand out to someone who’s been playing video games over the past 25+ years. I didn’t do a screen-time analysis, but I’d imagine that would be semi revealing as well, since Halo got over 8 minutes of screen time, and the centerpiece of the show in many ways, the white, alpha-male hero.
I think I could get on board with the fact that this is technically the most “creatively diverse” games lineup in Xbox history. But I think that just ends up highlighting just how far we have to go in the journey of equal representation in video games.
