Why Is Board Gaming So White And Male? I'm Trying To Figure That Out - Kotaku Australia

Board games have been having a bit of a cultural moment.

I have loved board games my whole life and in the last 10 years spent my time browsing shops for the newest releases, growing increasingly addicted to watching board game channels on YouTube and collecting games — a collection which has taken over several rooms in my home.

As a doctoral student at X University and York University in their joint communication and culture program, I have noticed a lack of contemporary scholarship on board games, as most game scholarship focuses on video games.

As I talked to people in board gaming communities and examined the games themselves, I realized that there were big, systemic social, labour and economic issues that were limiting the wide-spread adoption of board gaming and market growth.

My research argues that one of the key factors facing board gaming is the homogeneity of the current board game design labour pool and limited representation on the products themselves.

I found that 92.6 per cent of the designers of the 400 top-ranked board games on BoardGameGeek were white men.

The cover art images on the boxes of the top-ranked 200 BoardGameGeek ranked games with games such as Gloomhaven (2017),Marvel Champions: The Card Game (2019), Terraforming Mars (2016) and Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (2015) skewed heavily toward white-presenting males.

Images of men and boys represented 76.8 per cent of the human representation on covers, or 647 images in games such as Great Western Trail (2016) and War of the Ring: Second Edition (2012), compared to 23.2 per cent of the images of women and girls, which represented only 195 of the images counted as in games with more gender representation like Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2016) and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015).

White imagery was found on 82.5 per cent of the images or 528 compared to BIPOC imagery which made up only 17.5 per cent of the images, or 112 total images.

In total, 70.7 per cent of respondents shared that they play board games at least once a week.

More than half (53.5 per cent) of the sample have been board gaming for 11 years or more.

I got back a set of respondents who were mainly from North America (73.8 per cent).

The majority of survey respondents identified as women at 60.4 per cent, including trans women which represented 4.9 per cent.

More than a quarter of my survey respondents identified as men at 25.3 per cent and 9.4 per cent identified as non-binary.

Most of the respondents were white (74.9 per cent), while 20.4 percent identified as BIPOC.

The survey respondents shared that gender and racial representation did matter to them, in fact it mattered a lot?

Respondents agreed or strongly agreed (80.2 per cent) that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable gender representation in games design and 84 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable racial representation in games design.

Another overwhelming majority (83.6 per cent) agreed or strongly agreed that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable gender representation in board game artwork.

Similarly, 84 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable racial representation in board game artwork.

being one of the world’s largest consumer markets and straight white males being an even smaller portion of the global market — they currently make up about 80 per cent or more of the representation in board games.

Do these realities — the board game industry’s persistent focus on a small demographic and its skewed representation on the products toward this small population — create the necessary conditions for market growth and expansion of the board game industry.

If your choice to play a board game is hinged on whether the artwork is diversified enough or not..

Kinda like those people who claim they are now going to play a game purely based on somebody else’s negative take/criticism.

Literally nothing is stopping you playing a board game.

On topic of board games…How doesn’t games like drop it and Twister alienate people

It’s possible that because of the cost of board games, and the experience that people usually only play things like monopoly, it’s taking a while for people to realise how good they are