Non-disclaimer: This is a little rambling, and it’s definitely pointed. I’m not calling anyone out specifically, but also, if you feel called out, maybe that’s something to look at?

It’s telling that the vast majority of people in this small-press indie game community are white, mostly men, mostly with above-average education, and many with above-average incomes from their day jobs. As usual, it’s women (also mostly white and above-average educated, incidentally) who are at the forefront of raising social justice issues in our community, because they have been the ones who bear the brunt of bad behavior around gender.

So, let’s be super clear with ourselves that this community is going to be appropriative in its approach to other identities, because the normative identity in this community is so very homogeneous and privileged.

And let’s also be super clear that the only reason most of us get to engage in this hobby-cum-industry is because we have a boatload of liberty that whiteness, maleness, education, money, and status afford.
To be brutally honest, much of the design culture I see is a cadre of dilettantes flattering themselves that they are artists. Most of us are painting by numbers, and the handful of us who are turning out legit art are – wait for it – white men with above-average education and above-average incomes, because they have the time, means, economic safety net, and platform to make a strong play for commercial success.

We make some good things. We make a lot of stuff that is worthwhile and interesting or at least that is fun. And, communally, we also have very little capacity for insight into the degree of shitty debunked theories we use all the time in games, from sanity points to racial essentialism. We appropriate, because we’re the inheritors of a Victorian imperialist mindset, just like our literary heroes Lovecraft and Howard were.

And I don’t see any of this changing until educated white men with money step back (or get pushed back) so that other identities gain a collective voice in our community. Our little community is pretty progressive about gender and sexuality, so we already see movement in this area – but not without a fight that is still ongoing. But where are the voices of people of color, people with disabilities, people with less education or less money? Until we start including these voices, we’re basically saying, “Since no one else is writing a game about life in an indigenous culture, there is no one better qualified right now than this white dude.” And that’s fucked.