Got Mad Game

Invisible Gamers

According to the miserably scant research that has been done on gaming and ethnic minorities in the U.S., African Americans are among the most avid players of video games. Hip hop music saturates many game soundtracks, and the ethnically diverse inner city has become the fashionable setting for the Grand Theft Auto series and its many progeny. What you won't see, however, are game ads on the BET cable channel, on African-American radio stations, or even on the most popular online hub for African American players, AAGamer.com. "We are visible as people who are buying the product, but there is nobody who is marketing to us," says Joseph Saulter, CEO, Entertainment Arts Research (www.earesearch.com), an Atlanta-based "urban games developer" that is working on game titles targeting African American gamers. "There is an entire market that is being underserved," says Saulter. "They can't wait for someone to market to them."

Of course, licensed sports titles have always included African American athletes. Recent franchises like EA's "Street" sports series and Def Jam Vendetta and Midway's NBA Ballers clearly focus on this community. But many game companies rely on their general marketing plan to capture ethnic audiences and fail to see the benefits of targeted marketing into these communities, a tactic that the film industry and even packaged goods manufacturers realized many years ago. "There are opportunities for achieving in this market additions to your bottom line," says Roderick Woodruff, an advertising veteran who co-founded AAGamer.com last October with his wife, bestselling author Connie Woodruff. Even with 2 million hits in April, the site has not attracted direct advertising from game publishers.

Even when it doesn't result in immediate new sales, advertising specifically to the African American community helps companies build franchises and loyalty in a community that can be tapped in future launches. "It shows audiences that you understand, that you care about people of color. It lets me know that you are concerned about me as a black consumer and that you've tried to represent me in the storyline somehow."

Towards Inclusion

The dearth of marketing and game design that include African Americans is only beginning to be addressed. Vivendi brand manager, Nicole Bradford will offer a keynote address on the topic at the upcoming Digital Arts Symposium (October 6-9, Silver Spring, MD). Saulter's company, EAR, is about to start shopping around a game demo by his coalition of designers. Kaotic Foolz, an urban action adventure for consoles, is the first of about six titles he has in development. And mainstream games marketers who want to try to understand this market can start with the well-attended and opinionated forums at AAGamer, which the Woodruffs started as a place where African American gamers could have a voice.

More than marketing to African Americans, Saulter and the Woodruffs want to see game companies move beyond the rough stereotypes of NBA Ballers or Def Jam Vendetta, let alone the thuggish depictions in GTA and its offspring. "To have me always represented as the fool or the prostitute is not going to pay well, and we have seen it done in games," says Woodruff. He and his family have become avid players of NCSoft's City of Heroes in part because the game lets users play African Americans. "The designers must have given that storyline some thought about how to represent people," he says.

Saulter has no objection to violence and criminality in games or to have African American characters engage in this typical sort of action gaming behavior. But he wants to see more depth. "If the world can look at the Italian Mafia crime syndicates and almost idealize them in entertainment, then why can't we bring in gangs and make their characters understandable? "I've been watching 'The Sopranos' for three years, and inside of everything Tony is a person." Saulter also wants to see the range of African American experience represented in games. "There are good people in the ghetto, not just chain-wearing criminals." One EAR game in development, Seventh Day, is a Christian-oriented title being written by novelist Charles Campbell, and another, Billy Zane, is in the horror genre.

In fact, one of the blind spots in gaming is the presumption that sports is the genre of greatest interest to African American players. According to a Forrester survey last year that asked gamers what types of games they played at least once a week, 25% of African Americans said fighting titles, slightly more than traditional sport games (24%). This segment is well ahead of white audiences in frequency of playing wrestling games (20%), survival horror (15%), and action/adventure (23%).

And like the Latino gamer, African Americans are much more social players (see chart), a critical aspect of minority segments that could prove very lucrative for the game companies that attend to it. Forrester analysts say "This tendency to game socially will lead Hispanics and Blacks to be early adopters of commercial game consoles - which will boost their adoption of broadband." Publishers should also be considering how games with head to head play can work well in this segment. But most of all, the power of social play and social networking within American ethnic minorities should tell games marketers a great deal about the potential for marketing virally and through key community influentials. "When one person does something, it goes throughout this community very fast," says Saulter.

Getting in the Game

In fact, African Americans are much more likely (12%) to play educational titles than whites (5%), and Woodruff thinks that this is a much-overlooked opportunity for game companies. Initiatives throughout the African American community to improve local schools dove-tails perfectly with one of this community's favorite pursuits, gaming. "These kids can play games but they can't read," he says. "We think the future of gaming is huge and we see more in education. Urban schools need it." He already sees Microsoft and others starting to spend a lot of time and money exploring the school and educational market and starting to see how classic game design skills apply here. "Simulation will be the wave of the future. It will be how children are taught," he says.

As with Hollywood film, music and TV before it, games will better reflect and include the audiences who use this medium when African Americans and Latinos themselves are designing the games, not just buying them. Neither Saulter nor Woodruff contend that the gaming industry in any way excludes African Americans from the design workforce, but it is important to have minority voices contribute to the fundamental designs.

"It's the puppeteer's point of view," says Saulter. "If I want an African American character to be in my game, then who is the puppeteer? When I take all the clothes off a 3D character and put on the baggy pants, the character moves differently, the clothes move around differently. It's a different kind of jump."

If the game industry really wants to speak to ethnic minorities and the considerable markets of ultra-loyal consumers they represent, then it needs to cultivate designers, writers and executives of color who sit at the table when the scripting decisions are made, when the media are bought, and when the green lights are given. "If Black folks and Latino folks are waiting on white folks to write these stories, it ain't going to happen," says Woodruff.

Contact: Rod and Connie Woodruff, 443/367-0023; Joseph Saulter, 404/965-5937

Do You Spend Half or More of Your Playing Time... ?
: Playing with someone else in the room?
White: 26.10%
Afr.-Am.: 36.40%
Latino: 34.60%

: Playing with someone else online?
White: 1.30%
Afr.-Am.: 3.90%
Latino: 6.90%

: Playing with others In the room against others online?
White: 0.80%
Afr.-Am.: 4.40%
Latino: 3.50%

Source: Forrester Research

posted by Sneaker15 @ 12:21 AM