Finding The Spike Lee Of Video Games

Joseph Saulter, a video game entrepreneur (Entertainment Arts Research, Inc.) and educator feels the gaming industry is disconnected from its customers and would like to see the industry reflect its customer base.

Seeing gamers as disproportionately African-American or Hispanic in demographics, 2% whom are African-American and the game protagonists are white males. A measly tenth of the characters fall into a minority category are represented as either athletes or gangsters.

Saulter who has been identified by Ebony Magazine as the first African-American owned publicly traded gaming companies, is set to release a game in July and another project taking place in Chicago’s South Side in the mid-20th century.

Fast Company’s David Zax sat down for a one-on-one with Saulter & her vision for revamping the gaming industry.

FAST COMPANY: Only 2% of video game designers are African-American?

Saulter: There are not enough African-Americans and Latin Americans designing and developing games. However, what I call the urbanization of the game industry is slowly emerging.

So you think the problem of video game characters being disproportionately white will be fixed when the developers themselves are more reflective of society?

If there were more African-American designers and developers, there would be a better representation of African-Americans in the games.

You say you’ve met many talented black students, particularly through your educational initiative, the Urban Video Game Academy. Is there just a problem ushering that talent into the industry?

I think there’s a lack of information. I think there’s a lack of understanding. I know with the Urban Video Game Academy, a lot of these kids are very familiar will audio tools: They know Pro Tools, Q Base, Logic Pro. The same zeroes and ones that give the ability to create sounds are the same zeroes and ones that could make 3-D animation. I’ve kids I’m working with now who are fully fledged game developers; they’ve taken the last five years to learn programming.

Why do they come in knowing Pro Tools, but not programming languages?

In music they have role models. They have a Jay-Z out there who came from the heart of the ghetto. There are a lot of African-Americans who are very well positioned in the games arena, but there are few of them known to the rest of the community.

You’ve talked about enabling a Spike Lee of the gaming industry, a crossover artist who becomes a mainstream, household name. What’s going to get us there?

There are a number of chasms to get through. The main one is the finances. Spike Lee used his own money, he used credit cards, to get his first movie to come out. It costs a lot of money (to make a game). People talk about coming out of a garage. But you can come out of a garage much easier with music than you can with game design.

And yet some iOS developers are doing just that.

I’m not saying it’s not possible. I have a “garage product” called FireWire Code 22. It’s a casual game, a parkour game. It’s slated for a July release on iOS.