Despite the fast-growing and lucrative landscape of video game designing, minority students are finding themselves with limited options in the field.
Malcolm Perdue faces a dilemma as challenging as the computer games he loves to play. The 19-year-old student at Atlanta Metropolitan College wants to learn how to become a game designer. Not only would doing so be a lot of fun, designers can make $80,000 a year early in their careers.
But his school has limited options in the field. Nearby Georgia Institute of Technology and the Savannah College of Art and Design, which has an Atlanta campus, offer full curricula in game design, but SCAD costs nearly $28,000 a year in tuition alone, and Georgia Tech
demands high math scores. “Right now, I am focusing on my school,” Perdue says.
Indeed, minority students may find their options limited for what is a fast-growing and lucrative field. According to the Entertainment Software Association, game sales have reached $9.5 billion, triple what they were in 1996. The average age of players is 35, and 40 percent are women. By some accounts, before the economic downturn, gaming was growing at a rate of 24 percent each year and had been offering 822,000 new jobs as smaller companies such as Bandai Namco race to catch up with leaders like Sony and Nintendo.
According to the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), a trade group based in New Jersey, some 80 percent of the
designers are White, 4 percent are Hispanic, and 3 percent are Black. Asked about the discrepancy, Joseph Sapp, community liaison for IGDA, says “there’s a concerted effort all around to get more people involved in game design.”
