The Invisible Gamers: Can African Americans Get in the Game?

Electronic Gaming Business, July 28, 2004

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.