We Can Do Better on Representation
There’s a trend of videos making the rounds on social media of young black girls reacting to Halle Bailey’s portrayal of the little mermaid.
It’s heartwarming, and a little heartbreaking.
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon, have in some circles been meet with racist rhetoric, and vitriol over their portrayals of diversity in their respective fantasy settings.
It’s good that Hollywood is making some progress. And I hope The Little Mermaid, and The Rings of Power, and Game of Thrones are only the beginning of increased representation.
But, what about board games – how are we doing?
Racial Representation
A recent article did a pretty good analysis of representation in board games. It found that 82.5% of cover art characters are white vs 17.5% BIPOC. This is a massive under-representation.
I hoped that statistics like this have changed over time – and suspected that publishers are making some improvements in representation. So, I decided to check.
And, oh boy was I wrong.
I looked at the cover art for the top 50 games (according to BGG rank) published from 2020 onward. Only 11% of character representations on box art are BIPOC.
If anything, my analysis overstates BIPOC representation as I only counted foreground characters in some euro-centric games with crowds of white folk in the background. And, candidly, in instances with both BIPOC and white characters, often the white character had a more prominent role – or appearance of authority.
Gender Representation
The same article I cited before found that 23% of character representation on box cover art are women.
By my count of representation in the top 50 games published since 2020, 26% of representation is women.
We Can Do Better
You can look at any individual board game cover, and usually representation on it is justifiable. Afterall, you’d expect a game about historic Prague to have a cover full of Czechs, or a game called Carnegie to have an old, white, Andrew Carnegie on the cover.
The issue is that as an industry we aren’t making an active choice to increase representation. That means if a box has a single character, it’s often defaulting to being a white man. If a game is in a historical setting, it’s often Eurocentric.
It’s time we start making that active choice.
What are your favorite games that have done a good job with representation?
