mid_gen
June 23, 2016, 3:11pm
16
This I’ll somewhat concede to - there’s nothing wrong with looking to see if there is such a decent candidate. I do still find it a bit off that you’d want to specifically broaden to include a given demographic, but exclude others. Where I disagree is that I don’t think one’s gender has any relevance in VR. I don’t think we can even say what kind of demographics VR games are going to appeal to and who will eventually make up the audience. The kind of people that embrace development for emerging technologies aren’t usually the kind of people who are going to be ‘locked into’ a given development mindset, and I think the more successful VR games on the market shows a reasonably different class of games to the ‘traditional’ market already.
It only enhances the quality of the panel if their race / gender / whatever has any bearing on the topic of the panel. Someone’s genitals or skin colour has negligible bearing on their ability to develop VR applications* in Unreal. The same goes if your panel is currently all female and you’re looking for men to include in it for the sake of ‘balance’ - if you’re passing over a better female candidate for the sake of a token man then you’re once again diminishing the quality of your panel for no good reason.
(*Actually, there are neurological reasons why particular demographics might have issues working in VR, but that’s way outside of the scope of the discussion and irrelevant to any given specific individual’s ability anyway).
When it comes to a panel which is primarily about discussion, having a broader range of people from different genders/races/background provides a very clear and obvious value over one which is not representative.
Where is this hypothetical ‘better’ male candidate that is losing out to a ‘worse’ female one? It’s a weak argument against striving for better representation.