'Camp' for aspiring game designers

"Yes, dear parents, the countless hours spent glued to the screen don't necessarily mean wasted time for your children," reports the Washington Post in an article about summer camp that isn't the just-ended, five-week Urban Video Game Academy at McKinley Technology High School in the Washington, D.C., area. "The academy, like video game summer camps at Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaches the ins and outs of game design, exposing the joystick generation to the possibility of careers in the multibillion-dollar industry [7.3 billion last year]." At McKinley this past month, there were about 25 design trainees, all 9th- and 10th-graders, about a third girls, most African American, the rest Latinos. This diversity is important, the article points out. "If video games represent the next evolution of storytelling, as hard-core gamers and industry insiders insist they do, then who are the storytellers and what kind of stories get to be told?" A lack of diversity "results in here-we-go-again stereotypical story lines," those gaming insiders say. The picture is not pretty at the moment. Industry demographics cited in the Post indicate that it's 80.5% white, 2.5% black, 3.5% Latino and 8.5% Asian, and seven out of eight people in the industry are male. "These racial proportions aren't hugely different from the demographics of game players, according to Nielsen Entertainment's Interactive Group, except in the coveted 18-to-24 male demographic. There, 17 percent are black and 18 percent are Latino.