A USEFUL explanation of the concept “straight white male privilege” comes from John Scalzi, who suggested that being straight, white and male is like starting on a computer game’s lowest difficulty level.

In the sci-fi novelist’s analogy, “the default behaviours for almost all characters in the game are easier on you (the white male) than they would be otherwise.

“Your levelling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

“It’s certainly possible someone playing at a higher difficulty setting is progressing more quickly and you can lose playing on the lowest difficulty. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on.”

Scalzi, who also writes storylines for games, was attempting to appeal directly to fans and workers in the games industry, which has been struggling with inclusivity, because the word “privileged” is so instantly emotive. Most people balk at being called it, particularly anyone who’s really struggling in everyday life.

If there’s a problem with his argument, it’s that he places wealth as a secondary issue in an effort to emphasise that even if you are wealthy, the game is still made harder when you aren’t straight, white or male.

That is true, but does inadvertently play down a major reason for the confusion. Class is the crux of “hard mode.”

The black daughter of a millionaire president, privately schooled and with impeccable connections, is still going to be listed as one of the 25 most influential teens of the year by Time Magazine. A white male Toxteth teenager from an unemployed household is still going to be written off at school and stigmatised as a crime risk, even though he’s doing better than a black female Toxteth teenager on average.

With gaming specifically, this intersection of gender, race and class to create a “hard mode” manifests not so much within the audience, which is similar to Britain as a whole both for income spread and the gender split, but in the industry.

Of gaming company employees, 70 per cent are graduates (compared with 38 per cent in the population as a whole), 86 per cent are men and 95.3 per cent are white, compared to 87.1 per cent in the general populace.

This is a shocking disparity, but broadly in line with the idea that “easy mode” is significantly warping the industry’s demographics, which are in line with what has been happening in creative fields across the board.

Games design has a great deal of cultural capital for younger people particularly, similar to that of having a job in the media. Therefore, just as in media jobs, games company bosses can afford to be exclusive and demand intimidating entrance fees, be they in the form of degrees or unpaid internships.

On top of such demands, which already exclude anyone who might be culturally or financially discouraged from getting a degree or working unpaid for weeks or months at a time, there are the workplace conditions themselves.

Almost alone in the broader creative market, games-making has “crunch time,” a deliberate process towards the end of the production cycle where workers are expected to pull multiple all-nighters to get the final work done.

This is usually unpaid overtime, expected because gaming is a prestige industry which people are “lucky to work in.”

That in and of itself is a barrier to, say, a new mum returning to work, or a young working-class person caring for their disabled dad who was laid low by a work-related back injury.

It makes assumptions about time, commitment and background that militate against the equality of opportunity rightwingers so insistently say is there.

This ultimately impacts on the consumer experience as well, and is one reason why over the two years since Scalzi wrote his piece, an online battle has continued to rage over the “male, pale and stale” focus of games.

There have been many column inches on the ridiculous tendency for black sidekicks to get killed saving white protagonists.

They, along with women, rarely have starring roles, and are too often written in two-dimensional ways to tick a box rather than being intelligent characters in their own right.

This isn’t necessarily because game developers are uncommonly sexist or racist as a group, though there are stories on that front, but is linked to the fact that the vast majority of the staff involved have always played on “easy mode.”

It affects the understanding and assumptions of that room of people deciding where the story should go next.

We end up with many mechanical tweaks, and ideas such as “optional” paid-for content locking out Toxteth teens but not the better-off, while most of the stories told remain locked on one philosophical track laced with testosterone and upper-middle-class fantasies.

• Simon Saunders blogs at www.gamesandclass.wordpress.com.