For better or worse, video games are here to stay. They have become part of our routine, being easily accessible through smartphones, computers, and specialized consoles. The media makes speculations about their effect on children's psyches, companies use their simulation features to train employees, and even academia has begrudgingly started to admit their status as cultural artifacts or, in some rare cases, even as art.
    But one common critique that stands out when we investigate possible problems with video games is their lack of diversity, something that becomes painfully obvious if one looks at titles by AAA publishers such as Ubisoft, EA Games, Square Enix or Wizards of the Coast.
  Although those are all different companies, their main products form a somewhat homogenous body of experiences, - either war-themed FPS, high-fantasy-medieval-Europe inspired RPGs, or sports simulators - clearly designed with a very specific player in mind: white males between the ages of 15 - 30.
  In chapter 1 of  Rise of the Videogame Zinesters ,author and game designer Anna Anthropy addresses this problem by pointing out that the game industry began in what she categorizes as "white-male-dominated" fields, such as engineering and programming.
  This led to video games initially being produced by and for the same group of people, which in its turn made it difficult for them to incorporate other perspectives.
  However, times are changing and nowadays more people than ever before are playing video games. With an increasingly varied public, games should ideally shift their approach to something that appeals to those new players as well. The market should also see an emergence of game developers, hailing for all walks of life.
   Sadly, those suppositions were not true and until very recently what we had was a wall separating those who created games and those who played them.
For instance, despite the fact that half of the players today are female, data from both HEVGA (Higher Education Video Games Alliance) and IGDA (International Game Development Association) have disclosed that in North America, only 30% of the students in undergraduate game-related programs are women. That number falls to only 22% when we move the focus of the research to women in the game-industry workforce. The numbers are also ridiculously low for different ethnic groups and the LGBTQ+ community.
    Thankfully, as Anthropy also points out, there has been a lot of effort put into the creation of tools that allow people without the resources and expertise of big studios to bring a broader vision into video games. One such tool is the Unity engine, a valuable weapon in the independent game-developer arsenal, and the main topic of this chapter.
    Unity is at the very forefront of change, and the engine is closely associated with the boom of indie games witnessed in the scene. Many of the independent creations associated with it became quite successful - both financially and in the eyes of the public - forming a market space for more daring enterprises. It is now possible to become relevant without the endorsement of an AAA publisher,  as was the case with the latest hyped title  which wasn't made with Unity but certainly reaped the fruits of its success.
As a result, it’s not uncommon now to find rogue game-makers working in private projects, acquiring money through crowd-funding, and then self-publishing directly into hubs like Steam.
   This is a major walk-away from the past dynamics of simply joining the ranks of well-established publishers and following the same old game-formula for maximum profit. It is a shift that will have an influence on how a multibillion-dollar industry - recognized as such by the likes of Forbes and The Economist -go about its business.
Big studios have shareholders and invest large sums in games, to the point where innovative concepts are a risk they were not usually willing to take. But now, with so many alternatives in the market, they can't afford to be as conservative.
Another positive twist is in the sheer variety in terms of mechanics, themes, and visual choices a broader group of producers can achieve.
  If this is all connected to the Unity engine, it is important that we understand what exactly is a game engine and what other options are there. To learn more, follow this path and discover What is Unity?