The 2014 Game Developers Choice Awards convey a message of hope

SAN FRANCISCO — It will take the video game industry a long time to address the panoply of social justice concerns in video games, but the 2014 Game Developers Choice Awards demonstrated that gender issues, at least, are not going back in the box.

Video games have long been held as the domain of straight, white men. That describes the majority of developers, the main characters in narrative-heavy games, and if we strip the sexual orientation, the default setting for avatars. No one used to debate the point. But over the last few years, the industry has started facing this issue, in large part due to the rising swell of cultural critics writing about games.