Game Design Is Unfair If You Are Not A White Guy?

Here is an excerpt from a post by a game designer whose work I really admire, and whose politics make him say foolish things.

The odds of that cool thing getting the slightest shred of attention increase when certain boxes are checked. The biggest boxes are "male" and "white", and they correlate with things like resources and confidence, which of course correlate with privilege.
I am sure that I have never bought a game because it checked the boxes of "male" and "white".  This assertion is so deep in hogwash that I struggle to even begin. The white guy who wrote this is generally a thoughtful and creative game designer.  But when he gets intersectional, his blinders go up as the irrationality of intersectionalism is wont to do to anyone who wears it.

If I decided that I wanted to play Cyberpunk 2020, I am certain that it has nothing to do with the race or sex of the designer (not a white guy, BTW); it has everything to do with distopian rebellion against impersonal and amoral megacorporations with bleeding edge cyber tech.  If I want to play The Quiet Year, it has everthing to do with the idea of making an artifactual map while telling a story on a clock, and not anything to do with the guy who wrote it (who now calls himself a woman).  If I decide to play Downfall, it is because I love the high concept of creating a society and then telling the story of it's destruction, not because it is written by a woman.  And if I should decide to play most versions of D&D, especially the earliest editions, it has everything to do with wanting to play the high concept of going down into underground monster infested places, avoiding traps, uncovering mysteries, killing nasty things, and taking their stuff. There is no "white guy" box to check.  That assertion is simply ridiculous.

Here's a thing that happens all the time:

Someone creates a cool game, and it is met with deafening silence. It is hurled into the void and, despite its inherent genius, it is never played by anyone or heard from again. As a game designer this is as essential an experience as the act of creation. It happens to everyone.

But!

If somebody makes an intensely interesting game that speaks to an experience outside the mainstream, or somehow not aligned with a conventional narrative of violence and power, or just plain weird, the chances that nobody will touch it increase dramatically.

And this is because of "white male" check boxes? Seriously?

I have a different explanation; let's look at why the first thing happens.  Let's say that there are 100 new products a month released on just one channel (say Drive Thru RPG for instance). Many will be products written by white guys.  Honestly, I don't have time to look up 100 writers and find out if they are white or male.  What do I look for?  The HIGH CONCEPT.  I might have time to pick up one or two to read, and that only so that I can winnow it down to one to play this month.  That means that about 98% will go to the wayside, including a whole lot of white guys work. Congratulations for identifying how this happens to everyone in the game design field.

Now, let's look at the second thing.  What makes something intensely interesting?  A hundred things or combinations of things.  Sometimes I am interested in traditional violence narratives, sometimes not.  But if I don't have time for more than one, and I have to pitch a game idea in limited time to multiple people, I have to try to find whatever has the most common ground for everyone to connect with the game experience.  Are we to seriously belive that "white guy" is the primary issue that I am evaluating to decide which game to play?  HOGWASH!  Yes, genius, it is true that most people want to connect to something familiar enough to understand and exotic enough to find novel for whatever reason.  It it is too far afield, you marginalize most which makes for a bad game experience.  If you shove politics (that often hate white guys) down people's throats, you are probably going to make it worse regardless of who is playing.

Furthermore, the notion that narratives of violence and power are somehow a white guy thing are absurd.  If not, then why are there more games written by "marginalized" designers that are about taking power, often with violence?

Perhaps we would be better off just focussing on the basic design questions, and deciding if the game is good, not applying SJ criteria to the game in order to decide who to hate and when to virtue signal.