I've been gaming for close to 20 years now. In that span of time, we've gone from 16-bits to 64-bits to no longer using bits to describe the amazing level of graphic detail appearing on screen. The world of side-scrolling action games like Contra has given way to sandbox-style games like Grand Theft Auto and the bullet-time pioneer Max Payne. We've seen the rise and fall of arcades, and each year expands the capacity for online play, expansions and party linking.

Gaming has evolved in every way but one – the level of acceptable conversation regarding gaming and gaming critique. It never fails to amaze me how a debate can break out over the number of strings on a certain guitar used in Rock Band or other items of gaming trivia, but the very concept of talking about race or gender in videogames is considered verboten.

Journalist N'Gai Croal calls race "the third rail of gaming journalism" with good reason – his comments on the problematic racial imagery in Resident Evil 5 unleashed a firestorm all over the internet, causing major gaming sites like Kotaku and Destructoid to ask their audiences to breathe, and actually think about what N'Gai said in his piece before jumping to conclusions.

Such threads remind me that in many ways I am seen as a curious outlier in the general gaming equation. I am both black and female, which stands in stark contrast to the generally accepted ideal of a gamer. In Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat, an academic collection exploring gaming and gender disparities, Nicole Lazzaro's essay Are Boy Games Even Necessary? breaks down how the industry came to construct the identity of a gamer:

At its formation, the game industry used traditional market research data to understand and segment the market. They came up with their target customer: a 23-year-old single male technophile. The vast majority of computer games still focus on the tastes and preferences of the industry's first adopter, chasing him as he gets older. Because the average game player is 33 years old (ESA 2006), games offer more mature themes, lifting experiences from R-rated movies like Rambo.

However, this identity construct has been stubbornly held out as the industry standard, even as innovations like the Nintendo Wii redefined the market for video games, even as research notes that women constitute 52% of self-identified casual gamers, and 74% of those willing to pay for gaming content, and even as more and more women become vocal about their love of video games.

It is this idea of "the single (white) male technophile" that contributes to the myopia of both the gaming industry and the more obnoxious players and informs the assumptions that most of the people on the game boards happen to be white and male, regardless of their actual identification. It also leads to a commonly accepted culture of harassment, where those who identify themselves as women and minorities are subject to gender- and race-based harassment, simply for letting people know that they are different.

Bullying people into silence rarely provides space for the perspectives needed to grow and improve the gaming industry. And the net result is that many gamers just leave large forums and go to seek out our own communities. I started gaming with groups of people – first my cousins, then my friends. The people I game with now are a diverse group. As biracial, Latina, Asian and African-American women, we seek out other gamers to play with and expand our social circles without engaging with the larger online communities. While we read the larger blogs for news and gossip from the industry, many of us engage on sites like Gamers of Color, Cerise, Women Gamers or The Escapist, where raising questions about the racial and sexual politics of a game will actually result in a conversation, instead of endless denials and circular conversations.

The only flaw with this strategy is that by staying in our own respective areas we effectively cede the conversation to those who wanted to silence us in the first place. And the worst of it is that we really aren't asking for all that much. It is entirely possible to have a discussion of all the innovative things Resident Evil 5 is doing with the franchise (like the introduction of light as a major thematic element in a survival horror game) while calling out issues with racially charged imagery (like the images in the demo, detailed by Eurogamer). One can have a discussion of morality in the Grand Theft Auto series while simultaneously discussing the overall sexism within the game.

It is not impossible to become a socially conscious gamer. All it takes is a willingness to discuss issues in gaming openly and honestly. And yet, for some reason, gamers are afraid to actually take a long look at the entertainment they enjoy and to admit that yes, something could potentially be racist or sexist. This doesn't mean it's a horrible game that should be banned – it just means these are things to understand and potentially fix for the next instalment of the series.

Why is it so hard just to have a conversation? What are we afraid of?