I don’t want to talk about GamerGate or it’s critics. If anyone else would like to bring it up, that’s fine… I just don’t associate with either side of the argument. I don’t agree with everything Anita Sarkeesian says, however I believe her overall message is important to discuss.
I was about 6 years old when my brother was gifted a Nintendo Entertainment System in '86. I instantly fell in love with Mario.
You know how Krusty the Clown resembles Homer Simpson, which may be why Bart admires him so much? Well, I saw my father in Mario… and later identified with Mario myself. A working-class, pudgy, short guy who saves a princess and stomps on Goombas? Sign me up! Plus I have a slightly taller and leaner brother with darker hair.
I identify as Mario so much, that when I’m asked who my favorite Super Hero is, I reply ‘Mario’. I’ve been him countless Halloweens, and talk about him way too much for an adult.
I really wish that there were more diverse video game characters though. I want everyone to be represented in gaming because I want everyone to find ‘their Mario’. Sure their are female characters and minority characters… But they are often side-characters, or have perfect bodies, or are just stereotypes… Shoehorned into a game to make it more ‘inclusive’.
What makes Mario so perfect are his imperfections… He’s so lovable the way he is. I want gamers to feel as connected with their on-screen extensions of themselves as I do.
Some games, like the late lamented City of Heroes, allowed you to build your characters one or two pixels at a time - from dainty elf to giant insectoid monster.
Even most games with a fixed range of characters offer some range; Mass Effect allows you to choose a male or female lead character, Borderlands has four to six male and female leads of varying ethnicity, etc.
But as long as the gamer population is overwhelmingly white and male, the choices (the good choices, anyway) are going to play to their sensibilities.
We already have that. In old school games too. For the females you got your Metroids and Super Mario 2 and for the furrys there’s Blanka in Street Fighter.
Lol… Well Princess Toadstool has her problems, (she’s rarely the hero and often the trophy), and Samus is, underneath it all, a trim woman in a bikini.
The first video game I ever played a character that looked like me (matching gender, hair/eye/skin color, etc.) was one of the Myst franchise, specifically Uru: Ages Beyond Myst.
It was… amazing.
Mind you, I’ve been role-playing since the 1970’s and the oldest version of Dungeons and Dragons, and aside from D&D campaigns where I got to build my character I played men because there really wasn’t any choice. I didn’t mind it, and I had a lot of fun.
But it was a lot different playing someone who looked like me. A veteran gamer, I didn’t expect it to have such an effect on me.
Since World of Warcraft came on-line I’ve only played female characters in RPG’s.* Granted, I’m not a Tauran (8 foot tall minotaur like creature) but I really like having options other than over-muscled guys to play as a character.
And if we’re playing minotaurs, zombies, elves, dwarves, gnomes, goblins, spacegoats, pandas, orcs, werewolves, trolls, and Og knows what else it would be awfully damn strange if the only human option was “male” and “pale”.
After playing toons that looked like me for a bit I started playing humans that looked nothing like me, which was also fun. I also learned some new ethnic slurs the hard way, which wasn’t fun but was educational in some ways.
In WOW I’ll sometimes run my spouse’s toons around, about half of them male, because I’m a lot better at some game aspects than he is but we don’t do that too often.
I don’t think those types of games where you can choose your gender at the start should count one way or another. You don’t generally really remember the character if the game is written to be generic enough to apply to both sexes. IMO, the most memorable characters are from story-driven games with specific unchangeable names and characteristics. I also don’t buy into the “women characters always have perfect bodies” argument either. It’s just as common to have male characters with unnaturally sculpted bodies in games.
The one thing I agree completely with, is that there should be more games with leading women. Even as a guy, some of my all time favorites have had "normal" female protagonists. See: The Longest Journey, Syberia, Beyond Two Souls, Last of Us, Walking Dead. I’m sure there are plenty of others I’m forgetting.
Fatal Frame and Aquaria come to mind. (Though “normal” is up for debate in Aquaria…cause you know…gills. Though, apparently she can mate with a human since the epilogue involves her having a child.)
Probably. I think economics drove it as much as anything and white kids were more likely to have a gaming system than black kids. And, in the beginning, games weren’t really about white dudes or black dudes but more often space ships, Pac-Men and race cars. If a game did have a dude, he was probably green or blue and made out of nine giant pixels. By the time games were detailed enough to really have identifiable human characters, the gaming community was already primarily white kids. Had it been primarily black kids then it likely would have evolved differently.
While there certainly can and should be more diversity of race and sex, I’m not sure that diversity of body types would really work. For most games, the protagonist really needs to be decently fit to be able to do what you’re doing in the game. A fat guy like Mario might work in that game’s cartoonish style, but would be jarring in the more realistic-style games that are popular now.
I might as well add that I certainly have no objections to diversifying characters. It’s all the same to me if I’m shootin’ dudes as Gun Girl or as Whitey Stubbleface so if someone else has strong opinions about, go for it. A black main character is more interesting for me to think about: the only black male protagonist in a mainstream plot-based game I can think of is the upcoming Mafia III. I’m not counting any co-op style shooters or fighting games where you can pick an African-American out of a selection of characters (Left 4 Dead, Borderlands, etc). I guess GTA V has segments that might qualify but not the whole game.
I don’t think it’s necessarily all that unbalanced of a portrayal; in reality, the black male population only comprises 6% of the total population, so that’s a little bit more than 1 in 20 protagonists that would need to be black men in order to keep things proportioned according to the population.
Most games I’ve played in recent history have ambiguous characters (BF4, COD, Titanfall), allow you to make your own character (Fallout series, Mass Effect), have a wide range of nationalities, ethnicities and/or species to choose from (Overwatch, Vermintide), or don’t really have a player(Dawn of War III, Rome 2: Total War).
I guess where I’m coming from is that just because the protagonists aren’t prominently minority or female, that doesn’t mean it’s a problem. In many cases like I mentioned above, it’s either irrelevant, or up to you, and in others , such as fantasy settings based on Medieval Europe, it would be extremely contrived. I would agree that in modern-day games, there’s no reason not to be inclusive though.
But if you’re playing a WWII game set in Normandy for example, it’s not racist to not have black or female heroes- it’s historical reality. You could have hispanic ones though, as they were integrated into US combat units.
Sure, there are plenty of games where it’s not relevant, because there are many heroes to choose from, or the player customizes the hero’s appearance, or where there isn’t really any identifiable hero, or the hero isn’t human (the game I’m playing right now, my character is green with blue hair, because that makes it easier to pick him out on the screen). But there are still plenty of games (a lot more than 20) which do have an individual, identifiable hero, who could plausibly in the game’s story be of any race, and I can’t think of any I’ve played or seen where that individual is black.