Yeah, but video game heroes aren’t representative of the normal population otherwise they wouldn’t all be brown-haired white dudes in their 20-30s with beard stubble. Much less all proficient with firing a range of weapons, leaping off rooftops and drop-kicking zombie mutants. When you’re setting up all your heroes as white guys (and, to a far lesser extent, attractive white women) that’s the problem.
There is, of course, a ton of games with “build your own” characters or essentially characterless (strategy, driving, etc) but we’re discussing plot-based and increasingly cinematic titles about a specific predefined person.
Studies have shown that there are a near equal amount of men (50%) and women (48%) playing videogames. And a higher percentage of blacks (53%) and hispanics (51%) play videogames than whites (48%). cite
Although this goes back to the type of game. I don’t care if you want to call someone swiping Candy Crush on their phone a “gamer” or not but they’re largely irrelevant to the topic of AAA cinematic shooters on consoles. And developers are developing for the people who already own consoles; it’s not their job to convince someone with an iPad that they should buy a PS4 by making games to attract a PS4 audience that doesn’t exist. That’s Sony’s problem, not Ubisoft’s.
The real question is the demographics of latest-gen console owners and modern-tech PC gamers since those are the people these games are designed for.
I agree with the premise as well. The difficult thing about role models, giving kids something to look up to, to imagine themselves as being, is that it so often isn’t easily calculated as an A to B causation, allowing others to say that its perfectly fine for everyone to have straight, white male role models because you can’t exactly point to one person going bad because he didn’t have a role model of his race or gender. Not everything is as easily contrasted like the Doll Test. But I agree its very important for people to have heroes that represent them
Sure, but if you work out the numbers, 48% of whites is something like 5 times the number of blacks, and 4 times the number of hispanics, even if their percentage playing is slightly higher.
308,745,538 people in the US total, 63.7% non-hispanic white(196,670,908), 12.2% black(37,666,956), and 16.7% hispanic (50,325,523)
So 48% of 196,670,908 = 94,402,036, 53% of 37,666,956 = 19,963,486(21% of the white total) and 51% of 50,325,523 = 25,666,017 (27% of the white total).
Even combined, we’re looking at 48% of the white total.
Princess Toadstool was by far the best character in Super Mario Bros. 2. Mario I used the least.
Chell could’ve been two kids standing on each others shoulders for all most people know. The only way to get her appearance was through careful portalling.
Grand Theft Auto V (one of three protagonists).
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories.
Thanks, I knew about V but wasn’t familiar with the earlier games. Of course, “We had a black protagonist – in our crime game” is pretty sad bragging rights (and the same goes for Mafia 3).
Wait, if 50% of gamers are male and 48% are female, what are the other 2%, and why aren’t we asking why non-binaries are so overrepresented among gamers?
And it wasn’t hard at all to see Chell through a portal-- I played the first game the first time with a friend of mine, and within about 30 seconds of the start of the game, he was saying “Wait, there’s someone else in here”, before realizing that it was the protagonist herself. And, of course, once you realize that you can see yourself even though it’s an FPS, most people are going to deliberately put a couple of portals side by side so they can take a look and see what she looks like.
Take at the look at the PCs available for the multiplayer FPS Overwatch. Its selection definitely looks like a conscious effort to move in the more inclusive direction (easier, obviously, since there’s no ONE protagonist in this game), and I think it’s pretty neat.
I generally agree with the OP but sometimes trying to ensure everybody gets their time in the spotlight can get a bit silly. I’ve been playing Elder Scrolls Online lately and I’ve noticed every time the quests have some sort of bunch of people (and that’s very common) it’s almost always 50% male and 50% female. Instead of having sometimes groups of men you have to save and sometimes groups of women, you always end up saving 2 men and 2 women, or 3 of each. That’s not how real life works either.
It’s not that bad for same-sex relationships - most relationships are hetero but some fairly rare ones are same-sex and that’s fine with me. Though even that could be more interesting if there was a culture or two (there’s 10 different cultures or “races” in ESO) were more homosexual-friendly and some less, but I guess that’s harder to do without pissing people off.
Looks like the guy from Prototype 2 is black. Never played it but played the original (where he was white; in P2 you’re sent to kill the main character from P1).
It’s less about wanting to grow up and be Mr. Prototype and more about a media situation where your examples of extraordinary people are all white dudes with beard stubble and what message that sends over time.
“Build your own” or characterless games should obviously just be excluded from this discussion, and don’t count one way or the other. Unless there’s something obviously weird about them where, for example, you have a “build your own” game but can’t change your character’s gender or something.
And even in those games that have a slate of characters to choose from, there still often seems to be a bias. For instance, Heroes of the Storm has over a dozen different human characters (plus many more nonhumans). IIRC, the current count is at 15 humans (counting the Lost Vikings as just one), plus at least two former-humans who have skins representing them as human. Out of those, only one is black. Even the elves in that game have diversity (three of one ethnicity, two of another), so why not the humans?
Just saw this very interesting video from the show ‘Adam Ruins Everything’.
Thought it might be relevant:
What the video points out is that not appealing to female fans, (through being in the 'boys' section of toy stores, or not having many female developers, or marketing), the video game industry is really alienating potential customers... which is changing.