I want to make my real point first, before I respond to some stuff other people said. Did we need to fund a study to make this apparent? I mean, this is one of those things where science proves what was common sense. I could've observed this, and probably for a lot less money than those guys got paid (like, free!).
The sad bit for me is that we've pretty much ignored that videogames are overly white. That we need a study to say this (although, there's been an article on the Escapist on this previously) in order to draw attention to it is bullshit. But looking over the comments, I found pretty much general apathy to this. The trouble, to me, is not so much that videogames have too many white protagonists, but they go out of their way to be white. All those war games where we endlessly storm the beaches at Normandy (which always seems to take like two minutes, for an invasion that took nearly the whole day to get off the beaches) totally ignore the fact there were black units operating out there. And
GTAIV features an Eastern European immigrant? In 2008? You know how many of our immigrants (legal and illegal) are Eastern Europeans? Nearly nothing. There's only one way to sell a black protagonist to white consumers: make him a gangsta because white boys in the 'burbs already think that's how blacks are anyways. Everyone else is just a side character.
ShredHead said:
Um, gotta say.
Who cares?
The reasons they're mainly white males is because that's the most simple character to make, and can't really be called offensive.
Besides, a lot of very popular games are made by white males, and they probably don't want to make a game about an elderly black woman just to please certain minorities.
Wait, what? How is that first point true? Are Caucasian features easier to code, or something? Is white skin easier to model? I don't understand how you made that observation. That doesn't seem logical to me at all. Maybe it's the most simple character to make if the programmer is white, because it's the first character to occur. The second point makes slightly more sense, but the reality is that videogame developers don't call the shots, unless they happen to also be publishers. Publishers would love new markets. The key here is the "underserved" bit at the end.
Booze Zombie said:
You know what's even better than diversity? Not giving a shit about what colour someone is.
Colorblind is not an appropriate response. In America we're somewhat more cognizant to the fact that overlooking is pretty harmful in itself (although, sometime when people grow up in an all white neighborhood miles away from the nearest black person, they seem to think the problem's solved, because they don't deal with it). As long as media implies that "the norm" is white, then the people who do discriminate, who do give a shit what color someone is, will continue to feel motivated to keep minority populations down. Because after all, change is bad. We wouldn't want the status quo to change, now would we? What if black becomes beautiful? The the black ram will tup the white ewe, to quote Shakespeare. And that's a bad deal for Whitey McDiscriminatory. Sure, McDis is an awful person, and the majority of (white) people don't support his policy of telling non-whites to shove it, as long as they don't speak out because they're busy ignoring our differences, he can say whatever he want and be relatively unassailable, because the only people who would complain would be non-whites, and they would complain, wouldn't they?
