-Drifter- said:
As you probably know, the above describes just about every human video-game protagonist from every game ever made ever. Whenever this gets brought up, you always hear the same excuses: most gamers and game-designers are white men, so of course most protagonists are going to reflect that, it's a non-issue, blah blah blah... you get the picture. Still, the fact remains that there's a pretty staggering lack of diversity in skin colour, or even hair colour among gaming's heroes. Hell, I can't remember the last time I played a game with a lead character who was blond, or red-headed for that matter (well, okay, there was Ellen from Folklore, but you only played her for half the game.)
So, in the interest of exploring the little variety there is to be found in the AAA gaming market, how many games have you played with a non-white and/or non-brown haired human protagonist?
PS: Try to stick to real hair colours. Characters with pink or blue hair, for example, do not count.
This issue recurs constantly. It's really a non-issue though, diversity for the sake of diversity is bad, and well you mentioned some of the common arguements, and moat importantly there are more characters than you think that don't fit that mould.
For starters you can bring up all the games with female characters as protaganists, which can lead to other discussions about breast size and such (which can also be debunked as a non-issue), but sticking with the subject that pretty much wrecks a lot of what you've got right there.
Then you can start looking at various Japanese games, where most of the protaganists are Japanese. The Shin Megami Tensei games, etc... heck in "Final Fantasy" off the top of my head I can't remember a white guy with brown hair being the protaganist except for Zidane, they seem to have a thing for blonde guys (Tidus, Cloud).
Then of course we have Conan (black hair), Duke Nuken (Brown Hair), and others.
If we get into fighting games, the characters are quite diverse. The leading men of fighting are arguably Ryu (Player 1) and Ken (Player 2) from the Street Fighter series, and one is a Japoanese guy with black hair, and the other one is a blonde haired American.
It's actually pretty easy, especially given how much the Japanese used to dominate game design. To really go on a diversity rant you really need to find a way to narrow it down, while disguising it more. Say, loudly asking where all the black video game characters are, which isn't all that difficult to deal with (as has been shown on these forums), hispanics are a little trickier actually.
In the end it's kind of "There is a lack of non-white, non-asian, video game characters that are not based on real people, or popular franchises or IP tie in games"... which just doesn't have the same ring because it makes a joke of itself through it's own qualifiers. The point being that when you start bringing in sports titles UFC, FIFA, NFL, etc... in paticular, which also happen to be one of the highest selling types of video games out there (if not still the highest) it becomes impossible to make an arguement. Pretty much if a country has a pro-soccor team it's probably been better represented (numerically) in video games than any fantasy character.
20 years ago it was easier to make a diversity rant into a serious conversation, but as the "problem" has been self-correcting for a while due to simple interia and things moving on, there really isn't much to complain about.
To be honest with you despite "self aware" discussion starters, when you get down to it there really aren't that many generic brown haired white guys overall. It's just that we happen to be at a time when there are a lot of popular franchises with a character fitting that description all at once filling out popular discussion. To be honest with you the brown hair is also probably a reality of the graphics engines, if you've played around with much character customization in some of these engines (which are recycled for a lot of games) you'll notice that getting blonde or black hair that looks good can be tricky due to the tendency for the game to turn the blonde odd colors as you move around, or black to wash out gradually as it comes into contact with the game. Indeed you might remember that some games have even locked out extreme shades of black/blonde/etc... so you really can't create them for that reason, and the brown shades typically wind up being the most natural looking. A point a lot of people don't consider... and if you've ever tried to make a blonde character in some games and spent hours trying to get it to look right from character generation to the actual game (perhaps re-rolling dozens of times) you probably see the problem. Getting a decent redhead can be even worse. The engine is the engine, if it's a pain for you, chances are it's a pain for the devs, and they don't want the hair of the main character model to do wierd things as they develop the game.
I'll also say that another thing I never really noticed before someone pointed it out is that while there are exceptions, you'll notice that when you see black characters show up most of them tend to be bald or have their hair in strips (mohawks, corn rows, etc...) or dreads. The reason why is supposedly because texturing typically black hair in a more normal sense can be difficult to do. Not really relevent to anything, but once someone mentioned that to me, I started to kind of notice it (with the exceptions standing out more) and I suspect that while blacks are actually pretty well represented, this might have something to do with there not being even more. Given that even with today's technology it's hard to come up with hair styles that don't look like they were carved out of wood or rubber, it's easy to see why developers have fallen into certain patterns.
