White men over-represented in games News

well, to be fair, i dont think gears of war would have worked as well if marcus fenix had been an 82 year old black woman

I hope these 'researchers' werent grant funded. Fucking waste of a good research grant if they were.

...The study also found that Elves were over-represented by 400 per cent.

@anomagnus: On the contrary, it would have been improved

may cause "identity-based problems" for the people playing them

Now that is one sentence so full of idiocy its difficult to know where to start. Presumably they think you might forget what ethic group you belong too if you don't see it represented enough in game.

I don't know, I killed a few brown folks in COD4... and a few black folks in RE5...

i killed everyone in GTA IV.

i'm equal opportunities

This survey is under-representing women by 100%.

Oh good, someone whining about racism. Of the top selling 25 games ever, 21 have human characters, of which:

9 are predefined as white.
1 is unknown.
6 are predefined as Japanese.
1 is predefined as black.
4 have custom characters.

So of those 25, less than 40% have white main characters, as do less than 50% of all the games with people in them. Given that 80% of the US and Canada and over 90% of people in Europe are white, I fail to see the logic here. Also, of the 9 games with white lead characters, 4 of them have black prominent characters.

/is bored at work.

"and that they may cause "identity-based problems" for the people playing them."

It's true I had this problem years ago, began to believe I was a Italian plumber...good money though. Not as bad as a friend who played too much Tetris and had real difficulty fitting in.

Sorry...

/ gets coat

The results of this 'research' will contrast with the Aion's population where majority of population are 10 year-old green/blue girls.

"i dont think gears of war would have worked as well if marcus fenix had been an 82 year old black woman "

Or a toddler.

Hmm, Gears of War with all the main characters replaced by two year olds...

"Get back in your hole bitch" /puts dummy back in mouth

The focus of the study is completely wrong.

Instead, they should be asking why nearly every black man in a video game is a pure G/50 cent stereotype.

And when they put black people in games everybody is bitching about racism (Resident Evil 5 anyone?)...

Bad09 = Made of Pure Win

Tis true, I sprouted a third leg, turned green and grew wings after playing Spore.

why does everything have to be so politcally correct these days?

Why are 'white adult males' granted no distinct ethnicities of their own? There appear to be African-Americans and Hispanic-Latinos and Asians and such, and everyone else - from Jersey to Jerusalem - is 'white male'. I think the authors of this report are racialists.

@ Ornithophobe - awesome: "Get back in your hole bitch" has a whole new horrific meaning when the characters are replaced by babies. :)

@bad09

http://www.instantrimshot.com/

African-Americans, Irish-Americans etc etc are all... well, invented by a country with heritage issues.

Unlike me, who's Anglo-Saxon-English (probably)...or London-Kennington-Trash .....depends on my mood, who I'm talking to at the time etc etc.

LocoRoco disagrees with this article...

"White men over-represented in games - Not enough Diversity, says study. "

Sounds to me like someone's still unhappy with the way the Britains Got Talent finale went...

Less gruff bald white guys with guns in games please

and stop putting scars over people's eyes, it looks silly

the last time i had an 'identity based problem' was when i played call of juarez the other month. i wished i was a member of techland so i could go up to the person that allowed all the tearing in the game and stab him/her in the face.

Hah! My Fallout characters are a Chinese bisexual woman and a black bisexual woman! So BAM go your figures! And my Saint's Row 2 character is a goth chick! There aren't enough of those in games, but I bet they weren't in your study! And there aren't enough sexy redheads either! Yes, there's a definite deficiency of the sort of girls I fancy in games today!

I suppose they won't be happy until we get a quarter-African quarter-Inuit quarter-Mongolian quarter-Cape Malay pregnant single parent transsexual lesbian with cancer and a learning disability in a wheelchair as a hero.

Oh please. Give us a break. Most games let you bloody customise your character anyway.

White men, eh?
/tuts

Hideously white. Hideously masculine. Or something.

This whole thing has been taken too far, it clearly smacks of people who have too much time on their hands spending grant money on beer and then deciding that they needed something to write about show that they didn't piss that grant up the wall. Games aren't the real world, it's alternate reality, hyper-reality or complete insanity so as such shouldn't have to follow real world rules based on population and ethnic distribution. Are we going to have to get to the stage we have to randomly shoehorn in ethnic minorities just to fill a quota, to make up numbers?
@glaeken: agreed - I'm black but i now speak in jive and now have a big gun for an arm from playing too much FF7 in my youth.
@zomonaic: i'm bored too...

I feel my family is not diverse enough and so have followed in the footsteps of hollywood and adopted an orphan from a different country.

Aidan Quin, Accountant, 46 will be arriving in the post tomorrow apparently. Hopefully we will be spared when the diversity police come knocking on the door.

@metalangel: if the wheelchair can't turn into a mech, then i want no part of it.

I would love Rockstar to make a GTA concerning a black lesbian dwarf pensioner.

GTA3 - Unspecified generic white guy
GTA Vice City - Italian guy
GTA San Andreas - Black guy
GTA 4 - Slavic guy
GTA4 The Lost and Damned - Jewish guy
GTA4 The Ballad of Gay Tony - Hispanic guy

It looks to me like Rockstar are being as diverse as this report is after. Probably about time they featured a female protagonist, though.

Yeah sure, compare the global game industry to purely the demographics of the USA, and then say that the representation of those games are skewed, instead of the scientist's paradigm.

Oh wait, I just noticed it was published in a cultural studies journal. /ignore.

The Prince of Persia has an American accent now. The Persians are gonna be pissed if they ever find out.

I was seriously under-represented in this article. Not a single sentence in it is about me. That's, like, so unfair...

There is an argument buried in this somewhere, but the report itself didn't communicate it very well, and it probably was never enough of an issue in the first place to be worth writing a report on. Quite often you wouldn't want to fully identify with the main character anyway.

Another poster was right to mention rap and hip-hop music. Look at the stereotypes presented in that before you come anywhere near games.

In other news, Aliens are also over-represented in games.

There is an argument buried in this somewhere, but the report itself didn't communicate it very well, and it probably was never enough of an issue in the first place to be worth writing a report on. Quite often you wouldn't want to fully identify with the main character anyway.

I read the paper and they do indeed have a point, while I maintain that it's ridiculous to expect a fair representation of American demographics from game developers all over the world, I'm not sure if that's what they're saying in the article. They seem to simply state that this is the case, and it may have an effect on how people of different ethnicities perceive themselves. If the hero is always a brave white male youngster, after a while you're bound to see white young males as being of a higher social status.

However, they're driving the point home with the underrepresentation of latinos, and the fact that more latino kids than white kids play videogames. This still seems weird to me, latinos aren't that different from white people, in fact, for most black haired avatars, I would be hard-pressed to notice the difference even if it was intentional. I reckon a latino kid would easily identify with a white avatar. In fact, the only instances I remember of clearly latino game characters, were because of very thick stereotyping. Hardly something you would want.

Thing is the issue of latino representation in videogames is a specifically American issue (as its not something that Europeans are particularly aware of, we have more than a fair share of peoples and subject matter we're failing to address) and is something for all forms of American popular culture to resolve, as its out of step with the huge changes taking place in American society.

I don't like the accusatory undertone of that report, which seems to lay the 'blame' for the trend on young, white, male games developers being 'racist'. Although I'd like nothing more than to see these developers broaden their horizons and serve us up some interesting multicultural protagonists (to improve the variety and interest of games, as much as anything else), surely the best way to try and 'improve' the trend would be for hispanic or black communities to encourage their youths to pursue careers as videogame developers?

Basically the way to go is to allow the player to define their character's look. I think it's really as simple as that. Given the player is the stories only real focus, it is far more immersive to have a hand in defining what your hero looks like. If games companies were more creative they could have games where (if your main hero starts as a down and out vagrant) you could even create a tramp main character that looked like you etc. etc. Depending on the story, the photo fit character creation can force the player to include traits necessary for the character to fit into the story.

.....sorry I'm working on just such a system so I get quite passionate about such things.

Yeah, there's too many white stereotypes in games, what would really help is balancing it out with more black stereotypes for shizzle. Then I think our african american freinds would feel much happier word

More ugly women are needed in games too.

I enjoy cleansing the worlds I play in.

what a load of bullshit,

the moment a gaem is made with millions of black people, they claim it's racist (Reseident Evil 5)

Personally I don't take much notice of skin colour in games. It almost seems like people are desperately trying to cover up their own fear that they might actually be a little racist to even need to make a point of this. I can only imagine how annoyed fat people must feel that they're not represented in games. Or really ugly people for that matter.

As has been stated previously, the easy answer is to allow us to customise the size, shape, face, colour, sex of the main character and these sad, waste of time individuals can shut the f**k up and leave us all alone.

I totally agree.

I've always dreamt of going to anime cosplay events as Link, thats the game character I played the most and grew up with thanks to OoT and MM and Link's Awakening and Oracle of Seasons. I can't do that cause he's white and I'm black and the only other black character is the villain the 1 person I was sceared of and hated the most while playing Zeldas as a kid.

I think other ethicities are under represented in games, I wouldn't wanna see developers insert random ethnic groups just to please numbers and statistics but a little considiration of using other ethnicities when that would MAKE SENCE and only if it MAKES SENCE in game x would be nice.

Weirdly, I've just finished Fable 2.

My character was white, all of many many wives were white, 99.9% of the NPC's were white and yet my first child in the game was as black as the stain on my soul.

What is the world coming to when even your virtual other half's are cheating on you?

I've always dreamt of going to anime cosplay events as Link, thats the game character I played the most and grew up with thanks to OoT and MM and Link's Awakening and Oracle of Seasons.

Wait a minute, so you liked playing with a whit..ish avatar? Even though you're black? This is totally impossible, you can not identify with Link, therefore, you are a wasted opportunity for game publishers trying to sell games.

Developers should just take a leaf out of Capcom's book and homogenize every single game.

Game set in Africa? 'Mo white folk!

why dont they say what they mean: black men under-represented. not white men over-represented.

fucking hate politically correct twats.