Excellent post ab.aterno. HIt it on the head. If you're a hetero white male, it's probably best not to speak for a minority, as though you've experience what they've experienced.
This is not about shoving diverse characters into a story, this is about creating stories specifically about them. Video games (often, rightfully) get a lot of shit for having terrible/repetitive narratives and characters (and dont retort by saying it's all about the gameplay, that is a bullshit reductionist argument that completely ignores the communities that surround character/story enthusiasm), by tapping into the experiences and lives of diverse people, you enable new stories to be told and out of that new game experiences.
Yes video games are a new medium, which is why it's unfortunate that video game creation isn't prone to the same intellectual rigor that film is, or literature, or music. If video games want to be considered art, and considered beyond the fantasies of dudebros in their basement, then treating them as more than a fun past time that has no relation to the culture and the outside world isn't helping this process. Games are an incredibly important medium and the attitudes of those that make them, will be reflected in those that consume them, and have larger ramifications for society at large. Diversity is one of the key ways video games can get themselves out of their intellectual black hole. And less shitty games "journalism".
Thank you for assuming I'm hetero, which I am, but I'm a minority, and I speak from collective experience of 19 years of gaming and personal experiences with being disenfranchised as a minority, which if I was to go into derails this thread. So please don't ever do that again and speak so presumptuously for me. I don't need you to speak for me and I'm courteous enough not to speak for you, so don't. It's "probably" disrespectful.
I'm sure Shigeru Miyamoto was doing rigorous academic research when he made his protagonist for his Dokey Kong arcade cabinet a Hetero Italian fat plumber, surely not because he was out of ideas and his landlord in Nintendo of America, a guy by the name of Mario, happened to be there and give him a name and identity to use.
But that's not what you want to hear.
You want to hear about developers like Naughty Dog or Ubisoft having a moral imperative to create diversity in their IPs, right?
The Last of Us didn't win GOTY or sell well because Joel was white or Ellie was white, it won because of the large scale advertising effort that can rival FF7 with mainstream reach, on top of a solid third person cover system and a very relatable story of loss and redemption that is post-apocalyptic fare very similar to The Road, along with very strong performances by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson that rivals dramatic films.
You know when it was very clear to me that the developers were bigots? In the Far Cry series and the Uncharted series with respect to the waves of minority enemies who were only there as cannon fodder or the dialogue that paints Far Cry's protagonist as the great White hope and anyone with different color an enemy. Please don't tell me when I don't realize when diversity is treated poorly. I notice it very clearly. Bioshock Infinite hit me over the head with its racial themes. I'm aware of it and I look for it.
I'm going to sound like a broken record and I'm only going to echo the sentiment I know a lot of Gaffers echo before being called racist, but gameplay, and I mean gameplay that stands out in a crowded, heavily over saturated market, is what sells games. That and great narrative and prose. Otherwise, that game, no matter how diverse the characters are or how diverse the world can be, will not be noticed and will not sell, and when it doesn't sell, publishers take notice and won't fund any more efforts for diversity in gaming as it should be defined by you.
When you know the large history of games that released(which is libraries of games as far back as Pong) and games that sold well and games that didn't sell well, one universal agreement is that those games were marketed very well and had innovation in gameplay.
It's not that developers don't try to include more diversity either, it's that they do and when it's not noticed, it makes it seem like a societal problem and not a matter of timing, or budget, or vision, or anything that a developer says, or even the ill will of a publisher.
Fortunately, there are games that are universally accepted as artistic works(like Shadow of the Colossus or ICO or Journey or Braid or FEZ), so I thank those games for being recognized as artistic works.
I will not comment on the state of games journalism. It can run from terrible and juvenile to flat out manipulative.
