Why are there still so many white men in video games

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If they put women in those roles---women who would be just as appealing to the same target demographic---we'd still have this story, only then it would be about the objectification of women.

You're judging their actions in a vacuum instead of considering them in light of their motivation.
 
No. I would call them sexist if they had an increasingly non-female audience, yet they still only catered to women.

What you're arguing is basically that ten developers could be doing the exact same thing, and half of them could be called sexist based on who buys their games. I don't think that's how sexism works.
 
I see soooooooooooo many white men at the supermarket, and out to the mall and when I'm walking around in the park and stuff. Something should really be done about us.
I kid I kid... There's definitely a tendency for the protagonists to be white males. Does the blame lie with developers for making it that way, or with us for (presumably) tending to purchase more games if the hero character is a white dude (which I'm assuming, is why the devs keep making the heroes white, cause they assume people will not be able to relate to other nationalities or ethnic backgrounds.

Blah I don't know. I'd like to think I don't care what color the hero is. I guess research says we all do, tho.
 
It is true. Main character is usually a brown haired white guy. Where are the asian guys?!?

in asian countries?

This is going to sound racist (and to be honest, it kind of is)...

I'm asian but I prefer white male protagonists in games.

(That's not even the racist part. Here's the racist part):

Because to me, white guys in games are plain. They're just...there. A face. Brownish hair or something. When I'm given a plain slate like that, I can just apply my own imagination and interpretation to the character as I play.

On the other hand, if the character had defined cultural/racial features, I'm stuck playing an asian guy. I'm stuck playing a black guy. Or a hispanic guy. If he's white? I make him whatever I want him to be. There are so many of them in games that their race has loss any real meaning.

You know that blank silhouette on your phone's contact list if you don't add a custom photo? That's more/less what I think of when I see a video game with a white male lead...[insert personality here].

Some games make sense having a particular race. Sleeping Dogs has you playing a Chinese guy. Well your character is an undercover cop in HONG KONG, so yeah that makes sense. But in vast majority of games I simply don't need to be reminded of my character's race because they typically do a stereotypical and borderline offensive portrayal of it anyways. However, white males are typically portrayed as just some dude.

I love this post on so many levels.
 
Games take a long time to make and it seems like the community has only recently(past 2-3 years) become very vocal about wanting more diversity. I think change is coming and will really start to show in the next year or two.

To be fair, the community has to grow up as much or more than the developers. Right now it is seen as a risk to have a non white male lead because so much of the gaming community would react in a shitty negative way.

I think it would be very interesting to see the average video game focus group. I think that may be most direct answer to the topic at hand.
 
Speaking from the perspective of a person who I find it insanely difficult to not only relate to the typical male lead in a video game but it's also difficult to even find them interesting. This doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with these characters being white men but the audience these characters apparently cater to. All these characters end up for the most part being super duper macho, gruff, hardened, and possibly sociopathic or like the dozens of characters Seth Rogen portrays in movies who all spew out snarky one liners and memes. To me these character archetypes are uninteresting and I can't relate to them at all. I honestly find myself indentifying more with female main characters as a man. I think what I'm trying to say is the current status quo for game characters is becoming homogenized and stale. It won't hurt us if the industry tried to come up with a more diverse stable of characters from an entertainment stand point.
 
Even if the casual focused video game market were pretty balanced when it comes to diversity in protagonist, what does that have to do with the hardcore video game market and why shouldn't there be a more diverse palette of characters in hardcore video games anyway?

Personally I don't believe in such a thing as a "hardcore video game." But in any event,
the above might demonstrate that in market segments that have significant female interest there are options available to play as a female. The lack of female avatars in some segments may be a result of a lack of female interest in those types of games.
 
I see soooooooooooo many white men at the supermarket, and out to the mall and when I'm walking around in the park and stuff. Something should really be done about us.

Thanks for your cynical post and still contributing to this topic as a cautionary tale.
 
Yes.

On IGN, even on ye olde GAF, there was an embarrassing amount of people who could relate just fine to master criminal action heroes like Claude or Tommy Vercetti, but a "gangsta thug" teenager in the 1990s was just too offputting and unrelatable.

I scanned some old SA threads to find some juicy quotes and found a whole page of audiophiles complaining about the games audio compression. GAF never changes.
 
Because it's easier and safer to cater to your main audience.
But there are plenty of women and people of colour who play video games.

Probably just as many as white men. Even though most games only advertise to white men. And I'm sure more women and people of colour would be interested in them if they weren't treated so much as a club for white men.
 
I don't think there's any malice in it or anything, that's just the lowest common denominator I guess. Most of their customers are male, most will be white as they sell in the west and around 90% will be straight. It's business sense to try to alienate as few people as possible. It's nice to be able to choose between different characters, but for many narrative driven games I doubt it's easy to implement.
 
I actually like making my characters asian when it comes to character creator but a huge problem is that wrpgs sucks major balls at decent faces. When there isn't an obvious asian equivalent I often just make Nathan Drake, that's what I did for Dragon Age (I also make him choose the snarkiest douchebag responses). Though luckily the modding communities work over time to make decent facial modifiers.

Also a big pet peeve of mine is that wrpgs really lack good body sliders. Playing Dragon's Dogma and PSO2, you can make your body type anything. I know that a lot of Korean MMOs are really taking character creators to the next level. Especially Black Desert. After watching videos of Blade and Soul and Black Desert, those Koreans definitely like their ass sliders.
 
Yes.

On IGN, even on ye olde GAF, there was an embarrassing amount of people who could relate just fine to master criminal action heroes like Claude or Tommy Vercetti, but a "gangsta thug" teenager in the 1990s was just too offputting and unrelatable.
This is ironic in another way, namely that blacks are sometimes grossly stereotyped as being more likely to commit crimes, and yet when a game all about committing crimes got its first black protag, some people couldn't stand it

EDIT: Actually, now that I think of it, were some people complaining about a black protag in GTA because they worried it made blacks look bad? Or was it mainly just people wanting to maintain a white male power fantasy?
 
But there are plenty of women and people of colour who play video games.

Probably just as many as white men.
Needs citation.

I'm not saying I agree with the practice, I'm saying that's the reason. I'd actually prefer more diversity, as I have no trouble playing characters of any sex/race. But such is the world we live in: there is a correlation (does not imply causation, of course) between sales and cis white male protagonists, and so games are made to chase that success.
 
Because the audience doesn't solely consist of white men.

Also to the OP: "market research".

But the majority of the audience consists of white men or women, right? So what's wrong with that?

IMO it'd be racist to put any other race just to fit a quota, that's a lot worse in my eyes.
 
To the original post... I was more thinking of the gamers themselves; every single E3 feed that I watched was led/narrated by pasty white hipsters with thick rimmed glasses and plaid shirts. I guess character designers are just designing to their audience's demographic.

Incidentally, I'm a pasty white guy myself (although I dress more like Richard Stallman or Michael Moore than Michael Cera).
 
I'm all for more ethnic/female protagonists, don't get me wrong, but I also want to play devils advocate to a lot of this narrative.

I'd kinda like to see what the demographics for gamers excluding mobile look like.

But there are plenty of women and people of colour who play video games.

Probably just as many as white men. Even though most games only advertise to white men. And I'm sure more women and people of colour would be interested in them if they weren't treated so much as a club for white men.

I don't think it's about who plays games so much as who is making the games.

When writers aren't constructing a story that requires their character to be a certain way for story purposes, I think they tend to write what they know. It doesn't have to be that way, but I don't think it's thought out to be exclusionary. Just sort of a base.

I think this applies just as easily to novels, TV and movies btw. It's hardly exclusive to gaming.
 
Yes but they aren't necessarily interested in the same kinds of games. IE they play Candy Crush or Bejeweled or whatever.

But they seem to play a lot of Nintendo games in the Wii days and even before (and a lot of female gamers own a Wii U and/or a 3DS), if that article I read on here was right. Don't remember which thread it was though.
 
Like we have been saying for a while since social threads started to pop up consistently since 2014 (I think);

Ron Rosenberg

And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape her.

"You start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character."

Jean-Max Morris

"We had some [publishers] that said, 'Well, we don't want to publish it because that's not going to succeed. You can't have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that."

Lucian Soulban

"What do you think the odds are that we’ll get a mid-30s stubbly-bearded brown-haired white guy with a raspy voice who is gay as a lead character in a AAA title?" Richard Dansky, the company's "Central Clancy Writer" (yes, that's a thing) asked Lucien Soulban, an openly gay man who's worked on blockbuster shooter franchises like Far Cry and Rainbow Six.

"Not for a while, I suspect, because of fears that it'll impact sales," Soulban responded

Rockstar

The concept of being masculine was so key to this story" Houser said simply"

Ubisoft

"It's double the animations, double the voices, all that stuff, double the visual assets (especially because we have customizable assassins)" - So one lead female character will require doubled the work whereas including 4 male lead characters is double less

"Not too long ago...focus and production" (regarding why they did not include the original plan of including a female lead character - That has already been answered. If you wanted to include one female lead character than remove one Ass.

"A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation".

Ubisoft's Bruno St. Andre estimated that a female assassin would've necessitated more than "8,000 new animations recreated on a new skeletal structure"

The team didn't have a "female reader for the character at its disposal, nor did it have "all the animations in place." - That is fascinating because, (We were) "inches away from allowing players to choose between a man or woman as a co-op buddy in the upcoming shooter's multiplayer" - And I always wanted a Holywood Star female voice in an Ass Game.

And then,

They’re one drop in the ocean, they’re one part of it. If we’re creating all these different suits that can interchange, that’s a lot. It’s not only that, but it’s nothing to do with production

I am not even going to collect more quotes regarding game-situations like with The Last of Us and so on and so forth.

Whether it is cost-driven or narrative-driven it is time I think to start realizing that there is an issue. And the real issue is this - That developers creativity is limited by either their higher-ups or publishers. If you really think that always men want to write about men and always men want to play men you are seriously delusional to put it politely.

But the point is that every time the question comes about why they are excluding women lead characters in single player or in multiplayer there is always going to an answer pointing that women are a burden, from cost to story, to sales. The hard reality of things is that if this was not true, we would not be glorifying The Last of Us like there is no tomorrow because we would been treating it as another gem in this vast majority of story-quality released titles.

There is still not enough room for women in video games.
 
Why are there so many white leads in movies?
Because most rich countries have a white majority.

And Hollywood being a white culture has been established for a very long time. And because more "globalist" corporations, and some people like to call them, are in a kind of white feedback loop. Where they tend to on purpose promote white men from white cultures the most.

They promote and advertise white men the most because they're white men in a white industry, including to cultures where people of colour are the majority. And because they spend all that time advertising and promoting and making white culture movies starring white men, those movies sell the best. And because those movies sell the best, they get the most promotion.

So it becomes a self-promoting feedback loop with the richest multinational corporations in the world doing it.
 
Anita Sarkeesian really needs to watch this fucking video and then stfu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpJGkG1g-Lk

A Maddox video to make your argument? How are females en masse supposed to become interested in games when they can't relate to any of the characters they see? And when the community constantly flings insults at them simply for having a hobby that isn't traditional.

As for the magazine examples in that video? Men have alternatives to Cosmopolitan and Glamour. Women don't have much available as alternatives to male main characters. Handpicking a couple of examples doesn't change that, either.
 
Who cares really? I don't care what color or sex my lead is, as long as there is good gameplay and a solid story. RPG's are a different story.......
 
Wouldn't make my games any better, nor do I feel like there is something missing from them.

I am not against any changes either, to be honest I don't care either way.


As for the reason why, might have something to do with the fact that in the west it's an industry built predominantly by white men, companies started by them and I'm sure they still represent the majority of the workforce.
 
180 million white people in America, that's why.

You cater to the dominant group.

And the dominant group doesn't want women or black leads across the spectrum.

You'd think after the success of San Andreas we'd have copycats. But 'lol...nope.' That game came out in what, 2004? Not a black lead since, in my memory.
 
There's quite a lot of woman mangaka that give a lot of contribution to the manga industry.
Rumiko Takahashi
Hiromu Arakawa.
Kaoru Mori

to name a few

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To answer OP title: Because there are more white people working in video games and the facts that white male still one of the most dominant purchaser of mainstream videogame. At least that's what i think. Even Japanese studio usually make rhe main character a white male when making video games located in North America and targeting western market.

Yeah I think it's this. It's sort of like how in some circles it's a big deal if there is a white guy who is a rapper. There's nothing wrong with that (the white rapper), but certain things just somehow find a category they fit into whether it was intentional or not, and sometimes it's just a result of said element being created by the people of that category.

Of course many people of different genders, beliefs, and races play these games; that's definitely a given. I suppose if one where to do an actual test and find out the majority race, gender, etc of the people who not only play, but also make the games, it might end up being a little more telling.

On the Japanese side of things, it's a little tricky. I personally see the characters in most Japanese games as looking Japanese, maybe not completely in their physical features, but definitely in regards to hair, clothes, mannerisms, and the like. Take Vanille from FFXIII (I know, I know, we hate the game.) Her mannerisms and actions would look kind of..I dunno...odd if you saw your average non Asian girl doing them? But that type of body language certainly isn't out of place in Japan and a lot of us know or recognize that.
I think if you look at Japanese cosplayers, the majority of the time they have no trouble looking like the characters they are trying to portray.

I feel this is because the base design of said character is very Japanese in it's own right. There are even plenty of Youtube videos out there on the techniques an Asian woman might use to give her eyes a more rounded look. No, not rounded in a western sense (well I've seen some disturbing cases..but let's not go into that) but just enough that it just completes that "look" that they are going for that, if anything, is still very Japanese.

Using Final Fantasy again, just take a look at Barrett and Sazh. They are obviously black, but I have to say, one of them is a super stereotype (Barrett), and the other is much better in that regard, but still has a lot of those Japanese style mannerisms as well as a hint of stereotype (his afro hair, his bit of a dancing "jive" in a battle.) Where does fault lie then? White people did not make that game, people in Japan who only know what they know made it. Neither of them act like any of my black friends, they are like caricatures. Sort of like when you look at the portrayal of Asians in older media...well heck...some of that still lingers a bit today. The comedic stupid accent, the attire....the stereotype is overall weaker, but you still see it, and I think that is simply because of it being a product of people who are not the race that is being portrayed. Other examples in the reverse (on the Japanese side of things) would be characters like Mr. Popo from Dragonball and Oil Man from Mega Man Powered Up.

For me I just don't pay too much attention to it, I understand that certain things are a product of their environment and that shapes what they are, just like people can be. Is that true across the board? Of course not! Plenty of people grow up in broken homes or bad parts of town and become successful in life just as there are many privileged individuals that end up being batshit crazy and either die or end up in jail. Just recently that one dude who committed that shooting.....he was living the life of a child of a director in Hollywood. He committed his crime in his BMW...and I think he was either a high school kid or not that far past it. We can assume he came from a pretty cushy lifestyle and just look at him...killing people because I guess he was mad that girls wouldn't pay attention to him. Ridiculous.

Anyway, I think the change comes when people are more proactive about getting involved. I can see the effort in calling light to it or something of that nature, but the real change is when the people who want it, get involved and make those changes and contribute rather than hoping or waiting for others to do it first. If we want more women portrayed in games, more people of different races, then I say we need more women, and people of those races in the industry making those kinds of things. On one side those things will then exist, and on the other, we would have more reasonable portrayals than somebody else's stereotypical approximation.
 
Anita Sarkeesian really needs to watch this fucking video and then stfu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpJGkG1g-Lk
I think this video makes some interesting points. I say this assuming it's true that female content creators are a rarity in the industry, which I'd imagine they are. I like his Cosmopolitan analogy: Men don't expect the cover of Cosmopolitan to cater to them with guns and cars, because Cosmopolitan is made by women, who make a product they know to make — something that appeals to women. Women can't expect men to be women; men are men and make things they understand as men. If women want more videogames that appeal to them, then more women need to make videogames.

At which point the question becomes: Are women held back from creative roles in this industry? Or are there really just not enough women who want to work in this industry?
 
You forgot Tomb raider as well

Edit: The list of games where you can play as a female

Tomb Raider
Splatoon
Hyrule Warriors
Infamous First Light
Destiny
Mirrors Edge
Bayonetta 1 & 2
Hatsune Miku

Am I missing something?

WET
Heavenly Sword
Birth By Sleep
3rd Birthday
Metroid
Perfect Dark
Blood Rayne

We should continue this list. I feel I am forgetting some.
 
I got the impression the overall landscape of video game characters was slowly growing more and more varied already. What, you want to go try and enforce a true even split for every single race/gender combination? That'd be just as stupid.
Things are changing, but it ain't gonna happen in a year or two. Give it some time already!
"Calling it out" every chance you get won't speed the process up, it just annoys people to hear the same moaning every time.

I'm completely behind the core thought here but going "I want it NOW, NOW, NOW!!!" is not the way to go.
 
I got the impression the overall landscape of video game characters was slowly growing more and more varied already. What, you want to go try and enforce a true even split for every single race/gender combination? That'd be just as stupid.
Things are changing, but it ain't gonna happen in a year or two. Give it some time already!
"Calling it out" every chance you get won't speed the process up, it just annoys people to hear the same moaning every time.

I disagree, it reinforces the message and increases the chance that it'll reach someone in a position of authority who might not have thought about it before. You can't just sit back and hope things improve because someone claims there's a general trend toward things getting better.
 
"Because men do it you should do it"

I am not even going to fucking break down why his argument is so stupid.

"Black men can only write about black history"
"White men can only write about white people"
"Women only understand women"
"Men only understand men"


Those last two lines confirm you have not watched the video in its entirety.
 
"Because men do it you should do it"

I am not even going to fucking break down why his argument is so stupid.

"Black men can only write about black history"
"White men can only write about white people"
"Women only understand women"
"Men only understand men"
I'm not sure that's the correct way to characterize the argument. Surely you'd agree that if more women were in creative roles in the industry, we'd see more games with which they could identify?

Unless publishers are stopping such creative decisions outright, in which the situation becomes another problem entirely.
 
I got the impression the overall landscape of video game characters was slowly growing more and more varied already. What, you want to go try and enforce a true even split for every single race/gender combination? That'd be just as stupid.
Things are changing, but it ain't gonna happen in a year or two. Give it some time already!
"Calling it out" every chance you get won't speed the process up, it just annoys people to hear the same moaning every time.

I'm completely behind the core thought here but going "I want it NOW, NOW, NOW!!!" is not the way to go.

The same goes for complaining that there are too many topics about it. Just because you complain that there are too many threads about issues like that won't change that they will increasingly appear up until something changes.
 
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