Gamers hate diversity? Bull****.

[Batou667]

If the same cherry picking used in the original demotivator was used, it wouldn't be too hard to make one of only female protagonists, or only nonhuman protagonists.

Thankyou; somebody who gets my point! The original list is completely cherry-picked and the only reason it's "self-evident" that brown-haired white guys are everywhere is because that's how they've presented the data. (And I say again; who the f*** are half of the dudes on that list? I recognise five of them. Chris Redfield, Shepard, is that the Max Payne 3 version of Max, Nico Bellic, and Frank West.)

Give me 20 minutes and I could whip up a similar chart filled with examples of violence and bloodshed to "prove" that the current state of gaming is desensitising kids to violence. Or I could carefully find 20 big muscular guys to "show" that games are full of over-masculine imagery that is damaging teenage boys' self-esteem and causing eating disorders. It's easy to prove a point when the wind of public opinion is blowing your way and you have the luxury of picking data that matches your hypothesis.

i dont think the original poster is trying to paint gamers in a bad light, which is what OP seems to think, what with the defensive reaction to it. i think the point is that the poster is trying to say that the gaming industry is not diverse enough and relies on cliches - no matter how cherry picked the original picture is, you cant deny that is a lot of 30 something white guys who pretty much look the same.

In truth I have no idea what the intent was behind the original image, but I know that it gets wheeled out on these forums at least a couple of times a week, usually in the context of "Games these days aren't progressive or inclusive, and here's an image to back that up. QED." I agree that the videogame industry is built on clichés and tropes - and the "rugged, attractive everyman" is just one such cliche.

Ryu? He's not really the 'protagonist' of Street Fighter, just the most well known of the ensemble cast.

Yeah, I ummed and erred about that one, but Ryu is pretty much the "face" of Streetfighter - he's a character associated with the brand in a way that other fighting franchises like Tekken and Mortal Kombat just don't have.

Look, I think you're kind of missing the point. No-one is saying there weren't colourful protagonists back in the day. There were. In fact, that's the reason are complaining now. Because games made now tend to revolve around the white, 30yo male lead character more than games made ten or twenty years ago. That's the issue people have.

Even that seems like a bit of an unfair generalisation. Here's the current Top 20 game chart:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2013/apr/15/top-20-video-games

Of the 20, 6 are team sports, MMOs, party games or sims, and under our criteria so far those are discounted. The rest are comprised of the following protagonists: Two females (if we count Bioshock Infinite's Elizabeth as the "main" character, albeit not the player character), an Italian plumber, Sonic the Hedgehog (not current game characters, eh?), two sets of Lego protagonists, a couple of faceless soldiers (Master Chief and the Sniper dude), a mixed-race golfer, some monsters, and just four of our "ubiquitous" brown-haired macho men. And Baird from Gears Judgment is actually a blond....

and secondly because I strongly suspect it's a cherry-picked selection of protagonists which doesn't particularly reflect the most popular games or characters.

Isn't that what you did to counter the argument?

No cherry-picking involved, guv'nor; I went through the list of best-selling games on Wikipedia and posted images of their protagonist in descending order, starting with the most popular. It's not even a list of the all-time best-selling franchises (though if it was, Mario would still be in first place) - Mario gets first place purely on the strength of Super Mario Bros sales on the NES, likewise Sonic from his first Megadrive/Genesis game. My point is, brown-haired 30-something white guys aren't what the kids love - or at least, they don't love the games they star in.

 

[VanQ]

If this thread woke me up to anything at all, it's the fact that a portion of these very forums don't recognize most of the 20 most recognizable and popular characters in gaming over the last 3 decades. Either they don't play games or they're extremely young. I'm honestly disappointed at how few of them know Crash Bandicoot and Pacman when they see them for God's sake!

 

[Ikasury]

===.== as if the obvious 'lack of female MCs' isn't enough *lays face on desk*

honestly i felt F!Shep was a better rep for Mass Effect as a whole, the M!Shep was just way too... 'generic'... like period, and the F!Shep to cover was a lot more interesting, just to look at, see red hair! actually HAVING hair! XD but... ugh... yea, just looking down my list of games i've recently got:

Injustice: Batman (white guy in tights)
Bioshock Infinite: Dewit (White guy i never really see...)
Aliens: Colonial Marines: Dewinter? (so depressing, i played Xenos on multi anyway and ignored 'story mode')
Ni no Kuni: Oliver!! (a little red haired... white boy -.- least he has 'hair' and its 'red')
Boarderlands 2: pick one: chick, midget-mexican, generic-white-guy and Zero... whatever Zero is...
Zone of the Enders HD: well one's 'brown' with white hair? is that still caucasian? its anime-style, its hard to tell?
Dishonored: whatshisname... i don't know what he looks like other then 'mask' but his arms suggest 'white' and context suggests 'dude'~

so... hrm... just going down my stack of games next to the Tv, primarily 'white' and 'male', with the only 'deviations' being a multi-pick-MC... hrm...

*Hugs Parasite Eve* it will be okay~ Remember Me will come out soon~

 

[Imp_Emissary]

If this thread woke me up to anything at all, it's the fact that a portion of these very forums don't recognize most of the 20 most recognizable and popular characters in gaming over the last 3 decades. Either they don't play games or they're extremely young. I'm honestly disappointed at how few of them know Crash Bandicoot and Pacman when they see them for God's sake!

Actually, I think they are trying the game with the first picture with all the white guys. At least the ones I saw were.
That said, I did think they meant the newer one at first.

 

[Auron]

OT - I could only name Niko Bellic(who's Ukrainian by the way.), Frank West, Red Faction guy, Snake and Shephard. And I only know West because of MVC.

Prophet from Crysis 3 is black too.

Technically its Alcatraz' body in the suit in Crysis 3. Prophet's mind is somehow still in the suit, so its mentally him... and he took over Alcatraz' mind, erasing him from existence. Way to go, EA, we're playing a black Buffalo Bill. Talk about progress! Keep it up and you'll earn the Golden Poo for 2013 as well - Three-peat!

(that was a joke)

Seriously? I didn't know, not played it yet just read that Prophet was the player character. Thats actually pretty ugly, almost like some kind of "blackface" bullshit except the African American guy ends up white.

He becomes a virtual entity in Crysis 2 but recovers most of his humanity by the end of the game. While the body was originally Alcatraz the DNA was rewritten and meshed with the Aliens so by the end he looks like Barnes again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3bMXMMXfa5g#t=129s

I've linked the video at a spoiler free point just for the sake of it by the way.

We've also never seem Alcatraz, I do miss Nomad though it's really fucked up that they killed him off-screen and made the series lose all sense and downgraded the open world design to fit consoles and so on...

 

[J Tyran]

made the series lose all sense and downgraded the open world design to fit consoles and so on...

Never bothered with the series after Warhead, shame that Ubisoft can make a better Crysis/FarCry game than Crytek can. It all it cost was a 0.5% loss of graphical fidelity.

 

[Batou667]

Minorities doesn't have the buying power of whites, which is why you don't see much minorities. Can't cater to a base that doesn't exist.

Eh? Are you saying that black people don't have disposable income? I think that's a dubious claim, especially since a fair few brands specifically target the black dollar either as their primary, or one of their core, demographics. There's a music industry targeted at a black audience, ditto films. Just because black people are overrepresented in the working classes doesn't mean they don't buy cars, electronics, and other luxury goods. You never heard of "bling" culture?

Anyway, we have black gamers right here on the Escapist who represent a handy disproof of the idea that this userbase "doesn't exist".

 

[fezgod]

I've been waiting for a post like this ever since I saw the first picture. Yeah, those games may all have 30-something, white brown-haired protagonists, but only a few of those games are as iconic or well known as the one's in the other picture.

Yes, modern videogame protagonists are often homogeneous, but that shouldn't be a criticism of gaming as a whole.

 

[Frotality]

all forms of media and storytelling make use of a boring as f**k featureless protagonist, its just that books cant get away with describing the same guy over and over and movies/tv cant cast a perfect 3d render of john everyman like video games can. its a problem with the entertainment industry, not the gaming industry.

 

[Weaver]

I think the brown hair image was meant to reflect modern trends in gaming, not gaming historically.
Does anyone really care about pacman or crash bandicoot now-a-days?

 

[Jingle Fett]

Here's the revised image:

Suddenly, the state of gaming doesn't look quite so gloomy and homogenised, does it? Yes, the "brown-haired, 30-something male" is still represented, but to imply that this archetype is a requirement to sell a game, or that "gamers won't buy a game whose protagonist isn't a male power fantasy!", is bunk.

I don't see any black or latino characters on the "revised" list. Sad that animals have more representation than they do...

 

[Batou667]

I don't see any black or latino characters on the "revised" list. Sad that animals have more representation than they do...

Perhaps, but that list does contain Americans, an Italian, an American-Italian, two Japanese, a Greek and a Brit. The human characters also include brunettes, blondes and a ginger. It could be worse...

Most of these triple-A titles originate from studios in Japan, Europe or the USA, so to some extent it's understandable that most protagonists will reflect the racial characteristics of those places (lightish skin, darkish hair). Complaining that Japanese games don't feature enough Hispanics is a bit like saying Bollywood films are exclusionary for not casting enough Nordic blondes in leading roles. Different market, different target demographic.

I suppose that's a bit of a simplification as the games industry more or less has a global market, while relying on the input of quite homogenous teams of developers. Hence the issue of not many minority protagonists, and the faltering or ham-fisted attempts to "correct" that. While I think that studios in the US really should be trying harder to reflect the demographics in their own country, European and Japanese devs don't (I feel) have quite the same responsibility to be flag-wavers for diversity. Hopefully in time the situation will fix itself as games start getting developed in, and by, "minority" cultures and we'll have a gaming equivalent of Bollywood or Chinese Cinema.

 

[Starik20X6]

Also, notice that there's only one female in twenty characters.

Hey, we're not sure about the bird. You're being sexist assuming it's male! ;P

Hey, what about that other girl? Second row, second picture... Oh wait that's Cloud. [/obvious JRPG character design joke]

Yeah I've got nothing else to add. Actually, now that I think about it, you know what bugs me more than the overuse of the 'white male with brown hair protagonist'? That the protagonist never has curly hair. Think about it- how often, in any movies, games, TV shows or even books, does the protagonist have curly hair? Literally the only curly haired protagonists that comes to mind right now are Frodo and the rest of the hobbits.

 

[DoPo]

Yeah I've got nothing else to add. Actually, now that I think about it, you know what bugs me more than the overuse of the 'white male with brown hair protagonist'? That the protagonist never has curly hair. Think about it- how often, in any movies, games, TV shows or even books, does the protagonist have curly hair?

Can't think of many either. At least for games, they have the excuse of short/straight hair being easier to do. Well, that's been relaxed in the last few year but it's probably still going more or less out of habit. For other media, I dunno. Well, they sort of have an excuse in that many protagonists have short hair, so you can't exactly do curly with it. But it doesn't explain why short over anything else.

Now that I think about it, though, TV/movies may have an excuse of sorts - if the actor doesn't have naturally curly hair, they'll have to keep remaking his hairstyle which takes time. I dunno, that's the only explanation I can think of that isn't "just because". It's not much better but there you go.