White Guy, Brown Hair

[TehCookie]

AAA and unreal colors don't count? I have no idea. I have over 200 games and only 5 feature a white protag with brown hair, but the rest are AA and/or japanesey.

 

[burningdragoon]

Raiden from metal gear solid has white hair in MGS2 and MGS4

Yeah, but Raiden is a woman, so it doesn't count.

fuck off Raiden is not a woman

No, you're right.

He's a girl.

A whiny little girl

Spoiler

Your move, Mr Clarion.

Wearing high heels

Clearly a woman.

If wearing high heels meant I could hold a sword with my feet, I would consider wearing them.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Raiden from metal gear solid has white hair in MGS2 and MGS4

Yeah, but Raiden is a woman, so it doesn't count.

fuck off Raiden is not a woman

No, you're right.

He's a girl.

A whiny little girl

Spoiler

Your move, Mr Clarion.

Wearing high heels

Clearly a woman.

If wearing high heels meant I could hold a sword with my feet, I would consider wearing them.

Edit: Fail post, ignore.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Raiden from metal gear solid has white hair in MGS2 and MGS4

Yeah, but Raiden is a woman, so it doesn't count.

fuck off Raiden is not a woman

No, you're right.

He's a girl.

A whiny little girl

Spoiler

Your move, Mr Clarion.

Wearing high heels

Clearly a woman.

If wearing high heels meant I could hold a sword with my feet, I would consider wearing them.

No you won't.

Raiden from metal gear solid has white hair in MGS2 and MGS4

Yeah, but Raiden is a woman, so it doesn't count.

fuck off Raiden is not a woman

No, you're right.

He's a girl.

A whiny little girl

he is not girl nor is he whiny. I'm tired of people trying to peg Raiden as a whinny kid

Dude, I'm just messin' with ya

 

[Macgyvercas]

God of War series (no hair)
Heavenly Sword (female and red hair)
Tomb Raider series (female)
BioShock (we technically don't see Jack, so I choose to believe that he has red hair)
Any number of games with Asian protagonists
The entirety of the Ape Escape series.

 

[burningdragoon]

Raiden from metal gear solid has white hair in MGS2 and MGS4

Yeah, but Raiden is a woman, so it doesn't count.

fuck off Raiden is not a woman

No, you're right.

He's a girl.

A whiny little girl

Spoiler

Your move, Mr Clarion.

Wearing high heels

Clearly a woman.

If wearing high heels meant I could hold a sword with my feet, I would consider wearing them.

No you won't.

You say that now, but if you get both your hands/arms cut off you'll wish you had feet hands. Or would you rather just use your teeth? >.>

 

[Edible Avatar]

Alex Mercer, That guy from Limbo (actually, everyone in Limbo), The kid (bastion), Isaac from TBoI. In fact, every game i have played recently doesn't have a protagonist with brown hair AND white skin.

I win your bet, sir.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

snip

It's a cultural thing.

Our sense of humour is very sarcastic, very cutting, but we take the piss out of ourselves even more than we take the piss out of others.

Self deprecation is a very huge part of our humour.

Americans tend to lack this self deprecation.

*raises 'merican hand*

Maybe me and my friends are just weird...but we make fun of every american stereotype/thing under the sun. I can't tell you how many times I make jokes about being white/lazy per day, it'd take a while.

Sometimes i wonder if I'm a mutant American, sarcasm is a thing lost upon many people around me

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

In quite a few games you don't get to see the characters appearance in detail, such as halo or limbo.

I hate to say it, but an official art piece on Bungie.net reveals that Master Chief also falls under the 'white guy brown hair' category.

Spoiler: See that guy on the left?

...*nerd glasses on*

he's described perfectly that way in the books. hell i'm pretty sure his hair is shorter than that even most of the time.

still, sweet image, never seen that one before.

 

[ReinWeisserRitter]

I don't know. I tend not to give two shits about the race of a video game character any more than I give two shits about the race of any real human being.

Do you think that a person's race makes them who they are? No? Then you shouldn't shouldn't give two shits, either.

 

[Strain42]

My Saints Row character looks however I want him to look.

Phoenix Wright has black hair

Kratos is bald...

Pretty much every MegaTen game has a Japanese protagonist, with a few exceptions (Serph was white, but did not have brown hair)

Ramza was blonde, and since it's a fantasy world I dunno what he counts as...I guess somewhere from Europe if it were a real world thing.

 

[J. Mazarin]

Just wanted to mention how happy I am at how quickly/thoroughly aestu was knocked off his/her racist little pedestal. High fives all around.

OT: The whole lack of diversity thing in games kind of annoys me.

People always say something like "oh well, the majority of gamers are white so they should have white protagonists that they can relate to", as if people who aren't male+white are some completely foreign concept that has to be handled with extreme caution. Well, fuck that.

As a white guy with brown hair (haven't quite nailed the whole "in his 30s" thing yet) I personally would like to see more diversity in the mainstream market.

CAPTCHA: easy peasy

Damn straight, captcha.

 

[Najos]

Sports games have tons of black guys.

 

[Therumancer]

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.

 

[Therumancer]

Let's ask a different question.

Why is it a problem that most male protagonists are white-skinned, brown-haired men, but it is not a problem that most female protagonists are white women, usually blonde?

Funny enough, there is a direct correlation between feminists and women getting into gaming and the increase in racial/ethnic homogeny in video gaming.

Think back, for example, to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which was written entirely by white men, almost entirely for white (and Asian) men, but featured not only one of the most diverse casts in history, not only diverse but culturally plausible.

For some reason it has never occured to any feminist to uphold characters like Santiago or Godwinson or Deidre as good female protagonists. And certainly they were not perfect - they had typically female flaws, amongst them brittleness - but one could just as easily say the same about Zahkarov or Yang or Morgan - they had typically male flaws such as callousness and desire to dominate...

Or most classic Final Fantasy games, which featured fairly substantial physical diversity even amongst characters without outrageously colored hair.

In fact, non-white women and women with brown or black hair are far less common than non-white men. This, to me, is really just proof that race is far more powerful in human bias than gender. And that white women are ridiculously overprivileged. And that overprivilege is a driving force in portrayals in video games.

Not sure if I agree, because especially when looking at games from Japan you see a lot of female Japanese protaganists, many of whom DO have dyed hair, but many of whom also keep it black. Redheads also seem to be fairly popular as well. To be honest I can't think of all that many blondes off the top of my head.

As far white women being overprivleged... not really. I think the issue is mostly that it's western/white nations that have been pushing gender equality so heavily. We tend to forget how far behind us the rest of the world is, including with nations that give equality lip service without actually following through on it. I was reading some stuff about the condition of like 80% of the women on the planet as borderline slaves a few times, and as high as that percengate might seem, it's probably understating things giving conditions in China (which represents like 1/3rd of the world population), India (which is close to the population of China), and of course Africa, The Middle East.... etc... Surely things ARE getting better, especially in places like India, but at the same time attempts to bring gender equality (or the seeds thereof) to The Middle East have failed, not being able to keep that promise being one of the big slaps in the face of the US during the war on terror. I think it's more fair to say that the women of the first world, where whites are still the majority, have it better than those anywhere else, and that it's frequently taken for granted.

That said, obviously it's nations with a high degree of freedom for women that are going to produce games with female protaganists. Japan has made a lot of progress so we see it there, the US and UK, and most of Europe are givens, so yes... if your going to see these powerful female characters your going to see them mostly coming from those cultures. The Middle East which is dominated by oppressive theocracy, and where we still hear stories about women being executed for not marrying their rapists and such from time to time, isn't exactly going to be producing or promoting characters like say "Lara Croft" who pretty much represents an anathema to their entire view of women. Heck, apparently we have to have women in positions of authority act submissive to men and cover themselves during meetings (speaking through a guy) for diplomatic reasons in a lot of cases down there.

As far as Alpha Centauri goes, I don't think ANY of those characters could be considered good role models for anything, every one of them was basically insane, except maybe the Arab guy trying to hold together the remnants of the UN Peacekeepers. Fun game, but I think the point was in many cases to poke fun at some of those positions which are based on real ones to some extent. Well some of them were. Santiago for example is just a flat out Maniac being designed as a faction to genocidally eliminate all other factions, pursueing a military victory. Deidre is almost as insane as Poison Ivy from "Batman" when you get down to it, her only redeeming feature being that the planet she's on actually DOES happen to be a living, interconnected superorganism, but considering she held those beliefs before anyone knew that it's ummm... questionable if she had herself together. This is the crazy "let's mind meld with the space worms" lady. Then we have the insane chinese dude running "The human hive" who wants to subvert everyone else's free will, and rule everyone as his worker drones.... really the only two with anything resembling a rational position for the situation right from the beginning is the UN or University (and the University has it's own degree of insanity). That's just my opinion of course. While not as extreme it's sort of like asking which Warhammer 40k faction I'd support as a rational question, when every single one of them is utterly mad and it's more or less a degree of how psychotic or genocidal. You could probably drop Doctor Doom on Alpha Centauri and not only would he fit right in, he'd probably be the most stable and reasonable leader on the planet.

 

[Krion_Vark]

I know what you meant. I am pointing out that what you meant isn't logical.

You are trying to claim that my claims or the terminology used to express those claims are offensive; I am pointing out that simply isn't true because what is said is benign.

Well ok here's a little challenge for you; go up to someone with mixed ethnicity and call them a mongrel, see what happens.

You're calling people of mixed ethnicity a loaded and derogatory term. It's like calling someone from Pakistan a 'Paki' or someone from China a '*****'. Sure they technically mean the same thing but they're not the same are they? It's the context behind it.

I never thought of Paki as derogatory. Always assumed it was short for Pakistani. Well I now know something new. Good thing I don't know any Pakistani people.

 

[soren7550]

Part of the reason why so many protagonists are brown hair/white skin is because both are ungodly common in the world. So, often characters that their creators are trying to be like an every-man, they're made to fit that description (default ManShep id an example of this).

Anyway, on topic:
Pokemon White (female protagonist)
Pokemon SoulSilver (male protagonist)
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn
Mass Effect 3
Saints Row the Third
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim


Capatcha: gee whiz
Indeed.

 

[Cheesepower5]

I think games are pretty diverse really, sure the chiseled Nathan Drake and Niko Belik types that fill the market these days, but that's a fairly recent phenomenon. And it's not like there's zero diversity in that group, we've got the down-trodden eastern-european immigrants, we've got the macho man Americans, we've got the clever British guy. You know, etc. The Protagonists in Shadows of the Damned, GTA4, The Saboteur and Assassin's Creed II are all dark haired white* men with manly stubble but they're fundamentally different characters from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

*(Okay, so Garcia is just MOSTLY white, since Hispanics are different, somehow. Whatever.)