Are there too many ‘white people’ in video games?
In the real world, Americans have tried over the years, with mixed success, to extend rights and respect to citizens of all races and colors.
In the world of gaming fantasy, the matter of diversity appears moot.
So says a survey of in-game characters led by the University of Southern California, with help from three other institutions. The survey results, released this week, dissect a year’s worth of analysis of 150 titles across nine gaming platforms, with the findings weighted by overall sales.
According to those findings, game characters are overwhelmingly white and male, and adult, with 85 percent of human images appearing this way, compared to about 51 percent of the U.S. population actually fitting that broad demographic. Divided by gender, 89.5 percent were male, 10.5 percent female.
As for the apparent racial divide, blacks were underrepresented by 13 percent compared to the real world, Asians were underrepresented by 25 percent, and Hispanics and Latinos got the short end by a whopping 78 percent.
The differences are thought to closely resemble findings from diversity studies of TV characters. However, the game-survey researchers also factored in sales figures, so best-selling titles would be responsible for proportionately more stereotypes recorded in the survey.
The concern here is that a lack of diversity in game presentation may have the same deleterious influence on public perception of reality — or whatever reality is when it comes to video games. Of course, we’re talking about a medium also rife with multi-hued aliens, inanimate objects that talk and jump over other inanimate objects, smiling sackboys, impossibly endowed women, do-it-yourself life forms, customizable avatars and gun-toting superwarriors wearing head-encompassing helmets the whole game so you don’t know what they look like.
Another factor: Most of the games were developed in the United States, but a number of titles came out of Japan, where the ideal diversity is altogether different.
Nevertheless, Game Guy wants to hear what you think. Do you think surveys such as these matter? Does character diversity determine what games you try or buy? Would more diversity mean a bigger audience and better sales? Would diversity improve your gaming experience overall? If so, how?
Your answers might affect the ways new titles are developed.
Who cares. Diversity will not affect sales of video games at all. No one cares. Not even you. Or me. Or you.
I think it depends on the type of game.
Much like a tv show or movie, many story-based games use specific written characters, and are equally guilty of reducing them to stereotypes (see Barret from FF7). But there are incredibly popular games like Fallout 3, Oblivion, etc… that allow you to decide your own character’s race and you control their actions resulting in no predetermined stereotyped behavior.
On the other hand, take the strategy game Civilization. You start the game by choosing a race of people and their statistics are pre-determined by historical stereotypes of that group. I would love some insight into that process…
As far as the survey goes, maybe the results are more telling of the audience demographic for the surveyed game titles rather than a broad generalization of the games industry as a whole.
No one cares - IT’S A GAME!! What a waste of time pondering racial diviersity inn a video game - like it matters in any way to anything.
this is RIDICULOUS.
don’t care one iota.
i hope this “study” wasn’t funded with any of my taxpayer money
What will they do a study on next? Anime diversity? % of characters with blue hair vs purple hair? Come on…a lot of these games, like Final Fantasy, are set on planets other than Earth and have races that don’t correlate to our own. What a waste of time and money! I guess with all the money troubles in the state of California, USC somehow manages to waste some on this ridiculous stuff. (sigh)
The characters are created according to whom the marketing departments of the various game makers say are most likely to buy the product. In this case, white males (hence the endowed females). Expecting perfect diversity in a video gamen or anywhere else just shows how moronic we have become as a nation on this issue. End of rant.
The game developers can’t win. When they set Resident Evil 5 in Africa, they were accused of racism for having african zombies.
there aren’t enough robots in videogames. i like the sci fi videogames. more laser guns, too please (ahem halo you are supposed to be a futuristic space combat game and i’m using a pistol? where’s my damn laser gun?!?!?!)
There are two significant problems to this study:
1) The results are weighted by overall sales. Why does that factor into the equation of whether or not a race is underrepresented? If anything, what this proves is that white male targeted games simply sell better.
2) They are placing the American population as the source of proper diversity, rather than the target market. This is like complaining there aren’t enough black people on Univision or there aren’t enough Asian people on BET. They aren’t the targets, so there’s no reason to complain.
If they could do the study by comparing the consumer market of the games with the actual totals seen in the games, they might find they are more closely assigned than they think. Also, they should eliminate the weighting of the sales of games in the study, because that over-exagerates the importance of one game over another.
i was trying some adult games and there’s a lot of fun