Do We Need More Diversity In Games?

A bit of a controversy seen in games media nowadays is how often women star in a leading role. From the moment you are told to list your top 10 favorite games, you’ll realize how little female representation there is, let alone as a lead role. Most of the most iconic characters from the early days of gaming are predominantly white men, with top ten lists occasionally throwing in a Lara Croft or Samus. Sometimes they are yellow, like PacMan, but men nonetheless!

Why is this, though? And why is it such a controversy? Like most arguments, I think there are merits to both sides of it, and it isn’t appropriate to slap a single answer onto it and call it a day. First, let’s take a look at the cons of adding more women into games.

The Market Decides

I’ll admit, I enter this debate with a bit of a bias. Some people tend to see their character as an interesting person to follow, while others consider it an extension of themselves. I happen to be in the latter field and like to identify with my character to gain a sense of personal exploration. This is why a market being dominated by white male leads works pretty well for me, unfortunately. This isn’t necessarily an “F you, got mine,” attitude so much as one I hadn’t really considered over the years. There were just plenty of games to choose from where I would feel personally connected to the character.

But there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I, myself, fall prey to making games that tend to star white male lead roles. Even in my current project that I try to keep ambiguous by keeping the character in a helmet and never using a pronoun so that any player can assume whatever they want about them, whenever I type up documents about the lead character I tend to slip into using “him.” Is that a sign of bigotry? Or is it just a developer putting themselves into their work? There is a shocking 71:24 split in male to female developers, so there is a higher likelihood that the product of a male-dominant creative medium will be male. This all can be stretched to even sexuality, race, and background. Straight white males make games; straight white male characters are put into videogames.

The Market Decided

The trouble with this argument is that it’s very cyclical. Women aren’t in games which means they don’t attract a female audience which means that audience won’t grow up wanting to make games so they won’t be in games and so and so on forever. Worse yet, women do play video games. Almost as much as men! There is another argument that says “the 50:50 ratio refers to all genres, women don’t tend to play AAA style games and are more prone to play match-3s like Candy Crush which doesn’t even have characters,” to which I say, yeah, statistically. But that’s exactly why it doesn’t make sense to not include more female leads. And when I say leads, I mean starring roles, not “Princess Peach is a strong woman because after being captured and having no personality in Mario Odyssey she gets to make 1 decision at the very end.”

In a market constantly chasing the biggest audience they can find, it seems odd to deliberately alienate a large portion of your audience. We know that women like to play games in general yet seem to stay near more casual games with no representation of a character at all. When there is representation, it is typically what the player can create themselves. This could very easily be a result of there being no characters for women to feel attached to. Samus is so vaguely a woman that your average person doesn’t even know she is until they learn more about the game. Lara Croft has ridiculous, shall we say ‘polygons,’ because it was a risk to just have a female without something to pull in a male audience. Even the default character in Littlebig Planet is named sack"boy." That may be splitting hairs, but it just adds to the assumption that all characters should be males.

Caricatures in Games

This adds to the argument in a different light. Much in the same fashion, I already come into this with my own personal preferences. I find caricatures funny because as a straight white male I have plenty of regular characters to pick from that aren’t overtly stereotypical. That’s why when I see a character like Duke Nukem or Chris Redfield who have arms twice the size of their own head who are clearly satirical white straight males, it's just a game. I still have my Geralt when I want a relatable lead who has an excuse for the body they have. When I see a female that is unrealistically “attractive,” it doesn't really matter to me because I wasn’t really looking for a realistic woman in video games.

It’s a bit troublesome when we start becoming so sensitive to stereotypes that we start going in the opposite direction. Men can still be absolutely jacked and have perfect hair/beards/jawlines with booming and authoritative voices, but in order to be careful not to offend, all women should be completely covered and cannot be gentle. We have proven time and again that violence in videogames does not create violent people, and studies have shown that sexualized characters don’t create body-shamed players. There has been an awkward attempt at compensating by making all women incredibly grizzled and angry for no particular reason, while men are still allowed to be an array of different personalities. This is when caricatures are almost better because surprise surprise some women like being feminine.

Caricatures Only

That’s a wonderful rant that will please anyone who likes to stick to the status quo, but there are some inherent problems with it. I already admitted that I do slightly see it that way and have a few bones to pick with current-day media. Female characters do feel like they are trending towards pointlessly aggressive in order to feel like they are appeasing the other half of the argument. Call me crazy, but no matter what I did I couldn’t make a single female character not hate me in Baldur’s Gate III. The men are charming and witty while the women snap at the player for almost every interaction. That's not how you solve the problem. Nothing is ever fixed by going 100% the opposite direction.

The trouble is, imagine you’re that little girl who is struggling to find a game that you can connect with. Now imagine you’re that little girl who is also a minority in any way. Not only will you struggle to find even the simplest of representation just as a woman, but now you’ll have to wade through the sea of such bigoted examples of characters that I decided to delete this section because even I cringe looking at the list of early diversity in games. It’s self-defeating to exclude so many people who just want to join in on the fun. If 1 less game has a white male lead, there will still be plenty to choose from, but that 1 game just might make a gamer out of someone.

And if you aren’t confident you can write a properly diverse character, maybe ask for some help rather than guessing. It shows.

Overall

I’m incredibly excited to see that there does seem to be a gentle shift in the right direction. Games like Horizon Zero Dawn and the newer Lara Croft models are proof that some companies are willing to allow for more diverse characters. As I said, I’m not unbiased when it comes to games. I prefer playing as men because it suits me just fine. When I play a game with customization, I try to make them look like me. But that doesn’t mean we can’t design games for broader audiences. Once you are part of the videogame community, you aren’t just making fun little projects to satisfy yourself. You have the power as a developer to help shape young minds. If everyone considers themselves a punchline for the sake of white males, that isn’t good for anyone. It’s not good for the punching bag, and it’s not good for white males.