Is lack of gender/racial diversity valid criticism?

[MikeRox]

Soundwave said:

Lawlight said:

Do you finally accept that video games do not have a straight white male most of the time?

"Most" of the time? No. White characters or "Japanese" characters who have basically 90% white features are still the overwhelming majority in video games depictions of humanoid characters.  

Are there more diverse characters in video games, specifically in the last 4 years or so? Sure. 

"Equality" always will feel like persecution to a person who's used to privilege. You take a rich person and force them to stay in a 4 star hotel when they've only ever stayed in 5 star hotels and they will complain, you force them to stay in a 3 star hotel and they will say it's sub-human. And that is to some effect human nature because they don't know any different. When you are used to something, like defacto standard white humanoid characters in video games for the better part of say 30 years+ now, a change in that paradigm is difficult for some people to accept. 

Most people in my estimation don't care, gamers just like good games, and if the characters are more diverse to reflect a more diverse audience-base ... great. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. As far as I can tell there's no real distinction between ethnicities and gaming passion, I see black, Asian, and Latino kids as passionate and hardcore about gaming as white kids, so why can't there be more characters in games that look reflective of the people actually playing them. 

I agree with your latter post. I have no issue with a game character at all. I'm really baffled by this "I can't relate if this character isn't my gender/raced", but then I grew up in the 80s when your average game character was a purple/yellow/green jellybaby type thing.

However "big tits" was as much a limitation of the 32 bit hardware as a conscious design choice, in Lara's case marketing preferred it, but it was an accident rather than a design choice. Ironically though to show just how far we've come, Lara was originally not a British character until Marketing instructed them. Much like why Mario has a mustache and Pacman is a circle. Yes the PC version of FFVII allowed for more detail in Tifa, but the PSX original it was more to do with conserving polygons.

You know what. It's PR/Marketing that is the problem with gaming, not game developer haha.