Two interesting games

Capcom's 1942 -- Japanese company makes a game where you are trying to defeat Japan.

EA's Battlefield 1942: American company makes a game where you can play as US, UK, USSR, German, or Japanese soldier.

Is that the exception that proves the rule? (In other words, Japanese game-makers may over compensate whereas occasionally American ones will experiment).

Mike from Morgantown

True Crime: New York and the 50 Cent games come to mind when thinking of games with Black men as the leading role offhand. I'm sure there's more. The reason for the Japanese games promoting the northern european white male look (blonde hair, blue eyes) directly trickles down from their tv culture of anime. If you go way back into anime as far as the 80s, you'll see a strong focus on the Caucasian features for the characters. Scroll forward to modern day, and you find Japanese developers who grew up with having these white heroes as influence for their own characters.

I do agree, that despite this logic, that it isn't quite right to leave out other races. If I was a black gamer playing a white character, there might be some disassociation to that character. Of course, this is not always the case. Yet, sometimes you want to have a situation where you can relate more to the character. The selection of your hero/main character should allow for options, so you can choose a character other than a white one. In our development team, we've taken this to mind already, and have built character models not only of Caucasian looks, but black, hispanic and japanese too. We had more, but we had to size down our content a bit.

I suppose that at the end of the conversation, games are games, and its more about the skill then the character. Zelda fans love Link to death, but why? He doesn't actually talk or do anything unique. Link is just the car that the player is driving. So its more like their vehicle for completing quests and whatnot. *looks around nervously, seeing Zelda fans lighting torches*

I wonder how many Canadian, Australian and British gamers out there get annoyed with so many games based on Americian culture and places?

I think its done purposely. Like I said the only non-white relatively popular main character I can think of is Ryu Hayabusa but not once is his face ever shown. Why? Because white people won't purchase the game?

(btw just to precise .. i'm not American... I live in Quebec, Canada) :)

The American culture is indeed dominant like Kasz216 said and Japan was also influenced by that culture. We are all influenced by it.

There's still some games that have black protagonists (can only think of black people atm.. sry no offence to the others) there's Need for speed series, GTA (look at the hero of GTA VI) I see many games that it's genre is oriented toward hip hop & rap music with their dance style and fashion. This is from the afro-american culture. :) It's everywhere.. not just in games. :)

1. Celebrities are beyond how regular people are defined.

2. Its worth noting that the ones with black characters as leads are called "True Crime" and "Grand Theft Auto". These are not people that "save" the world if you get my drift.

Carl Johnson from GTA San Andreas !!!!!!!

Topic: I have no problem playing a game with a none European/American protagonist. Even when he is an Arab like Altair ;)

Why do so many games feature characters that are Japanese or have Japanese names? 

The gaming world is biased I tell you!

I was just using that as an example to illustrate the fact that games these days appeal to a much broader audience than they once did.  Plus, games in general going all the way back to the beginning are pretty abstract, it's only in recent generations that games have begun to present specific cultural influences or references.

Still, aside from a couple examples given like Americans being portrayed as the good guys against Russians/Arabs/etc in war games, i see about 95% of games out there appealing to virtually anyone regardless of race or creed, and the other 5% well u could just as easly swap whatever western theme is presented in said game and take the core gameplay and dress it up for whoever your intended audience is.

@Pristine20
There are nearly 2 billion people in India and China who don't care about gaming coz a gaming console costs more then what they make in a month.
People in a lot of non-white poor countries are still too busy taking care of the other important things in their lives (getting a home, food, a job etc) to have any time or money to play.
This is a big reason but it still does not justify why a lot of the modern western shooters seem to have the same message as the american government of fighting terrorists, russians and justifying police brutalities. Even a game like crackdown, which featured an african-american central character is almost exclusively killing Mexican, Asian and east european guys all of whom are 'crooks' and 'gangsters'

 But systems that experienced greater success in Japan also featured a bias towards caucasian looking protagonists.  Turbografix -16, Famicom (was initially more successful in Japan).  Marketing is the small picture here, though not irrelevant.  There are larger sociological forces at work.