Video Games Need a More Diverse Cast of Characters

Sept. 22, 2009— -- You might not be surprised to hear that the demographics of video-game characters don't quite match up with those of real populations. But the first "virtual census" of the human characters that inhabit US video games exposes just how much they diverge from reality.

The survey reveals that males, adults and white people are over-represented in games. Females, black people, children and the elderly are correspondingly under-represented.

Dmitri Williams at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, carried out the study with colleagues at Indiana University, Ohio University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He told New Scientist that the mismatch between real-world and videogame populations could be excluding some groups of potential players from games.

Identity Feelings

Williams and colleagues say that this is the first research on the types of people represented by characters in video games – whose actions are claimed by some to act as role models for people's behaviour in the real world.

They ran a census on the top 150 games sold on nine popular video-gaming platforms, including the Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation, PS2, Nintendo GameCube, PSP, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and the PC. The research took place in February 2006 but has only just been published.

Seasoned gamers were recruited to play each game for 30 minutes. The researchers analysed video of the sessions and recorded the demographics of each character that appeared on screen, no matter how briefly. They then weighted the results in proportion to each game's sales. For example, characters in a game selling 2 million copies counted for twice as many character stereotype impressions as those in a game selling 1 million.

The results were then compared with data from the 2000 US census.

Usual suspects

Williams and his team found that male characters are "vastly more likely to appear" in games than females. They made up 85 per cent of characters, compared to 51 per cent of the real population.

Results Similar to Studies of TV Characters

Compared to the real population, African Americans were under-represented by 13 per cent and Hispanic/Latino people by 78 per cent. Asians were over-represented by 25 per cent and white people by 7 per cent.

Despite being made by and for very different people, the results are very similar to studies of TV characters.

Missed Opportunity

Most of the games analysed were produced in the US, though the researchers say they didn't take the country of production into account in their analysis. "Games produced in Asia could account for some of the over-representation," says Williams, though it is not known if Asian developers are biased in favour of using Asian characters.

Williams says that the demographic disparity between video-game characters and the real population is likely to have practical consequences. "For developers this would be a missed opportunity," he says. "For players it is a potential source of identity-based problems."

Unless the population of games becomes more like that of the real world, says Williams, the industry will struggle to attract customers from groups such as black, female or elderly people, who today are under-represented among both characters and players.