I think it's two main reasons:

1) As people have said, RPGs usually have a Western European middle ages setting. Given such a setting, I think it's no surprise that the vast majority of characters are white.

2) White/Japanese characters have come, for whatever reason, to be the default race of RPGs. Even if they weren't, they're the majority race of two of the major markets for video games. Both of these mean that if a character is white/Japanese people don't take notice. If a character is not white/Japanese (e.g. black), people notice. You've drawn attention to the fact. This is bad if you're not trying to make a point by choosing that race (i.e. if racial/cultural issues aren't the focus). You'd also better be prepared for people to read something into every aspect (not that this doesn't happen with a white/Japanese character, it's just less socially charged). If he's "too black" people will complain about stereotyping. If he's "too white" people will complain about ignoring black history and heritage.

Why not ask, "Why dont you ever see handicapped people (in wheelchairs) as RPG heroes?"
They are people too.

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Original post by headfonez Why not ask, "Why dont you ever see handicapped people (in wheelchairs) as RPG heroes?" They are people too.

Well yes they are, but in your typical RPG your typical hero is expected to wield swords and shields or maybe guns, and run and jump and stuff. Black people and hispanic people and asian people and white people can all do this just fine, but people in wheelchairs (regardless of race) cannot. Same reason there's no blind characters in racing games?

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Original post by Frequency Same reason there's no blind characters in racing games?

I've been waiting my whole life for a good zatoichi game.

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Original post by abstractimmersion A better question: why do most anime characters appear to be whites with huge eyes?

Japanese appear white to themselves. The characters with huge eyes are supposed to be Caucasians, not Japanese. (Check out the post-WW2 history of Japan for a good reason why American pop culture features so much in older Manga and Anime.)

*

Races & Myths:

The surreal notion that international travel is something that simply never happened before the invention of the railway is nonsense: people travelled. A lot. They even traded. (The Great Silk Road? Marco Polo? Anyone? No?)

There were sailors from _all_ seafaring nations throughout recorded history. It was not unusual to see people of unusual coloration in port cities because of this. Hell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne boasted ferries manned by Middle-Eastern and even African sailors 2000 years ago. (And yes, there's archeological evidence for this too. Feel free to look on Google.) During the Roman Empire's heyday, slaves were often a very, very long way from home. Romans were around for a sod of a long time, with many people, from many nations, ending up all over the place. It was common practice for Romans to send soldiers recruited in one region to go fight in another part of their empire.

Immigration is far from a new phenomenon, although the scale of it has certainly increased manyfold over the past 200 years or so.

The idea that nobody from Northern Europe during the Medieaval period would have ever seen a 'black guy' is utter bollocks. While Africans would have been very rare in the Far East, they certainly got there occasionally.


The reason all those Tolkien-lite RPGs lack people of alternative skin pigmentation is because Tolkien was writing fucking *fairy stories*, full of gods and monsters and good vs. evil. Read "Tree & Leaf" if you want to know where Tolkien was coming from and why any attempt to view his works as anything other than attempts to create an artificial mythology for the British -- whose culture is rare in that it lacks much mythic folklore of its own -- is just plain stupid.

And the day people lay Tolkien's works to rest and try inventing something a bit more bloody original cannot come soon enough.


I won't bang on about Japanese RPGs as these usually put some effort into creating novel mythologies and back-stories. The lack of dark-skinned races in Japan is as much to do with its location as anything else: it's on the other side of the planet from Africa, for a start. It was also _very_ insular as a nation historically.

I had a lot of trouble identifying with the lead character in GTA:SA, although I think it was more to do with his personality than his race.
I am neither a blue hedgehog nor a a shambling corpse, yet I had no problem enjoying the games they appeared in.

For me the worst part of SA was when the player meets that truely irritating girl who wants you to steal a petrol tanker. I knew that if I wanted to advance the story, then at some stage my annoying avatar was going to sleep with that annoying NPC, regardless of what I wanted. So I quit.

They should have made the corrupt cop played by Samuel L. Jackson the lead. He was a much more interesting character.

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Original post by Frequency Quote: Original post by headfonez Why not ask, "Why dont you ever see handicapped people (in wheelchairs) as RPG heroes?" They are people too. Well yes they are, but in your typical RPG your typical hero is expected to wield swords and shields or maybe guns, and run and jump and stuff. Black people and hispanic people and asian people and white people can all do this just fine, but people in wheelchairs (regardless of race) cannot. Same reason there's no blind characters in racing games?

Yeah, I forgot that people in wheelchairs can't be pushed by someone else

Wheelchairs are easy to solve, just look at Charles Xavier. You can give disabled characters psychic powers, levitating wheelchairs, have them remotely control robots, ride around on a mog like Cait Sith...there's no end to the ways to incorperate them into a game.

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Original post by stimarco The idea that nobody from Northern Europe during the Medieaval period would have ever seen a 'black guy' is utter bollocks. While Africans would have been very rare in the Far East, they certainly got there occasionally.

But they're still uncommon enough to draw attention to the fact that it's a "black guy". See Othello (not Medieval, but should do well enough to make the point).

In the small midwestern town I grew up in there were enough black families that you wouldn't be too surprised to see someone with dark skin walking down the street, but it would stick out like a sore thumb if the main character of a community show were black. You can't have a "generic" hero of a race other than the majority. Before people jump on that, when I say "generic" I don't mean "cookie cutter". I just mean that if, in an American game, the main character is white then people won't see his race as part of his character; if the same character were black then people would take that to be an important character trait. If you want to draw on race in forming the character this can be a good thing, but it also might be distracting from the main point.

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The reason all those Tolkien-lite RPGs lack people of alternative skin pigmentation is because Tolkien was writing fucking *fairy stories*, full of gods and monsters and good vs. evil. Read "Tree & Leaf" if you want to know where Tolkien was coming from and why any attempt to view his works as anything other than attempts to create an artificial mythology for the British -- whose culture is rare in that it lacks much mythic folklore of its own -- is just plain stupid.

How are people trying to read more into Tolkien than that? Heck, I'd say that the fact that this mythology includes predominantly lighter skinned people is an example of the majority race being the focus of a culture's stories.

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Original post by CIJolly Wheelchairs are easy to solve, just look at Charles Xavier. You can give disabled characters psychic powers, levitating wheelchairs, have them remotely control robots, ride around on a mog like Cait Sith...there's no end to the ways to incorperate them into a game.

But this quickly becomes gimicky.

An important question is whether you simply want more characters to have black skin or whether you want their race to be an important part of their personalities and their actions. For the first, all developers need to do is ask the modelers to change some RGB values. For the second, the fact that most game developers are white and thus will have trouble developing convincing characters is probably the main reason.

I've been doing design and writing for the game I'm working on, and while I haven't given a lot of thought to what most of the characters look like, they speak and act "white" simply because that's the perspective I have to write from. I don't think I'd be qualified to design a black character whose race was important to his personality and outlook on life, because I don't have the experience. I could, of course, design a character who acts and thinks stereotypically "black" but I don't think that would help anything. I think this demonstrates something of the problem whites have when designing black characters. If it's more than an art decision, we lack the experience to do so convincingly. In addition there is the cultural problem of trying to neither reflect stereotypes nor make the characters act too much like "white guys," either of which would offend some people.

And if you're on a gamedev forum, you're probably either involved in making a game or planning to start one, so my suggestion is: If you see something you don't like in games, make you're own and try to improve it.