A Quantitative Study of Ethnicity and Gender in Video Games

Dmitri Williams of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, et al., conducted a census of video game characters and concluded that non-Whites and women were vastly underrepresented:

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.[...]

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.

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.


The researchers also noted that video games originating in Asia demonstrated a similar disparity.

Link via Popular Science

Image: flickr user Gamer Score Blog used under Creative Commons License.

Game characters are well considered by their creators. Cataloging the distribution of ethnicity in real societies might be of interest. But since every game society is the result of intelligent design, wouldn't it generate more useful information if the researchers asked those creators why they made their choices?
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Hollywood has a bit of the same problem: If an ethnic character is included, then any possible negative associaton with that character risks controversy and backlash.
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So, is this the "omg that's sexist" du jour?

Male gamers far outnumber female gamers. Quite often, gamers want to play as a character of their own gender. Two plus two equals four.
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Although it is not specified, I believe the story is about in-game characters, and not player-made characters.

I'm sure player-made characters would be a very different set of results.
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Well I imagine a good chunk of the games surveyed were games that focused on professions already heavily male dominated in real life. Such as war games, or professional sports games.
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Alright, I managed to actually read the study through my school's library. Apparently they took the top selling video games from each console/pc as of 2005-2006. They then weighed games depending on how many copies were sold. So if one game sold 4 million copies and another sold 2 million, the 4 million one had double the value.

The thing that really annoys me is they don't list the specific games they used which I find really sloppy. However, if we think about this logically, the vast majority of top selling games are either war related or sports related.

I don't discount that women are featured less prominently than men. However, I believe the sample of games they used made it impossible to realisticly expect a 50:50 ratio.
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It's not that women don't play computer games, but they tend to dominate in more abstract game genres, rather than the first- or third-person views that were probably studied here. Tetris and Bejeweled don't have gendered avatars in game so much.
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"abstract" game genre. why do girls play those games? BEJEWELED?? what the heck? anyways, yeah, no big deal. asian and white men make video games and primarily asian and white men play them.

i used to play smash bros competitively though and i have to say that black men are surprisingly engaged in the video game community as well. this alludes to what is probably the biggest injustice.
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This is so stupid. I don't feel under represented. Tons more males play computer games than females so it's expected. And gosh! Those Asian developers over representing Asians in Asia! Who would have thought? What IS the world coming to?!
... What a waste of research money.
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In other news, men are almost completely unrepresented in commercials for feminine hygiene products, even though they make up almost half the population of the world!

Sexism!
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