No, the reason why we have so many bland white male characters is marketing.

No. Because there are so many bland white, male gamers.

I don't think so. Once you devalue you the character, you're actually free in a way; if the character doesn't matter, the character can be anything. A glowering bird, for instance.

So why? I say: circular reinforcement.

People believe it's sellable and it feels like the default choice, so games come out with it... People then say "look at what's selling", see that it's default and maybe even blame the "bland, white, male gamers" and they'll repeat repeat repeat.

It may or may not actually matter. Anyone who isn't a white male with brown hair is enjoying games with people who don't look like themselves, so I don't buy that white males won't do the same.

I wouldn't say that marketing is the cause, in my opinion it would be more on the PR side. I say this because, in this day and age, when characters are created to represent anyone other than a white male, one has to be extremely careful of stereotypes. Unfortunately the least offensive, or at least easiest to defend, character is a white male. I love when games take chances on other characters. To me the whole point of playing a game is getting to experience things that you cant in reality.

But that is not the point of this article. I agree with the concept of experience first, but isn't the character part of the game play experience? If Red Dead Redemption had us play as an awkward, clumsy clown that cracked jokes every two minutes the experience would have been a little different.

AAA games get the worst of both worlds. Regurgitated experiences in the name of "great gameplay" and stagnant characterization. People often say things like, "Oh well lets make a first person shooter in Vietnam instead of WW2," "Lets make the next Assassins Creed pirate themed!" or "lets add a branching story line to Call of Duty!" and expect that to automatically refresh everything.

Bland, white, male characters?

-An overweight plumber in overalls
-A family of gorillas
-A female space bounty hunter
-A pink gelatinous sphere with a mouth
-A space-bound fox

...I'm not always defensive of Nintendo, but to say their characters don't have character is not something I would levy against them... that's why characters in Nintendo franchises do so well in a game like Smash Brothers, since they are all distinct (in profile / size / shape / color palette) verses what happens when you have your standard "bland, brooding, bald, white male" Cole McGraths of the world)

No, the reason we have so many bland, white male human protagonists is because there are no innovatory gameplay mechanics forcing the orthodoxy to appear incongruous. Valve were forced to put a disabled person in one of their games due to the amount of falling involved in Aperture Science's test chambers, making her a light agile trapped woman is a natural step - Marcus Fenix would not have suited the role taken by Chell in Portal. I'm sure others can think of many fantastical characters like Kirby that couldn't even be human:

http://masseffect.bioware.com/me2/universe/squad/subject_zero/

Hollywood marketing tends to rehash human male protagonists freeing vunerable females and the videogames industry tends to follow this low-risk formula. However, TV shows such as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has had five strong female characters, with only two of them being human. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had another five, with the only human being from an ethnic minority and the space station run by a black man. So, maybe the trend is being led by Science Fiction. Uhura, anyone?

@Jerry Shamblin

Clicking on my name will provide a link to my profile. I am the Lead Designer of
the genre-fusing MMORTSFPSRPG 'Universe' (currently in production):

http://www.videogameinsiderjobs.com/video-game-designer-job-descri ption/

Although, due to the scale of this endeavour my focus has largely been on tools development so at present I am more of a Middleware Programmer. 'Universe' will encourage players to stay 'in character' by awarding them Kudos points for consistent role-play within its open world which can then be used to obtain roles that are more complex and demanding - kind of like how winning an Academy Award benefits your career as an actor. Unlike most games there won't be the orthodox pre-scripted story as much as a player history that is shaped by the
game to conform to an underlying theme through the manipulation of AI driven dramatis personae whose interpersonal relationships and machinations indirectly affect your character only as a bystander, before they entangle themselves with NPCs at the periphery of these organisations in order to build a web of trust and infiltrate their ranks. A lot of the technology depends upon the creation of some parameterized archetypes - so, just as you might create the appearance of your character through the adjustment of some sliders in Skyrim, this tool would deal with specifying their psychological makeup, childhood trauma, fears and desires so that simulation would generate convincing and gradually revealing emergent behaviour that was regulated by self-consciousness provided that they maintain their mental equilibrium. Obviously, there won't be pre-recorded speech unless I can get something similar to Douglas Adams' Spookitalk to work for me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spookitalk#Gameplay

Localization is such a nuisance that it may just be easier to leave it all as text, although it may be something that could be retrofitted by an international group of modders if coded the right way. Cyberpunk 2077 looks to be multilingual:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RzwUslpNe4k

Another interesting thing about character is that objects can be imbued with it. I recently saw one of the developers of Bioshock: Infinite talk about how they took a gameplay mechanic intended to swarm, distract and attack enemies and give it personality by representing it as a drinkable Vigor which enabled you to unleash a "Murder of Crows":

http://uk.ign.com/wikis/bioshock-infinite/Vigors

Which looks like this in gameplay footage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8DomvUSV_o&t=8m20s

This was further reified into a object for a charity auction:

http://playforjapan.org/2011/04/11/
auction-murder-of-crows-bottle-signed-by-irrational-games/

So, I would argue that developers should try to inject personality into everything around the player, to think about the backstory behind the cause as much as the gameplay effect, to imbue objects and environments with history and character.

Not necessarily. I think creators only have personal and cultural experiences to pull from. It’s sort of an “exposure bank”. So if you only have the same types of people who have, for the most part, all had the same life experiences growing up and similar tastes. It’s going to show in their products.

It’s really no one’s fault. But, most of the decision makers in the gaming industry are all the same and have roughly similar life experiences to pull from, which is (IMO) why there is a lot of similarity in most of the games that come out.

This is why it’s important for the decision makers to step out of their comfort zone and experience new things, like new foods, new cultures, read a different genera of book… or simply learn the art of creativity. It’s also important to know that if you want more authentically diverse products, there needs to be more diversity when it comes to the types of people making the decisions.

Good artists are always trying new things and searching for new inspirations to pull from. They understand how it enriches their product. Design is no exception… Suits and Decisions makers sometime don’t understand the importance of that concept.

@Michael DeFazio

You named a few characters out of a vast majority of characters out there. The truth is that game characters can be separated into three main types: bland white males, non-human, and every other type of human (non-white males and white females). When you separate it into those three MAIN categories, which one is the larger percentage of what you see/remember in games?

A lot of what drives Miyamoto isn't about where he wants to focus, but what he feels can be perfected.

He is an incredibly selective perfectionist. He probably refused to add online multiplayer to games because they are prone to harming the experience. He partially doesn't like heavy story in games because localization is so prone to being botched. He's also been unable to figure out how to tell deep character based stories without cutscenes, which he generally dislikes. I think he doesn't do story because he knows he cannot perfect it.

In all forms of design there is something to picking one element and perfecting it - or at least focusing on the essentials - whatever you determine it/them to be. Depth not breadth.

I would argue the opposite. Miyamoto is a designer unlike any other because of the unique situation he is in. It's rare for a game designer to be so influential in the development of game hardware. Miyamoto may very well be the "last" of this kind of game designer.

Exactly. Being on iOS/Android wouldn't be freeing - it would be a constraint. Touchscreen-only interfaces as the de-facto final standard would forever limit the range of game types this man can produce, whereas at Nintendo he's almost single handedly able to shape the interface paradigms of the future. And what's the future of our interactive medium if the evolution of man/machine interface is relegated to an afterthought?

http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/50-new-nintendo-ips-since-year-2000.206 143097/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nintendo_franchises
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Software_development_studios

I'm inclined to say that Nintendo takes risks with new IPs more than once in a while. More recent IPs would be Pandora's Tower, Xenoblade, Steel Diver, Pushmo, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, Chibi Robo, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Rhythm Heaven, Luigi's Mansion, Pikmin...

I'm almost inclined to say that Nintendo takes many chances with new IPs, and they're not all massive successes, even. Maybe people just remember the successes, or forget that Pikmin, Metroid Prime, Smash Bros, and many, many other things were all "new IPs" once.

That said, your point is certainly well taken. I would sooner point to Star Fox Adventures and Kirby's Epic Yarn as cases where a game idea was heavily influenced by franchise staples. It would be more productive for the Nintendo internal development teams not to assume that every platformer should star Mario, or that every action adventure idea is automatically going into the next Zelda game. I'm of the opinion that they don't actually go about it that way, but I certainly can imagine they scrapped a lot of ideas which might have made for wonderful new games in their own right.

Funny you mention Star Fox Adventures, seeing as that game was pigeonholed into an existing franchise a good way into its development. And as Anita Sarkeesian has demonstrated in her latest video, there were some unfortunate consequences.

Also, does it really count as a new IP if it has "Mario," "Luigi" or "Kirby" in the title?

I think he's being gentle here because Nintendo's created some monster new genre owning IP's that hardly get recognised as games at all. Wii Sports? Wii Fit? Brain Training? Animal Crossing? Nintendogs? A lot of the time this stuff gets swept under the carpet by the 'core media', but the numbers and influence are staggering. It's true that Nintendo doesn't make new IP if you ignore all the new IP they make - it's just that the new stuff they make doesn't conform to the expectation of what 'new IP' has to be - universes with narratives. Again, this is a microcosm (or rather a macrocosm) of exactly what Miyamoto is talking about. Which do we better recognize as a clear new IP this gen? Wii Sports or Dead Space? But which is actually more important?

Still, the point has weight, and it ties back to what I think is Nintendo's greatest weakness: they only have 5000 employees! They need to make more stuff and faster, so that they'd have the schedule to make new experimental games on the backs of fresh IP, parrallel to experimental stuff with existing IP (they actually do this, but not enough of it), as well as, you know, reduce the dry spells. To increase their capacity they need more hands on deck, but unfortunately they can't grow their studios while maintaining their craftsman like quality in short order. They could have bought studios in in 2008 when they were flush with cash (and they did make a few purchases - the loss of Cing was a terrible missed opportunity), but as we've seen so many times, buying studios doesn't effectively translate into buying talent.

That's fair. I probably shouldn't have used the term IP - I did mean it in the "universe" sense.

Mine too!