Ganked this from Zar

[shamanicshaymin]

Diversity in Video Games survey

The last three questions are the biggies: you gotta list every video game you have ever played that starred a female protagonist, POC, or LGBTQ.

I listed a lot of horror games for the girls, mostly freeware like Ib and Yume Nikki. And Clock Tower, of course. Nomnomnom. Thank god I remembered Jet Force Gemini, TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventure and the Little Mermaid game on NES. I wanted to include Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable, but I hadn't played that yet. I left out games like Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Sonic Adventure since technically, your main main protagonists were still Kirby and Sonic. Sonic Rush made the cut, though, since it starred Sonic and Blaze.

Considering how many horror games I listed for female-centric games, I wonder what that tells about us as a society. :o

POCs? All I got was Portal. And zero for LGBTQ. :( I would've listed Silver Chaos, but technically, I've only seen Zar's screencaps of it, not played the game itself.

Boy, looks like video games have a lot to catch up on. :o

Comments

[straightforwardly]

This was certainly revealing. I genuinely thought I had played plenty of games with female protagonists, but most of them turned out to be "choose your gender"-type games. A hefty chunk of what was left were indie &/or otome games.

As for POC or LGBTQ, I couldn't think of any. If I have played a game with a protagonist that had either of those traits, I can't remember it.

[swordianmaster]

A lot of the problem is that the biggest source of character-driven video games is still Japan, which is not only grossly xenophobic, but also traditionalist and stuck a good thirty years behind America in terms of acceptance, if not further back. A decent number of Western-based games allow for the option to play female, or POC, but those are entirely games like Mass Effect or Grand Theft Auto or what have you, where you're an interchangable player avatar character.

That said, I can think of exactly one game from Japan where you have a non-heterosexual protagonist (if sexuality is brought up at all), that being Persona 2: Innocent Sin's Tatsuya Suou. Tatsuya, unlike pretty much every JRPG protagonist before and since, actually has a serious homosexual romance option - which some people suggest might be part of the reason that the game didn't see American release in the PSX days.

[shamanicshaymin]

I'm not surprised about Japan's xenophobia. :/ Which reminds me of an interesting tumblr post; all the characters in Japanese Anime and the like look white, but Japan views them as Japanese. If they wanted to depict someone American, they usually do it by giving the character a bigger nose or something. I'm grateful for customization, mainly because they allow you to be someone often neglected in games. :o

[larvesta]

IM SUPER LATE TO THIS BUT i just wanna contribute that whatever other problems dead island has, as of riptide 3/5 of the playable characters are POC, two of those being women.