This has been bothering me for YEARS now. I see several points that keep popping up over and over. First, there's the lack of racial minorities in lead roles in video games. This is usually quickly rebutted with a list of games. Then the camp of "All the ethnic characters are always stereotypes!" and the camp of "The ethnic characters are always just recolors of a white guy" show up. Sometimes I'm seeing both in the same reply.

No one will ever be satisfied with the racial aspect of video games because of those two statements. To get a completely believable racial character, you have to walk a very, very fine line. That line is in a different place for pretty much EVERY person. Anytime you attempt to include racial topics in a game, you're going to fall into "That's so stereotypical, you guys are racists" or "That guy is acting so white." I don't get it. What does a black guy act like? How does he differ from a white guy? If you drop an african, a russian, a japanese man, a korean, a mexican, a canadian and an american into an alien infested city, is there really going to be a cultural difference in the way they blast their way out of it? I think it's a step FORWARD when you can say that you could change the white character into a black character or vice versa, it shows that we've advanced enough as a society to not need to have a character acting in a stereotypical manner to denote his race.

If you want to see factors like racism, slavery, prejudice, or government injustice played out I think we've got those covered in spades. Everything from Fallout to The Elder Scrolls to Final Fantasy to Grand Theft Auto has played into the topics of racism and injustice over the years. I don't see what we're really missing unless we want an affirmative action simulator or a game where your character loses 5 points of morale when a random old lady on the street hugs her purse closer to her chest.