The homogeneous game development industry and the character designs of women and minorities in games

The aim of this thesis is to examine the character designs of female and minority characters and how their designs were produced by the lack of diversity in the game development industry. Games are largely made by white men for white men as they appear to assume that this is their only audience, which is certainly not the truth. Misogyny and racism are unfortunately extremely common in both the industry and the games themselves. As research into the field of gaming has shown, the majority of game developers are afraid of losing profiles from their assumed audience of straight white male by catering to more people.

This thesis will highlight the lack of diversity in the game development industry and how it influences the games that are made and the workplace environment in these studios. It will explore how the majority of game developers, being a homogeneous group of straight white men, create characters that fall into common tropes of objectification of female characters or harmful caricatures of minorities.

It will first examine female character designs from different decades in respect to the theoretical concept of the male gaze, objectification and the recent increase in strong female characters. It will progress onto examining the industry environment, focusing on two large mainstream game development studios; Activision Blizzard and Bioware. It will investigate their workplace environments and how it leads to the objectifying or racist character designs they create. Lastly, it will focus on the community response to the lack of diversity with modding. The game communities it will delve into are The Sims 4 (2014) and Skyrim (2011). They will be compared and the contrasting nature of their modding use is different. The desire of the gaming community for accurate representation of people from different backgrounds is reflected in the use of modding in The Sims 4.