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[Lime]

Gamasutra had this as a featured post: Two design scholars did a detailed study on character creators and the (lack of) diversity in options across 'races', skin, hair, facial features, and body types, which they then contrasted with personal accounts from interviewees. It's really good work and it's also in line with the excellent Invisibility Blues series on character creation and Evan Narcisse's fantastic article on Black hair. What is great about this particular study is that they approach it also from a design perspective in terms of technical limitations and ways to avoid the usual challenges on why for example "curly hair is too difficult to model" as the usual excuse for the status quo.

Qualification of the study

[...]it’s stated that a higher similarity between player and personal character leads to increased identification with the character, and coupled with the previous paragraph, we can assume that character-player similarity leads to media enjoyment. This would mean that if the player cannot create a character that properly resembles them, some enjoyment is lost. While of course some players sometimes want to play as characters that are dissimilar to themselves, studies show that most players find gaming scenarios more entertaining when they can create characters that are more in accordance to their own appearance (Trepte, Reinecke & Behr, 2009). So imagine the frustration when time and time again, there’s no options to create a character that looks like yourself.

*I would personally add that it's also a matter of people being exposed to different modes of being in the world - i.e. it's not necessarily only the argument that other players need to see themselves, but also that players as a whole should see other people different from themselves (e.g. straight players experiencing bisexual characters)

Parameters:

The procedure was designed with the selected games’ character creators as well as previous knowledge in mind, and focused on five categories: presets, skin, hair, facial features and body.

On race and ethnicity:

When entering a character creator one of the first choices is to pick a race. In some games there are several different human races coded with different ethnicities, while others have only one fully customizable human race. Out of the examined games, Rift, Allods Online, The Elder Scrolls Online and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning have two or more different human races, while World of Warcraft, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Guild Wars 2 and Neverwinter each have one race presented as “Human”

Distinction between race and culture as a possible solution:

A possible way to avoid creating unintentional stereotypes is to disrupt the notion of race as geographically and biologically fixed. An interviewee touches the subject too: “[Humans] often hail from different continents or countries, have different cultures and standards. I enjoy games in which the [character creator] differentiates this as a function of deeper immersion for the player. That's not to say that I think skin-tone and ethnicity would be similarly monolithic within those factions.” It would be interesting then to see a RPG in which race and culture are not one and the same, where for example the player would first choose the culture, to which abilities and the like are linked, and afterwards the race and ethnicity. It would provide interesting world-building, and would also mirror real life history, where people from all cultures have traveled all over the world throughout the ages. Similar concepts can be seen in science-fiction, for example the Federation in the Star Trek franchise, or in the Stargate franchise, where The Ancients are a humanoid species that always features people of all human ethnicities. This would naturally present another set of development challenges, but it would interesting to see an attempt in the fantasy genre.

On skin tones

When looking at the available options of skin tones for the human races in every game it can be seen that although they often offer a large number of skin tones, many of them are very similar and a lot of them feel redundant. They don’t provide a wide variety and most of them offer only a few skin tones of a darker shade, but many don’t seem to want to go “too dark”, while having several variations of lighter skin tones. The two or three top rows of colors in Rift looks near identical, and it feels unnecessary to have that many options if there is such a minimal difference, instead of widening the range to a few more lighter and darker shades. The game with the widest variety is Guild Wars 2 that not only has one or two dark skin tones, but several different very dark tones that are varied in both hue and value. It becomes extra apparent when comparing the tones to the other games, most of whom seems to reach a certain value where they stop, Allods Online being the poorest example since they simply chose to exclude all darker skin tones.

But the most noteworthy aspect of the Guild Wars 2 skin tones is that out of all the examined games, it’s the only game that has light palms and soles on the darker skin tones. It shows that they had different ethnicities in mind and actually took care to accurately portray the different skin tones, instead of just doing darker variations of a light skin tone. In many of the other games, it often looks as if they have taken the initial texture of a light skin tone and just changed it to gradually darker shades and made no actual effort in making it look realistic. It feels as if this was the case with for example Allods Online and World of Warcraft. There is no variation in the darker shades and in Allods Online, their darkest skin tone can be another game's lightest. Even though they have such a light shade, they still feel like darkened copies of the lighter skin tones and it can be seen in game. They look desaturated and unnatural and not as thought through as the lighter skin tones.

It’s also important to note differences in hue variations. One of the interviewees wrote: “Oftentimes there are only token options for non-white characters. There will be only a single Asian skin-tone and eye-shape option, for example.” Just having the the skin tones range from light to dark is not enough, there need to be a variation in the color hues themselves, and this is also applicable to dark tones.

On hair

A majority of the interviewees brought up hair as a category they are frustrated with, and for good reason. We could really sense the frustration, and it’s about the fact that there are so few hair styles other than straight textured, and that they are always the same few. “If I want to create a black character, there will often be no curly hairstyles (natural), or other identifiable facial features.” And when we look at the data results, we can immediately conclude that straight textured hair styles take up an overwhelming percentage. The graphs show that little or no effort has been put into including different hair textures, in all the games we studied. The majority of the hairstyles are always straight textured and offer a wide range of different styles that the player can choose from. But in the cases where afro textured hair is included, only a small collection, often with very few differences, is offered.

There were also not a lot of curly or wavy hairstyles, which were often an even smaller number than afro textured ones. “I understand it is the most difficult thing to render, but I've yet to see a game really blow me away with the hair options offered. Sometimes it is frustrating because the existing options COULD have been very good, but they have something awkward about them…” Hair can indeed be tricky to render realistically, especially in a game where the character can have a lot of different helmets and armor, where different parts of the mesh will cut through itself in unrealistic ways. From a technical point of view straight hair texture might be somewhat faster to make, but every single curl in a curly hairstyle does not need to be modelled individually, just like every single hair strand in straight hairstyles do not. Especially with the simplified style that most of the examined games have, hairstyles can easily be made to give the illusion of the character having curly or wavy hair; some of the games even have good examples of this.

So we’ve established that there are some great examples of varied hairstyles of different textures, so it seems it’s instead a matter of choosing what to spend effort on. And players notice this: “The lack of variety is really infuriating, especially since you can SEE how much effort went into other parts of the game.” It wouldn’t be particularly difficult to take some of the time spent on yet another straight hairstyle and make more varied and differently textured hair options for people of all ethnicities. There needs to be more variety, since the results show so few options for hair textures other than straight and since hair was a category that most of the interviewees were noticeably frustrated with. As one interviewee puts it: “It's like no one has ever seen a black woman unless she has a fro, a short fro, cornrows or is bald”. When only one or two token curly or afro textured hairstyles are offered, it shows that while they are able to include more of them, they chose not to.

Conclusion

Although the need and want for more diverse options exist, this need is not met. As the non-White interviewees answered, they can never make an accurate representation of themselves in today‟s character creators, even in games we have not examined. But adding a few more dark skin tones, a few more hairstyles that are not straight textured, and providing either a few more preset faces with different facial structures or allowing a wider range of facial customization would go a long way to include more players since these are categories that matter most to them. They do not need to be expensive additions; it is rather a question of diversifying the available options. Time spent on yet another light skin tone and straight textured hairstyle could be used to create a more equal number of diverse options. It is time to disrupt the notion of White as the default and recognize the player base for the ethnically diverse group that it is.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Thesis in full

There's much more at the links, most notably facial features and body types in Part 3.

 

[Garrett Hawke]

A lot to read through, thanks for posting. Interesting about the light palms thing, I never noticed that a lot of games didn't do it. Something to be conscious of going forward.

Edit: thinking about it now, I think this is just one of the many reasons why it's important to have diverse teams CREATING games as well. People who are actually PoCs are much more likely to notice subtle things that non-PoCs might not be able to, even if making a conscious effort to create more inclusive and diverse content.

 

[Primethius]

One of the reasons I don't care for most character creator games and would rather play an actual story character is that it's impossible for me to create someone whose brown without looking like he's a tanned white guy the majority of the time.

The amount of decent character creators I've encountered I can probably count on one hand.

 

[Phamit]

As a white person with curly wavy hair, I can confirm the selection isn't very satisfying

 

[Lime]

As a white person with curly wavy hair, I can confirm the selection isn't very satisfying

Which is funny because a lot of the excuses by some developers amount to "resources" or "memory budget" but it is clearly possible to do curly hair just as much as straight hair given some adjustments to the textures and meshes. It is simply a matter of priorities from the beginning and getting more people with insight into these things in power positions for the developer helps immensely in ensuring broader reflections of the world.

 

[Orayn]

Guild Wars 1 fits into this in an interesting way. You wound up with a different set of face, skin tone, and hairstyle choices depending on which campaign your character started from.

Prophecies (Tyria)

Factions (Cantha)

Nightfall (Elona)

There was still some diversity among those choices, and it varied between classes, but I thought actually presenting different ethnicities provided a unique angle.

 

[Spring-Loaded]

Crazy how imbalanced the options are. C'mon devs

 

[HMD]

I like character creators when they don't go overboard with facial customization. Just give me hair, facial hair, skin colour and tattoos with a bunch of pre-made faces.

 

[WrenchNinja]

*Looks at Fire Emblem Fates*

A bunch of dumb haircuts and the ability change that colour and facial features and yet no skin tone option.

 

[Creaking]

One thing I thought Fallout 4 actually did pretty well.

 

[Toxi]

I like character creators when they don't go overboard with facial customization. Just give me hair, facial hair, skin colour and tattoos with a bunch of pre-made faces.

I prefer character creators where I can make horrible monstrosities.

 

[Espada]

Not surprised to see Guild Wars 2 on here. I remember starting that up on a whim and being impressed at the wide variety of skin color options. And as they said, you can pick the hue and the value as well, which avoided the issue many other character creators have where you have a sickly looking "brown" which doesn't look realistic at all. The palms and soles thing I didn't notice until after I stripped the character down to do something goofy in a high level area.

On the hair front, it's pretty much like the rest. The graph where it shows 0 afro textured hair for women is 100% true.

Developers really need to put more effort into their character creators.

One of the reasons I don't care for most character creator games and would rather play an actual story character is that it's impossible for me to create someone whose brown without looking like he's a tanned white guy the majority of the time.

The amount of decent character creators I've encountered I can probably count on one hand.

Yeah, but if developers ditch character creators we're more likely to wind up with an nigh-endless sea of white protagonists (mostly male, mostly 20-40).

 

[Toxi]

Yeah, but if developers ditch character creators we're more likely to wind up with an nigh-endless sea of white protagonists (mostly male, mostly 20-40).

I'd say 15-40.

 

[hwalker84]

Jacob from Mass Effect is the gold standard for a common black mans hair. Made me sad you couldn't pick his hair in create-a-player.

 

[orthodoxy1095]

It’s also important to note differences in hue variations. One of the interviewees wrote: “Oftentimes there are only token options for non-white characters. There will be only a single Asian skin-tone and eye-shape option, for example.” Just having the the skin tones range from light to dark is not enough, there need to be a variation in the color hues themselves, and this is also applicable to dark tones.

Hey. Someone else with that Asian struggle.

 

[bobbychalkers]

Jacob from Mass Effect is the gold standard for a common black mans hair. Made me sad you couldn't pick his hair in create-a-player.

Still the only game where the devs understood the concept of waves.

 

[Kenzodielocke]

can someone post the black character with the beard in the division beta ? I think he looked very good ans accurate so I picked him.

 

[Spring-Loaded]

Jacob from Mass Effect is the gold standard for a common black mans hair. Made me sad you couldn't pick his hair in create-a-player.

Yeah, he looks all right, but good luck making your character on that level.

 

[Rizific]

As an Asian person, I could not careless about character creation. I usually just hit randomize until I get something that looks half decent. I wouldn't mind if character creators went away forever.

 

[Spring-Loaded]

As an Asian person, I could not careless about character creation. I usually just hit randomize until I get something that looks half decent. I wouldn't mind if character creators went away forever.

 

[Warxard]

Jacob from Mass Effect is the gold standard for a common black mans hair. Made me sad you couldn't pick his hair in create-a-player.

That Cerberus wave grease sheesh

 

[Basketball]

GTA online has a lot of options

 

[Massive Duck. C.M.]

I usually just choose the beastman/robot/etc. route with character creators that lack good options. Interesting to see this studied in tech terms.

 

[JSoup]

As an Asian person, I could not careless about character creation. I usually just hit randomize until I get something that looks half decent. I wouldn't mind if character creators went away forever.

This, but I click random once and then get to the game. Unless the characters looks have an effect on the gameplay, I refuse to waste time on it.

 

[Camjo-Z]

Any character creator that does not feature a huge joke afro hair option is a failure in my book.

Always remember when posting this that the exact same response could be made to you.

 

[dangeraaron10]

I usually just choose the beastman/robot/etc. route with character creators that lack good options. Interesting to see this studied in tech terms.

You and me both.

I really like Guild Wars 2's character creator. They actually have different human subraces in the game as well. Ascalonian are Europeans, Krytans are sorta Mediterranean? Canthans are Chinese and Elonians are African.

Although I play the game due to the very inhuman and awesome looking Charr, and also the Asura. In Skyrim I play Argonian.

 

[MisterShine]

"It would be interesting then to see a RPG in which race and culture are not one and the same, where for example the player would first choose the culture, to which abilities and the like are linked, and afterwards the race and ethnicity. It would provide interesting world-building, and would also mirror real life history, where people from all cultures have traveled all over the world throughout the ages. "

This is a very interesting post overall Lime but I'd like to chip in a response on this point made in the article. Oddly enough I am playing such an RPG right now (Pillars of Eternity) that has such a 'culture' system to stats. There are multiple races in the game that give a minor bonus (Elves get +1 dex, Humans +1 resolve, etc) but also what culture/nationality you hail from gives you an even larger stat bonus and is often mentioned either by you or other characters as a feature that identifies you. An interesting point I thought here was that it does not actually restrict what race/class you are to a specific area. Even though people from "The White That Wends" are pretty much exclusively said to be dwarves and pale elves, you can be any race and still from that area giving you a real flexibility in how you want to play your character.

 

[Sai-kun]

Great article, OP. Excited to read through it.

Always remember when posting this that the exact same response could be made to you.

except this is a topic about character creators and not about how we want to get rid of them and we don't care about them. If he doesn't care, why even enter the topic?

 

[Htown]

Always remember when posting this that the exact same response could be made to you.

The post he was responding to had a complete lack of actual content relevant to the topic. "I don't care if character creators even exist" is a dumb thing to post in a thread specifically about options in character creation.

 

[Sblargh]

Will read this up later. Thanks for posting.

 

[Retro]

Although I play the game due to the very inhuman and awesome looking Charr, and also the Asura. In Skyrim I play Argonian.

The Charr are really well done in terms of diversity too. Most developers approach the female variation of their "beast" race in one of two ways; a human female body with a wolf mask or putting a pair of human D-cups on a wolf / cat person. ArenaNet actually went out of their way to model the Charr genders on the natural sexual dimorphism of lions (the only big cats that have obvious differences between the genders); the obvious mane but also a shorter snout and slightly smaller size.

Here's an article about it. They did a lot of amazing work designing their races, and this study backs that up... still need more African hairstyles, though.

 

[A Link to the Past]

LEGO Rock Band - to my knowledge, the only non-white customization you can do is to give your in-game minifig a black man's head

 

[dangeraaron10]

The Charr are really well done in terms of diversity too. Most developers approach the female variation of their "beast" race in one of two ways; a human female body with a wolf mask or putting a pair of human D-cups on a wolf / cat person. ArenaNet actually went out of their way to model the Charr genders on the natural sexual dimorphism of lions (the only big cats that have obvious differences between the genders); the obvious mane but also a shorter snout and slightly smaller size.

Here's an article about it. They did a lot of amazing work designing their races, and this study backs that up... still need more African hairstyles, though.

Hence why I always say Charr are probably the single best playable beast races in any MMO (or RPG for that matter), the Sarnak are also good in the gender difference regard in Everquest 2, with Females actually being larger than males.

 

[Wozman23]

As a white person with long hair down to my mid-back, a mustache, and a long goatee, I too understand the struggle. I'll let my combination of facial hair slide, but I can't stand when there are no long hair options for men.

 

[Narras]

They don’t provide a wide variety and most of them offer only a few skin tones of a darker shade, but many don’t seem to want to go “too dark”, while having several variations of lighter skin tones.

I like when you have the option to make your skin tone range from any color, but whenever you try to get realistic skin tones it's either never light or dark enough.

As one interviewee puts it: “It's like no one has ever seen a black woman unless she has a fro, a short fro, cornrows or is bald”.

It's pretty ridiculous. Those are always the options. LOL

 

[……forgetit]

GTA online has a lot of options

That honestly made me want to buy GTA V finally.

 

[JSoup]

LEGO Rock Band - to my knowledge, the only non-white customization you can do is to give your in-game minifig a black man's head

The greater problem here is with LEGO, not the game itself. LEGO has a policy that games/comics/shows can't portray LEGO things that can't actually be made out of legitimately available LEGOs. Without looking it up, I'm guessing the only commercially available skin tones for human minifigs is tan and dark brown.

 

[Mr. Smiley]

GTA online has a lot of options

It has a curly afro/bob for women so yeah, GTA is one of the good ones.

 

[Primethius]

Yeah, but if developers ditch character creators we're more likely to wind up with an nigh-endless sea of white protagonists (mostly male, mostly 20-40).

I don't disagree with that statement. But personally, I'd take that over the current crop of character creators. At least white protagonists would have some personality as compared to my frankenstien attempt at making someone look like me but who doesn't really and ends up being a generic blank slate.

 

[RedSwirl]

For black people, hair and face structure options have always sucked. Fallout 4 is a little bit better than most games in those regards.

 

[Dereck]

The post he was responding to had a complete lack of actual content relevant to the topic. "I don't care if character creators even exist" is a dumb thing to post in a thread specifically about options in character creation.

Right

 

[A Link to the Past]

The greater problem here is with LEGO, not the game itself. LEGO has a policy that games/comics/shows can't portray LEGO things that can't actually be made out of legitimately available LEGOs. Without looking it up, I'm guessing the only commercially available skin tones for human minifigs is tan and dark brown.

Even still, I'm sure that there are more black minifig heads than that one, y'know? I'd be really surprised if they didn't have a single black female minifig head

 

[Sickboy007]

For black people, hair and face structure options have always sucked. Fallout 4 is a little bit better than most games in those regards.

Women's hair sucks though. GTA Online is kind of in its own category for mainstream games.

 

[Toxi]

The greater problem here is with LEGO, not the game itself. LEGO has a policy that games/comics/shows can't portray LEGO things that can't actually be made out of legitimately available LEGOs. Without looking it up, I'm guessing the only commercially available skin tones for human minifigs is tan and dark brown.

They're getting better about that.

 

[Speely]

Really interesting research that I am glad is being done. Still reading through. A bit innacurate at a glance, though. ESO also has lighter palms for black races (Redguard.) In addition to that, the actual feature options for the race are decidedly more African rather than just adjusting skin tone. Funny since Redguards are a fictional analogue of Africans/Persians. Still the best I have seen in regard to black people in a MMORPG as far as options go. I love making Redguards in that game for that reason.

 

[Walpurgis]

One of the reasons I don't care for most character creator games and would rather play an actual story character is that it's impossible for me to create someone whose brown without looking like he's a tanned white guy the majority of the time.

The amount of decent character creators I've encountered I can probably count on one hand.

I've given up on attempting to create myself many years ago. I'm actually still surprised to hear that people can do it since it seems so impossible. I usually create a new character that I don't see as myself and I just control them. So for me, it is basically: empty shell of a character that I glued together (that definitely is not me) vs defined character with story and etc. This is one of the reasons why I want more games to go The Witcher 3 route.

The character that I create is typically African like myself (when possible). The game that pissed me off the most with no darker skin tones was World of Warcraft. I made a human death knight and this was the darkest it went.

It basically looked like a suntanned white person in game. I think gnomes were even worse and couldn't go this dark (and that was my main).

As a white person with curly wavy hair, I can confirm the selection isn't very satisfying

It's ridiculous how rare it is when curly/wavy hair is so common. I usually just go with super short straight hair if I can.

Really interesting research that I am glad is being done. Still reading through. A bit innacurate at a glance, though. ESO also has lighter palms for black races (Redguard.) In addition to that, the actual feature options for the race are decidedly more African rather than just adjusting skin tone. Funny since Redguards are a fictional analogue of Africans/Persians. Still the best I have seen in regard to black people in a MMORPG as far as options go. I love making Redguards in that game for that reason.

I always thought Redguard were horn of Africa. I don't know their lore though.

 

[Jerry Orbach]

They're getting better about that.

Wow! When I was a kid the only color they had was chinese.

 

[Dame]

Lime. You are starting to become one of my favourite gaffers. This is detailed and well a thorough post. This shows part of the reason why representation is so important. I'd kill for an rpg with a cast other than one tolken POC.

One of the reasons I don't care for most character creator games and would rather play an actual story character is that it's impossible for me to create someone whose brown without looking like he's a tanned white guy the majority of the time.

The amount of decent character creators I've encountered I can probably count on one hand.

Coincidentally, looked at the Wolrd of Warcraft creator and realised just how little dark skin is even a thing. Bloodborne was hilarious in that if there was an option for anything other than white, they hid that very well during my otherwise enjoyable playthrough.Game developers just really forget that people of colour exist sometimes.

Edit: Wow. Walpurgis beat me to it.

 

[timetokill]

Great link, Lime.

As a white person who has wavy hair when long, I always knew but still find it funny that there are even fewer options than typically "black" hair styles.

Anyway, it would definitely be nice to see more facial features incorporated especially. There are usually so few types of eyes, noses, lips and so on, that you really often run a risk of making a "dark-skinned caucasian," regardless of how colorful your skin palette is.

 

[Phoenix Fang]

Jacob from Mass Effect is the gold standard for a common black mans hair. Made me sad you couldn't pick his hair in create-a-player.

Just so you know, not every black man's hair is like that. For example my hair is more of say someone from like India and I'm from Haiti. I know a lot of black men in London with the type of hair I have.

if I cut my hair, it might look like what it does in the picture you posted but if I let it grow out, it looks nothing like that. So i don't think it's the "gold standard" as you put it.