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
*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:
On race and ethnicity:
Distinction between race and culture as a possible solution:
On skin tones
On hair
Conclusion
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.
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.