I guess I'm one of the people who think that representation matters. While equality means that it doesn't really matter if a video game character is straight/gay/black/white/male/female/European/American/Asian or whatever, the absence of said characters could imply that the gaming world does not acknowledge their existence.
I doubt you'll find many that disagree that representation matters, as it's an important diversifier. I think treating identities as cardboard or window dressing isn't the representation anyone wants. Absence of a said character is also not the disacknowledgement of their existence. A historical game happening in Congo during the Bantu kingdoms, isn't going to get someone to shout out "where's my asians/white characters?!?". Such a thing is just representation for representation's sake, treating characters merely cardboard pieces, treating history and culture as irrelevant to some larger goal of representation. Heck, representation for representation's sake often ends up portraying an identity as a caricature, dumbing things down to the closest common denominator. It's often filled with lots of blunt signaling, rather than treating a character as a person of many complex identities and attributes.
Imagine a game happening in Norway during the 1950s. Of course there wouldn't be any black people or asian people present. It wasn't until around the 1970s that asylum seekers and other immigration lead to influx of people with darker skin colors. Of course, people knew they existed, but they thought black people as a rather exotic (and backwards) phenomenon during the late 19th and early 20th century. Once black people came to Norway (outside of Christian Hansen Ernst, a postmaster, which was the first black official in Norway, a slave from England that during the 17th century became the servant of the Stadtholder of Norway, Gyldenløve. And another during the early 19th century ) they were a small amount of the population and would be an unlikely person to meet. If you met them, they might be having language troubles, their experience in the local community could differ a lot, but likely a mix of being included and excluded (racism). But the characters themselves aren't just "the black characters", they'd have a cultural background from the country they emigrated from, they'd have their own particularities and tendencies.
Take Peter Parker. He's white, but what gave him an additional dimension to separate himself from the multimillionaire genius heroes, was that he came from a struggling home in Queens with a low amount of minority families, outside of jewish families,, having lost his parents, struggling with fitting in at school, while having a penchant for science as a subject. He also has an ego, he feels wronged by society/his peers, then he becomes Spiderman and the first thing he does is try to make money off it. This obsession with money and being a star, leads to him letting a criminal go, that ultimately leads to the murder of his beloved uncle. That trauma defines Peter through his whole life and it'll be what leads to a difficult marriage, a harsh financial situation and a loss of his professional ambitions.
And on a more personal note, I take myself as an example.
I like playing as a straight while male, because I *am* a straight white male and I prefer my gaming avatar to be similar to my race and sexuality. While it's not a be-all-end-all situation (for some reason I always create a redguard in my first playthrough in any Elder Scrolls game and I will pick female characters in fighting games sometimes), it *is* my preference.
I guess we're different then. Because it matters rather little to me, as long as the game respects its character and its setting. In games where you can create your character, I might make a female character, a male character, a white character or a black character or just fantastical humanoids. It's not a representation of me, as I don't feel more in line with white characters at all any more than I do black characters. I rarely have a specific goal in mind, especially given how quality of models varies a lot between games. (Playing as a male human in World of Warcraft? Nope. Made a female instead.) Heck, in Wasteland 2, I made a transgender character called "Goldilocks" Williams, which I wrote this bio for:
"Born the son of a british royalty, 24th in line of the throne, Ms. Williams enjoyed an upbringing with beluga, foie gras and ballroom dances in the royal court. Along with the privileges, expectations also followed, and when her father once caught her dressing up in her mom's dresses, they cruelly appeared. She was sent to a boarding school for boys and her father threatened that if she were ever to do something similar again, she would be killed, "... rather than our family suffering such shame". Constantly in conflict with her self of being, in which she identified herself as female, while being met with the harsh reality of outside expectations, she started to develop a persona to tackle this cruel reality. "Goldilocks" Williams, named after her favourite fairy tale and William the Conquerer, were to be her wall of shelter, in which she could build up confidence. Spending most of her school years reading books and her spare time putting on a mask while attending social gatherings her father forced her to attend, she dreamt of freedom. Eventually as her courage had built up and her desire for freedom had grown after puberty, she appeared dressed up in a ball gown on a commemoration dinner for her father, shocking everyone. Laughing while she ran out of the dining hall, she grabbed a bag of supplies she had stashed and took an airplane to America. Enjoying her newfound freedom, she was working at a burlesque club when the disaster hit. Almost starving to the death under the debris of the club, she was eventually saved by a group of Desert Rangers and eventually joined them in their cause."
Generally making characters is creative expression for me. When it comes to fixed characters, then I might care more about what kind of powers/skills/weapons they have. Or I might care especially about how I can empathize with their struggles or feel cathartic with their emotional drive, in a general way (themes of isolation, anger, vengeance, tragedy, all kinds of themes/situations/emotions that we all can feel a familiarity with).
And since *I* think this way, I'm sure there are others who think this way as well. A woman may prefer her gaming avatar to be a female, a gay character may prefer to have gay romance options, etc.
In *this* way of thinking, I think that there should be some games which have a trans character as a protagonist, or a character creation option. While I do not disagree with your opinion that a trans person may see himself as a 'herself', we cannot dismiss the possibility that some trans people may see themselves as neither male nor female, but as something in-between. So for those transpeople, who are also gamers, this game is a solid option.
There might, but there might not. In fact, maybe it's not as important as you think for most people. I asked my wife just now and she said she preferred whatever looked the best in her opinion, which is rather in line with what I do. Some might feel differently, but I've yet to see someone do this as much. The amount of horde representation in WoW also makes me view it less as a common thing. Maybe the amount of humans on the alliance side could be a sign, but even that isn't as favorable as the two races closest to the core of the Alliance (gnome, dwarf and humans), the two others are more silly or caricatures of fantasy tropes.
If some transperson views themselves as in "the middle", then that's a rather dubious position. That's because a binary system is simple and exclusionary. One which tries to get in the middle of two poles, doesn't really make much sense to me. That would severely negate a lot of the body and self-esteem issues for a transperson, since they'd be partially in sync with their perceived gender. Then it might just be a case of gender expression, since it's something working along a masculine-feminine spectrum. At that point it's seeming more like attempting to generate a third gender, but that third gender doesn't really exist in any practical way. These people seem like the people that are making things harder for transpeople, which have generally just the wish to be recognized as the gender they identify as.
Creating a transgender character that doesn't have signs of being transgender or struggles or any other relevance to being transgender, is just a "CIS male/female" character, because generally the transgender aspect is an internal issue, which wouldn't even exist if it wasn't externally represented. You can see if someone's gay, you can only assume based on stereotypes, if the story or gameplay doesn't in any way treat them as gay. A footnote is just treating a character as a cardboard figure, as a marketing tool, as token representation.
Whenever gaming companies spend times focusing on representation they're often doing a disservice to everyone. Imagine if they were instead treating characters seriously and taken the breadth of people and cultures in the world seriously? Why isn't there a game focusing on the Bantu kingdom? Or the Zulu Kingdom? What about a gay person during a time when being gay is dangerous and where you tread carefully? Or what about a gay person that represses himself because he sees himself as sinful, dealing with an environment where homosexuality is seen as sin, while that not being his biggest struggle or even the most important part of the character? That's because what most gaming companies actually have is generally little respect for minorities and minority characters. It's just a checkbox or a cardboard figure to stick in. Of course, there are many exceptions as well, but it's a general trend that can be seen in some industries, where they seem to believe minority characters can't stand on their own or that color is "irrelevant for the character"/a color palette.
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