Though recent studies have shown that blacks and Hispanics make up the majority of gamers in the U.S., both in players and game purchasers, the majority of game characters are white males.

A 2009 study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication, “The virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games. New Media Society,” found that only 3 percent of all videos game characters were Hispanic, with none of them being “playable characters.”

Nearly all other identifiable groups except white men were under-represented as well; one exception, African-American men, appeared in proportion to their presence in the population but were confined to a narrow range of game genres such as sports titles and games tied to celebrities such as 50 Cent. An additional study found that African-American characters were more likely to be represented as villains and were often given particularly frightening characteristics, resulting in a negative portrayal of that ethnic group, often by way of stereotypes.

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