Final Project Report

White Characters are the most prominent on video game covers

The number of white characters on video game covers outweighs all the other types by at least 2:1. Out of five possible categories, only one had even half of the number of white people depicted.

My corpus is made up of a random selection of twenty-eight of the top video games of all time according to Gamespot.com. The method is quantitative content analysis, in which the characters on each video game cover was coded first as white, black, other race, creature/robot, or inanimate objects.

The previous study was found in Chapter Four of the Sex in Consumer Culture textbook. It was conducted by Smith, Pieper, and Choueiti (“Video game packaging and ad copy: Are gaming publishers in compliance with the ARC,” 2004, Previously Unpublished Raw Data). This study looked at 74 games that were US best sellers in 2003. It first categorized the games according to their intended console, i.e. Xbox, PlayStation. The researchers then took note of the rating assigned to each game. After that, the covers were tallied according to gender distribution, degrees of nudity, and sexually revealing clothing. The researchers found that males are 89% more likely to be shown on covers than females. When females are shown, they are shown partially nude or in revealing clothing 73% of the time. Less than a third of the males were pictured in that way.

There are two relevant studies used by Smith, Pieper, and Choueiti. The first is a study by Children Now (“Girls and gaming: A console video game content analysis,” 2000, http://childrennow.org). This study looked at how often females were portrayed on video game covers and also noted if they were shown in a provocative light. It looked at 24 video game covers and found that 54% had main female characters, but only two covers had females on them. Both were shown provocatively. The second study was performed by E.F. Provenzo (“Video kids: Making sense of Nintendo,” 1991, Harvard University Press). This study looked at the jackets of 47 top selling Nintendo games and found that males outnumbered females by a ratio of 13 to 1. Provenzo also found that figures with no identifiable gender were more likely to be shown than females.

Of the twenty-eight video game covers sampled, twelve depicted white characters. Whites were shown in a variety of different genres, ranging from games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 to Resident Evil 4. Only four covers featured black characters. It is interesting to note that of those four, three were on the cover of NFL related games. One black man was shown on the cover of a game where one must complete illegal missions for different crime lords. Two of the covers were placed in the other race category. Both were martial arts games depicting Asians as the main characters. Six of the twenty-eight covers were coded into the creature/robot category. This category was for characters whose race was difficult to ascertain. It included characters from Halo, Metroid Prime, and Banjo-tooie. The last category was for inanimate objects. Of the four covers in this category, two pictured designs (Elder Scrolls IV, Diablo), one portrayed weaponry (Zelda), and one was a racing game that depicted cars on the cover.

This mini-study used the same methods employed by the three previous studies shown. Rather than looking at gender or sexualized content, this study focused on the portrayal of race on top selling video game covers. Whites are the most likely to be pictured, followed by characters with no race identity (creatures/robots). Blacks and inanimate objects are depicted with about the same frequency, and the category with the least amount of tallies is other race (seen as Asians). This study could be enlarged by also nothing the specific genre that certain races are more likely to be found on. For example, could Blacks be shown more often on violent or sports games? Are whites most prominently shown on fantasy video games? The rating of each game in correlation with the race of the figure on the cover could also be taken into account.