Hey you look like me!

So as a chick I've often been sad when games don't bother to have a female character to play. Today I started playing Alice Madness Returns and was describing it to a friend.

ME: I'm playing as Alice but she has a big ass knife for killing
MOSTLY ASIAN FRIEND: So she's basically me
ME: No, she's a honkie
MOSTLY ASIAN FRIEND: So half me
ME: yes.

I'm not being racist, just accurate. I don't think it's bad to have characters that are white or male, I just think there should be more variety. I want to be able to play as a girl which is often not easy. Luckily I'm white so most female characters when they exist look like me. And you know most people relate better to characters that look like them.

Personally I'm not nearly as pale as Alice but I'm sure I'm as crazy as she is. Although I tend to wash the blood out of my clothes.

Many video games have a range of genders, races and sexualities but those are as rare as a stripper with a Ph.D in Mathematics. The first two inclusive games that come to mind are Mass Effect and Borderlands. Much has been written around the interwebs about Mass Effect and its gender and sexual inclusivity so onto Borderlands 2.

I played Borderlands 2 with my boyfriend and his friend(basically his non-sexual life partner) and they played as the commando and the siren so I was left with either a husky short male or a non gender specific assassin. The choice was easy. Zero, the assassin has a male voice but for the most part is gender neutral. Zero is fun to play but when Gearbox released a second female character I switched teams. Both the female characters are white and one is too young to have a sexual identity but the siren is mainly appears to be heterosexual. The non player characters are generally white and also heterosexual. I should note that the gunzerker appears as latino or hispanic, basically not white.

Here's a picture of Gaige to break up this wall of text. 

Overall the game is heterocentric which is going to be common in video games/entertainment for many more years to come. On the bright side the game is not heteronormative, the female characters have as many responsibilities, skills and talents as their male counterparts. There are fewer females in the game than men but I think it's closer to 1/3 females than the typical 1/4 ratio. Also many of the females are very strong and well developed. I found Tiny Tina and Moxxi to be more developed in the personality realm than some of the comparable male NPCs. There is also a remarkable amount of discussion about sexual pasts and it generally does not come off as the typical slut/stud dynamic.

In Borderlands the female characters are most often in overly sexualized outfits but in all fairness the male characters are also on display and their physical traits are nowhere near realistic either. The entire game is very sexual, one of the characters skill trees is sexual tyrannosaurus, I've seen pornos that are less sexually charged.

Clearly Borderlands is not a polite conversation sort of game but the raunchiness does go both ways along with a fair variety of characters.

Anyway back to my main point, damn am I lucky that I'm not trying to find a character that is female and hispanic and a lesbian.