Video Game Character Creation, or Do I Have To Be a White Guy?

The video game character creation screen represents the clearest aesthetic iteration of the medium’s promise of agency. The player is given the ability to create a self-insert character or a fantastical projection and then become whoever they want to be within the game world curated by the designer. Yet, the UI design of character creation screens undercuts that promise of agency by typically making the default created character align with the typical video game protagonist: white, male, muscular, and conventionally attractive. Combining both qualitative readings of select character creation screens with quantitative analysis of a larger corpus of character creators, this talk explores the default created character presented in over 200 video games from 1984 to 2026, spanning genres from the CRPG to the cozy sim to the sports game. In doing so, the talk asks if the standard default starting character creates and sustains a racial aesthetic, one in which the player is always implicitly a white guy.

 

About the Speaker

Austin Anderson PhD is a Provostial Fellow at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Critical Game Studies Lab. He studies how games are enmeshed with race, gender, and class while also examining the liberatory potentials of gameworlds. His first book project, Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies, creates a formalist framework for analyzing the racial aesthetics of videogames. He has published in the fields of game studies, African American literary studies, and comic studies, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Transformative Works and Culture, Electronic Book Review, KULA, The Comparatist, Popular Culture Review, ADE Bulletin, ASAP/Review, and other outlets. He currently serves on the Multiplay Editorial Board and the SCMS Precarious Labor Committee.

Lunch at 11:45 a.m. for in-person attendees

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