28/09/2015
A Survey of First-person Shooters and their Avatars
By Michael Hitchens
This piece of text looks at the broader scope within
first-person shooter games, it looks at how time, gaming platforms and settings
of the game affect the characteristic of avatars in the game. It examines the
race, gender and background of the avatars in the game and how these things are
affected by the platform and time.
This piece of text picks up on how there is an effect on how
the avatars are portrayed due to the year the game was released and on what
platform they were released on. World events were effecting the portrayal of
the avatars within the games.
The text begins with Wolfenstein as an example, ‘Figure 1 shows Wolfenstein 3D (id Software,
1992), the face of the avatar, B.J. Blazkowicz, directly in the centre of the
player’s view. This avatar is well-defined: a Caucasian male, with a military
background.’ I feel Wolfenstein has been picked because it has a Caucasian
male with military background as the playable character that is still being
used to this date. It also later questions if ‘other platforms and avatar types come to prominence?’ I pulled this
out because the original game was released onto IBM PC and the avatar being a
Caucasian male and it asks if much has changed since its release, for me, I
don’t think much has changed.
This text uses lots of surveys and looks at games released
from 1991 to 2009. It looks at 550 first-person shooter titles. It states it
does not include every FPS title, but it allows use to grasp an idea of what is
most common within the FPS genre.
Firstly, it looks at how many titles were released in the
given years and it shows a considerable increase after 2001. FPS games prior to
2001 were mainly in the low 20s, but then in 2002 onwards FPS games are being
released at about 40 to 50 titles a year, proving that it became more popular. Another
table also shows that PC Has the most amounts of titles available and the most
title exclusively on PC. So from the original question asked in the
introduction, I feel that it is very obvious that PC is the biggest platform for
FPS genre, as well as possibly a whole.
Next is what gender the avatar is. We were asked if much has
changed since the release of Wolfenstein in 1992 and the statistics gathered
show use that males are still the most used gender for avatars in first-person
shooter titles. Over all of the titles investigated, 390 titles used male
avatars and 20 used female avatars. I feel this is due to males being seen as
the dominant gender in combat situations and also historically, females were
not allowed on the battlefield as in World War 2. So this shows the in single
player first-person shooter titles, male avatars dominate.
When we move onto race, not much has changed either from
when Wolfenstein was released. The figures show us that Caucasian avatars are
the more dominant choice in first-person shooter titles. If we look at the
overall avatar race in FPS titles, we see that:
347 - Caucasian
5 - African or African American
7 - Asian
5 - North American India
67 – Multiple
32 – unspecified
In the text it raises a point that because in FPS titles, we
see the same view, that the avatars race is not often bought to the players’
attention. In most FPS games we see the players hand, so why are the avatars
dominantly Caucasian? In titles which are set in WW2, the avatars are mainly
British or American so it is more typical to have Caucasian avatars for the
setting of the title. But more current titles will feature African American
avatars more frequently. There is no
real answer to this as to why Caucasian avatars are used, but I feel it is due
to players wanting to be the stereotypical Caucasian American male as the
playable avatar. I think this because it has been apparent since 1992 because
popular games only had Caucasians avatars to play as.
Finally, another main point looked at in first-person
shooter titles is the background of the avatars. As the main objective in
first-person shooter titles is to shoot, it is obvious that the avatars
background is dominantly from military background, just like Wolfenstein.
Overall, military background accounts for 287 of these titles. Civilian is then
in second with 36 and intelligence in third with 34 in the overall standing. I
think it is obvious as to why military is the strongest background for FPS
titles as the player will be given an avatar which is highly skilled and have a
strong arsenal.
Overall, this text shows us that from 1992 to 2009,
Caucasian males with a military background are most common choices for
first-person shooter titles. Over all these years nothing has changed and I
feel that it still won’t change. I understand that, not necessarily to have a
successful game you need to use Caucasian males to sell the game, but it seems
that this is how most titles are being created by companies as it is part of
the ‘norm’ how everyone else has been doing it for all these years and to start
doing something different, might not work for the title. I think that gender
and race shouldn’t play a part in the titles creation, as in I feel that the
title should feature a broader variety in the avatars gender and race within
the title.
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