VIDEO games tend to deal in fantasy rather than reality, but you might hope that the characters who populate them reflect the make-up of the real human population. No such luck. As the first 鈥渧irtual census鈥� of US video games shows, the demographics of the virtual characters diverge sharply from the US population (see ).
The survey, carried out by at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and colleagues, revealed that white adult males make up 85 per cent of game characters. Women, black people, children and elderly people are few and far between (New Media and Society, ).
The results closely parallel results of similar studies of TV characters, even though they are for quite different audiences.
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