"Most games I play lack a protagonist figure with a distinct race or gender," I said on Twitter, having already examined this recently. Someone who disagreed replied that I "must not play many games" and suggested I examine the covers of the top ten bestsellers on vgchartz.com for what SJWs call "POC."
You often hear that race is a social construct. One popular SJW construction of race divides people into two categories, white and POC. POCs are non-white, but some POCs are "white-passing" and appear white, but from just the visual art on these covers I can't be expected to classify characters racially by anything but their appearance... it's a tangled web.
There's no standardization of what video game cover art depicts either. A game could crowd dozens of characters onto the cover, or not have even one. A character on a cover could be the only playable character, or one out of many, or not playable at all. The same game is often released with different covers for various reasons, like new editions, different marketing in different territories, or even so that the boxes are more collectable.
Because of complications like this I'm not going to try to make a tally, I'll simply comment on each cover. These are from the vgchartz April 4th global top sellers list.
Bloodborne
Bloodborne has at least two cover designs, a street scene with a figure and a figure on a blank background with the street scene rendered within the figure's outline. The figure faces away from the viewer, with no skin or hair visible, wearing an obscuring coat. It is impossible to classify this person racially.
I've also seen a third cover which appears to be a tight closeup of a similar figure carrying a saw-toothed blade, wearing a heavy coat and tricorn hat. This too lacks racial signifiers.
It's my understanding that you can make your own character in this game.
From Software is a Japanese developer. The publisher is Sony, the well-known Japanese megacorp (word borrowed, justifiably, from Shadowrun).
Henceforth I will solve the issue of variant cover designs by only examining the one featured on vgchartz. For Bloodborne, this is the blank-background figure linked second above.
Battlefield: Hardline (two entries)
The cover features one lightly bearded man in sunglasses and body armor with police markings, a jumbled pile of bundles of paper bills, a closeup of a gun, some skyscrapers, and an armored vehicle with police markings near an airplane. The color of the man's face has been digitally altered to a low-saturation cyan, making it impossible to determine his race.
EA DICE is a Swedish developer. Their parent company, EA, is American. Judging by the SWAT emblems, the game is set in America, although I don't recognize the pictured buildings.
MLB 15: The Show
The cover appears to be an altered photograph of a baseball player from behind. Except for selected blue elements, the picture has been desaturated, making the player's race visually indeterminate, but the name on the back of his uniform is Puig and his number is 66. This makes him identifiable as Yasiel Puig Valdés of the Dodgers, a POC.
SCE San Diego Studio is an American developer, and the game covers the top American baseball league. Sales figures indicate that the game's popularity is almost exclusive to North America. The developer's parent company is (through subsidiaries) Sony (Japanese).
3rd Super Robot WarZ: Tengoku-Hen (two entries)
No humans are visible on the cover, and I don't even know if those robots contain humans, are remotely piloted by humans, or are autonomous. I know extremely little about this game, only that it's a long-running series combining many fictional properties.
Like most titles in the series, the game has only been released in Japan. It is not clear to me whether it was developed by Banpresto or Winkysoft, both Japanese studios (vgcharts just lists the developer as "unknown"). The publisher is Japanese entertainment company Bandai Namco.
Grand Theft Auto V
The cover is split into separate panels, as is traditional for Grand Theft Auto. Clockwise from top left: possible white cop in a helicopter firing its rockets and guns, probable white man in a gas mask outside of a bank, possible white man on a motorcycle with a gun (the only clue is the color of his hands), probable white man with a scoped gun and a "cut here" neck tattoo, car, almost certainly white man on jet ski, probable black man with gun, baying dog named chop, white woman with smartphone.
Apart from the art style's treatment of lighting, and the smallness of details such as the face of the figure in the helicopter or the hands of the motorcyclist, I happen to know that GTA5 is set in a Los Angeles-like city, where I would expect a great many people to be — in SJW terms — white-passing POC. The tattooed man on the right, possibly white, could easily be POC. The POC man in the bottom center could be white with different assumptions about how he is lit.
The developer, Rockstar North, is Scottish. They are owned through Rockstar Games (American) by Take-Two Interactive (American). Take-Two is better known through its subsidiaries, Rockstar and 2K (American).
Mario Party 10
The cover has six visible characters, three of which are nonhuman (Bowser, Yoshi, and a green blob I don't recognize), and three of which are white (Peach, Mario, and Luigi). Peach has blonde hair and exceptionally fair skin. Mario and Luigi have fair skin. All three have blue eyes.
Nintendo is Japanese, and Mario and Luigi are canonically Italian, as if I needed to tell anyone this. I am not sure about the supposed racial history of the Mushroom Kingdom and its royal family.
Xenoblade Chronicles
The cover has no visible human figures. A red sword of unusual design is thrust into a grassy field near part of a rough wooden fence and an unidentifiable object in poor condition. Above this is the title, and above that is a vaguely humanoid, heavily armored construct with glowing red lights in the area you'd expect to find eyes.
Monolith Soft is a Japanese developer, and the game appears exclusively on Nintendo platforms.
The Sims 4
The cover shows eight people. Top row, left to right: white, white, white. Middle row: POC, unsure. Bottom row: white, white, unsure.
The last time I played a Sims game, you could make custom characters and even populate an entire neighborhood with them.
Developed by Maxis/The Sims Studio (American), owned by EA (American).
Conclusions
Five out of eight covers do not have any racially identifiable figures. (Two out of eight do not have human figures at all.) Of the remaining three, only Mario Party 10 has no POCs. GTA5 is very difficult to assess, but I believe the cover has at least one POC. The Sims 4 has between one and three POCs, and I presume that in the actual game it is possible to have POC characters.
The Twitter SJW who suggested this inquiry told me, "Look beyond the games you play. Learn something." The intention, or so I suppose, was that I would look at the box art of top sellers on vgchartz and be converted to the SJW position that there must be more POCs and less whites in video games than there are now. Instead, I didn't see anything to contradict my own position that if you like games with POCs (and judging by similar questions about gender, most people probably don't have a strong enough preference to change the games they play) you can play them right now, with no alteration of the hundred-billion-dollar video game industry necessary.
