Dynamic Demographics: Lessons from a Large-Scale Census of Performative Possibilities in Games

While much popular discussion of representation in games exists, there is very little rigorously collected data available from which to draw direct conclusions. In this study, we set out to address this gap by performing a census of playable characters across a large sample of contemporary games. We gathered data from 200 games released since 2005 including independently published (“indie”) games and so-called “AAA” titles from large publishers. While our initial analysis yielded some insight into the landscape of playable characters, it also highlighted the contingent, negotiated, and interpretive nature of representation in games. This led to additional analysis that emphasized the ways in which this negotiation manifests in research in the methods and metrics used to quantify representation. We argue that researchers studying representation in games need to treat it as a possibility space for a multitude of potential interpretations rather than a singular, measurable, phenomenon.