Asheron's Call provides another interesting example. The game shipped with three human races: one based on the people of northern Europe, one on northern Africa and the Middle East, and one on Japan and China. In my experience, racial roleplaying was very rare, and when it did occur, it involved a lot of real-world stereotypes. Players couldn't conceptually separate the in-game races from their real-world counterparts. Something like your EQ2 example would have involved a lot of offensive real-world slang, for instance.

Similar observations I think would be fascinating in Second Life where there are no racial categories established by some pre-existing plotline, and where body features are determined by gradients on sliders rather than in discrete categories limiting hair styles, skin color, and facial features.

I think this setup makes for more racial playing; I'm a Filipino and I've chosen to make my avatar have the hues and shape of a southeast Asian. Also, I have seen a fair share of non-white avatars though I must admit many still do fall into racial stereotypes.

I think game avatars are designed to be neutral from real world cultural and racial differences simply to hide the ugly truth about our human natural tendencies to bias, stereotype, and segregate (which is what political correctness is all about). The cultural differences between the actual players easily come to light either instantly from the avatar's name or from text/voice chatting. MMO populations are highly racially and culturally segregated, especially with the prevalence of voice chat. Animosity towards Asian players on US servers runs extremely high for example. This isn't a reflection of differences found in-game, rather the attitudes of American society in general.

Just dropping in on a very, very old topic:

I play exclusively male avatars. My current WoW guild is the first people I have played with in about five years to know I'm actually female.

Why? Because, honestly, I have to deal with enough bias and stereotyping in real life; I'd rather not have to deal with it in games, too. "White male" is the default; there are so many of them running around, nobody notices another one. Nobody thinks twice about one, or about who might be on the other side of the computer.

In the time I spent passing as male, I learned a few interesting things about how the other half lives. The most interesting from a sociological point of view is that the RL males that I encountered did not divide the human race into "males" and "females" -- rather, the categories were essentially "people" and "females". Their de-facto category of "people" encompassed all the variety of the human species (except for supposed Chinese gold farmers) ... well, the male half of the species, anyway. "Females" on the other hand, were seen to be a rather homogeneous group, with very little variety.

The stereotypes were self-reinforcing. Any action done by a (known or presumed) female was believed to stem from one of the highly-stereotyped, and generally negative, characteristics assigned to that group: Overly emotional, fond of drama, manipulative, lazy, greedy, self-centered, nurturing, and not committed to the game. Once the action (whatever its real cause) had been ascribed to that stereotypical root, it served to reinforce the stereotype. It became a vicious circle. When a person (male) did exactly the same thing, it was accepted that he did it for any of a variety of reasons, most of them neutral or positive. For example, getting into a verbal altercation with someone who was stealing kills from a guild group would be seen as "getting emotional" if the one doing it was female, and "standing up for his guildies" if the one doing it was male.

Likewise, in discussions of out-of-game matters, the "people" versus "females" distinction was retained. "Females" (mostly girlfriends) were spoken of as if they were another species entirely; those admitted to membership in the human race were exclusively male. These women (girlfriends, some wives, occasional co-workers) were spoken of in terms often bordering on contempt, as a burden and an unfair limitation on the speaker. (cf. the concept of a wife as a "ball and chain" common in humor, bachelor parties, etc.)

I'm a gamer. I want to be taken seriously as a gamer. I want to be judged by my skill and my actions. I want to be seen as a "person", not that non-human species called "female". And, prior to my current guild (and even with them, until I knew them well) the only way to accomplish that has been to allow others to assume I am what they see as the default, as someone like themselves: male.

I'm tired of being a pioneer, breaking stereotypes and changing attitudes. I've been doing that in real life for decades. I just want to play the game.

And there are a lot like me. More, I suspect, than there are who want avatars that look just like them. (As someone on another blog said, "If I want to watch a chubby middle-aged woman running around, I'll go out and run around.") My avatars in a game have nothing else in common with me -- the last I looked, I couldn't swing a sword longer than I am tall, nor cast fireball spells, nor smelt khorium. I don't live in a war-ravaged medieval land, ride on the back of a game netherdrake, or fight monsters for a living. So, with all the important things about a character being totally different from the player sitting at her computer, why should I care that the skin color or body shape of that pile of polygons should match my own? Out of all my many characters over the years, the one I identify most with is my tauren warrior. My male tauren warrior. Sure, he looked like a big bipedal bovine, but that character that just wanted to have a good time, get rich, and kill people (PvP server) ... that was me.

I think there's another factor, though, in the lack of race-specific skins provided for avatars: fear on the part of the game companies. Most of the ways in which a male player with a female character can be offensive are covered under rules against sexually-explicit actions. (remember, kids, make war, not love) Not that the night elf "stripper dance" isn't offensive, mind you, but I've got more important things to worry about, and I don't have to look. Portraying exaggerated stereotypes of females is not a thoughtcrime. Portraying exaggerated stereotypes of minorities, however, is. Giving people the opportunity to do so is opening up a huge, and potentially expensive, can of worms. Let's say a player creates an African-looking character and starts acting in a stereotypical way (the "D'shawn example above, or the "gangsta" lifestyle), and someone complains. The game management has two choices: Allow this to continue, and get slammed for permitting racism in the game, or stopping it, and then getting slammed equally hard when the person claims to be black in real life, and therefore being discriminated against. It doesn't matter if they are or not -- all they have to do is say they are, and the bad PR will start. It's a lose-lose situation for the company. There is no way they can come out of that situation without being accused of racism -- either for allowing the player to act as he did, or for stopping him. That's someting that Legal and Marketing just won't risk.

As for whether more people of any given demographic will play games if the avatars looked more like them: I seriously doubt it. I have never, in decades of gaming going back to when I was represented as an ASCII symbol on a text-only screen, whether or not my avatar could look like me has never entered into my decision about whether or not to buy/play a game. What I can do in the game, yes. What I look like in the game, no. For that matter, one of the attractions of MMORPGs to me is that I can be a "person" instead of a "female" -- someone just like everyone else, distinguished by interests, skill, attitudes, personality, whatever, instead of body shape. It's a refreshing change from the real world.

You can't take a game that isn't fun -- whether it isn't fun overall, or it isn't fun for people in some specific group -- and make it more fun by changing the pictures. No matter how you dress it up, if it's made of suck it's just going to be prettier suck. The reason people don't play any given game isn't that the pictures don't look like them. (otherwise, who would play Zerg or 'Toss in SC?) The reason is the game isn't fun for them. That is what devs need to address.

I've been interested for a long time in the history and mythology of Africa. I think that would be fertile territory for a MMORPG. It would certainly be a refreshing change from rehashed Norse mythology as filtered through Tolkein. I suspect it would not do well in the market, mostly because said market seems to have an inexhaustible appetite for said regurgitated Norse mythology. But whatever the reason for it not doing well might be, that reason is highly unlikely to be that white players couldn't make avatars that look like themselves.

But that's a rant for another day.

Sadly, I don't have anything hugely insightful to say, but I thought I'd mention that Guildwars has a pretty large number of options for non-white characters (compared to most other MMO games I've tried), especially in the latest nightfall expansion, and while they are noticably rarer, there are enough so seeing one isn't strange. It's quite a nice option to have certainly, especially when you're making a character based on a set background rather than personal preference.

The comments by "Female Gamer" regarding the population of WoW as being separated into "normal" players and "female" players were very interesting and I certainly agree with them. Personally it brings to mind the environment that harassment training in the workplace is trying to enforce. Ideally, workers treat each other according to their work ethic, their skill and their personality objectively regardless of sex, race, religion etc. The online community isn't nearly as enlightened though as many are still teenagers, anti-social, inexperienced with women or all of the above.

Another quick point I'd like to make is I think Blizzard saw a need to create more physically attractive female character models with the expansion. The number of lithe supermodel type female models went from 2 in the original game to 4 with the addition of the Draenei and Blood Elf races. In fact, the 2 new models are even more dainty than the Human and Night Elf character models.