Games are a medium, like books or comics or films. But they are more interactive than those other medium. The influence on people is similar than the other mediums except people who game might be a little more invested.
There are plenty of games, many with no message at all, others reflect broad culture. Saying that they doesn’t affect people is ingenious. Just by playing ·D tetris when I was little I “broke” the spacial test that we took at class. I wasn’t supposed to finish in the given time, but I was “trained” in a way others wasn’t.
In multiplayers, some guys have the idea that women “need to be rescued”, yes, eve if you told them that you are perfectly happy playing alone or that you don’t need help, they refuse to listen. Why? because for them you are “not a real player”. Meanwhile, they ignore other men that might need help. They have been influenced.
When I was little it was common that when girls asked for characters “like them”, were told “go make your own games/write your own books/comics”. And when some of us starting doing our own stories? Well, funny enough, some men came to tell us that “we should write male characters instead”. Hell Zoe and Quinn were making their things. They could just ignored them and let them be. Like they could have let us play without the need to create different servers just to be able to play without men pestering us.
Games like dragon age did sell well. Maybe for you diversity detracts, but for others, it adds. Point is, the same way that I have been hearing all my life that “companies want to make money” as a reason to not have “female characters on some games”, now is the reason there would be diversity. The only way companies can make more money is by expanding the market. And they can only do that if more people play. That means diversity. If they keep focusing only on white men, market becomes stagnant and sales too. Hence segmentation of the market. Some games would be aimed at traditional white males, while others would be aimed at that new public. Shouldn’t be a big deal.
