Task 3 – Representation

Stereotypes

Some games use stereotypes as bases (or in their entirety) for their characters, a strong example of this is in Team Fortress 2 where every character in the game is some form of stereotype:

The cowboy Texan engineer
The charismatic French spy
The large Russian heavy
The loud-mouthed Boston scout
The drunken Scottish Demoman
The outback Australian sniper
The mad German doctor
The patriotic Midwestern-USA Soldier
The masked psycho pyro

This helps to add some humor and variety to the different characters.

Characterizations

Characterization is very important as a strongly written, interesting and believable character can really help with a game's story. Characterization is everything about characters including, background, personality, stereotypes, behavior, their speech and possibly their development throughout the game.

An example of this is Michael De Santa from GTA V. He's an ex-criminal trying to turn things around for the sake of his family.

http://cdn.staticneo.com/w/gta5/thumb/f/f3/Michael.png/280px-Michael.png

Genders

Genders in video games tends to be a touchy subject, with people complaining about how females are shown "unrealistically" in video-games, and while sometimes right, they tend to ignore the fact that a large amount of male characters look like a refrigerator on legs due to all their muscles, which isn't very realistic either.

But despite the controversy, genders are an important part of characterization whether it is the stereotypical muscly males and the female damsel in distress, or a strong female character  and a less musclebound male.

http://thenerdstash.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/is-mirror-s-edge-2-catalyst-an-open-world-game-like-dying-light-mirror-s-edge-2-456565.jpg