I'm glad there's a thread to discuss stuff like this, it felt weird to post about it in a Kingdom Hearts thread when it's a much more wide-ranging issue than that.
Most of what I was going to say about most of the games I've played has already been said. But I'm probably going to talk more about racism/representation because the entire thing is so interconnected to me at this point. There's things in general just bug me, note, I'm coming at this from more of a Black/African mindset:
1) The sheer lack of playable black characters in most of the games I've played. Any time there IS one, they tend to be limited to: Hyper masculine/Sports/Dancing (you MUST pick AT LEAST one). In pretty much all of the games I've played (fighting games, JRPGs and platformers), the best option I've been offered for a character I could play as was Storm, from the X-Men, which is a pretty damning indictment of videogames if this is the best representation in any game I've played.
2) I don't really know how to describe this properly, but even when you try to go "Oh this person could be black" because they're not lily-white like almost everyone else in the game, people come out of the woodwork to go "No, they're just tanned!" like the thought of having a single PoC in the game is completely unacceptable. (The fact that Atelier pic earlier has the ARTIST doing it is just horrendous) But then you have white people claiming characters in anime and things set in Japan, which is somehow even more outrageous but goes by without incident.
Also for actual games I've played that haven't been mentioned here and their representation. Sadly they're 4X/TBS games which means the representation is more abstract, but still, there's something there.
Civilization
You can play as leaders like Shaka, Hatshepsut, Rameses, Mansa Musa and Zara Yaqob. The structure of the game means you can't actually see your leader for most of it, but it's nice, you can peek at the in game encyclopedia and get a simple history of them, which is actually really good since I had no real way of knowing these people existed prior to this game (but this is more of a thing about schooling and eurocentric history etc etc). I think Civ IV is the only one that actually lets you play as a black lady though (Hatshepsut), all the rest are dudes.
Total War (historical)
Speaking of Eurocentric... For the games that aren't set in Japan/China/Britain/Greece. Rome Total War is based on the time period around the Punic Wars and Medieval is based on 1080-1400 CE. Here is a map of the factions in Medieval 2
Your pickings for African factions are "The Moors" and "Egypt". The entire rest of Africa is a bunch of sparse rebel provinces.
Rome 2 and Attila finally added factions that weren't Ptolemaic Egypt/Carthage/Numidia, such as Aksum (Ethiopia) and Kush, which actually let you have a ruler who was a black lady. Naturally this made people flip their lids because I guess black people and/or women are ahistorical or something and this was the last straw. Oh and these factions are DLC only and feel pretty half-baked because why not.
Total War (Warhammer)
Unless there's something I've missed, there is not a single way to play as a black person or have a black faction leader in this game. You can play as someone CODED black, which I'll get into, but yeah.
Basically the universe of this game is based on Warhammer Fantasy Battle, which is a pastiche of real world medieval factions fed through a fantasy filter. So Germany is a collection of loosely-allied kingdoms who fight using pike and shot and artillery, France is a bunch of knights who live in castles and downtrodden peasants. Romania is full of vampires. All of these are pretty weird and neat so far, they must have come up with really cool stuff for places outside of Europe with some nice representation.
The Aztecs/Incans are into astronomy, astrology, large pyramids, human sacrifices and gold. They're also all sentient bipedal turquoise lizards.
The Egyptians have giant constructs based on cats/sphinxes/scorpions, they also like pyramids, gold and obelisks and so on. They're also all undead mummy skeletons.
Sub Saharan Africa (or deep in South America) had
this (extremely offensive), unsurprisingly, given how bad they are, they stopped selling them in the 90's and the faction just doesn't exist now.
So yeah, it's not good either. If you wanna play as a black person you're pretty much locked into playing as an undead mummy (which is cool, but...they're an undead mummy). Every single human(oid) leader in the game is white, green or some sort of vampire.
If someone here has played any of the Paradox stuff, how do they handle it? Can you legitimately play as an African faction, or is it just a half-baked afterthought?
Also since someone mentioned LoL/DotA
LoL had Karma and Nidalee back when I played, I'd HOPE there's more now?
DotA2 has Chen and Legion Commander
The sole pro is that they pretty much did the opposite of whitewashing here, in the original game Chen was an Orc and Legion Commander was a white dude.