As Narrative Director at TiMi Montréal, I’m helping our team create the vision for a new fictional world that we’re building for our game. TiMi Studio Group has opened three North American studios, including our growing team. We’re passionate about improving diversity among our team and improving representation within the games we make.
Character creation is top of mind for our team right now because we are in the early stages of developing a completely original, AAA , open-world role-playing game (RPG). When we think about creating an immersive experience, having believable characters helps ground our players in the world and the story.
Let’s start with the question of why it’s important to increase diversity in our games. The media site DiamondLobby analyzed 100 top games released over the past five years that had pre-set or authored characters. They found that more than 79 percent of the main protagonists in those games were male, while more than 54 percent were Caucasian. Females accounted for less than 21 percent of main characters and just 8.3 percent were females of other ethnicities.