No, "representation" does NOT matter in video games

During the past 10 or so years far-leftists have been pushing extremely strongly this narrative that we need "more representation" in video games, that "representation matters". They want to push this idea that people somehow feel excluded and marginalized if they can't see people with their own skin color or their own genitals in a video game.

For anybody who has ever played any video games it should be extremely obvious how false this notion is. However, the far left has been pushing this notion so strongly that some people, including some video game developers, have started actually believing it. To them it has become truth by sheer repetition.

The actual truth is that since as long as video games have existed, since the 1970's or so, there hasn't been a single person in this world who has played a video game and thought "I feel excluded and marginalized because this playable character doesn't look like me". Not one.

(Sure, today there might be a few people who will say that, but they are not saying it because it's an original thought of theirs. They are saying it because they have been told to think it. They have been taught that they should think like that. They wouldn't be saying it if they had never been told to say it.)

We are told by the far left that people see themselves as the playable character, and thus if said character doesn't look like them, they feel excluded and marginalized.

Not a single person in this world thinks like that. When you start playing a Pokemon game you don't think that the 10-year-old boy or girl represents you, that you are essentially that character. When you start playing a Legend of Zelda game, you do not think that you are Link, that Link somehow represents you. When you start playing a Mario game, you do not think that you are Mario, nor do you get depressed because you are not a 120cm moustached Italian plumber.

More prominently, when male players start playing a Tomb Raider game, they don't get upset because they have to play a chick. They don't think "I'm not a chick! This doesn't represent me at all! Why am I forced to play a woman? I'm not a woman, this is offensive to me!" I can bet actual money that not a single male gamer has ever thought that, in the entire history of Tomb Raider games.

And why not? Because people do not think of the playable character as a representation of themselves. That's why. That's why a completely normal masculine heterosexual male, even one who would consider it highly offensive if he were called a girl or a woman, has absolutely no problem in playing any Tomb Raider game, or any of the other myriads of games with a female playable character. This has been true for as long as video games have existed.

Heck, in games where you can fully customize the playable character, the vast majority of people will not make it look like themselves. Some might, but the vast majority don't. The vast majority of people do not think of the customizable playable character as being a representation of themselves. Instead, they design a character that looks cool, or badass, or funny, or ridiculous. Many male players may even create a female character (even when there's an option of which sex to choose), not because they think of themselves as female, but because they may like that kind of playable character more. (After all, as the saying goes, "if I'm going to have to look at an ass for hours on end, it better be a nice ass.")

So no, "representation" does NOT matter in video games. People do not get upset if they can't play a character that doesn't look like themselves. That's purely an invention of the modern far-leftist feminist "intersectional" ideology.