Gender is a hard subject to talk about, even now. Everyone has been slowly opening up about it, but there are still obvious inequalities on both sides of the argument. In video games, it can be easy to tell by a characters physical appearance whether they are male or female, which can make sense. What doesn't make sense is some of the roles these characters can have depending on this fact.
The protagonists of games are more commonly male, which is definitely a negative. A positive to this is that people are adding more diverse male leads to their games. It used to be a white male protagonist, but now the race is being changed more and more frequently. On the down side, this can get a little boring as well as repetitive. Even though the characters may look different, the personalities mostly stay the same.
Men in video games are usually no-nonsense, militant-matadors. They are also modelled to look quite muscular, which sometimes works, not all men have the same build. This could put pressure on for young boys who are just starting to play video games, and make them think this is what they need to look like. Or the attitudes of the protagonists could have an effect on their morality.
Of course, young boys are typically better at ignoring or dealing with their insecurities than girls, who are given a lot more pressure. Women in video games used to be scarcely-clad and slender. Over recent years, women have taken on a more central roll in stories of video games, but there still aren't many female protagonists. A lot of women would prefer to play as a female protagonist as opposed to a male one, and yet still there aren't many games with a strong female lead.
Young girls can be under pressure to look slender or pretty because of the media, and have a harder time dealing with this than boys because how in-your-face the ideals or women go. In more recent video games the woman have been more realistically proportioned (going by realistic games). This is good for everyone, as more and more female characters are becoming present and important in modern gaming.
There are a lot more points of interest I could've written about, but these were the most pressing for me. Another pressing issue was that we shouldn't remove white-male characters from games. That would be unfair to all white-male gamers or anyone who likes to play a character that looks like that. I think it's very important to register that discrimination can be positive and negative.
While there should be a variety, one group shouldn't be removed to favour the others.