Why is it so that walking by Vespucci beach, in Los Santos, the most common NPC character is a white woman? Skinny, petite and wait, all of them are the same? The outfits are different, sure, okay maybe there are some skin variations too but how is it so in such a densely populated city there is a critical lack of body diversity?
Body diversity wasn't really that important in gaming until recent years where movements towards body acceptance and diversity in the real world.
When 3D gaming was primitive it made sense why NPC diversity didn't exist. You practically had polygons, very limited hardware specs, and programmers had to use tricks up their sleeves to use up all the juice of the hardware. It was difficult to even consider focusing on body types alone, and much easier to copy paste different heads on the same body. Games like the original GTA were entirely top down and relied on swapped textures, but GTA III is known for having repetitive pedestrians. The "same hat different pedestrian" problem was just getting normalized.
Animating 3D bodies early on was nightmarish. They would look horrifying if they got too detailed, which is why developers would default to stylized, slim proportions because they were easier to work with without getting them wrong. Less math to calculate and less room for error. Fat, curves and muscles, on the other hand require a lot more calculations for the polygons to not look like melting wax.
But then in the 2000s it gets even more uncomfortable. By this stage games now can do decent 3D character models, but games like dead or alive still choose feature petite, anime style, big breasted women while having the hardware capacity to make and show body diversity and instead represent a very specific ideology about which bodies get detail and which don't.
There's a well documented thing in game development where the default placeholder model used during development is almost always a slim white male, sometimes literally called "the mannequin." That default has a way of persisting into shipped games.
What does it mean now? Well, rest assured gaming has been taking some positive strides.
The most diversity in NPC types I saw was in Cyberpunk 2077, more specifically there is an NPC who you need to have a boxing match with, his wife is also there but interestingly she's pregnant. You can see her body mesh is clearly made for a pregnant woman, and it amazed me, a shook me a little because it probably was the first time I've seen a pregnant woman in a videogame.
On the other hand I know I started this with a complaint about GTA V NPC diversity, but the recent GTA VI trailer showed us a snippet of the beach and we can see multiple different feminine body styles which definitely makes me much more hopeful about the future, as some games have begun to treat NPC and bodies as people, rather than background texture.
