Interesting Trend in Role Playing Games

I don't really do the whole RPG thing, it's never really appealed to me, but there's a gamer contingent among my friends and I have it on good authority that studies have shown that in games which offer a broad variety of species, genders, appearances, etc to their players women and minorities tend to experiment broadly with in-game identities and their gender and race/ethnicity are not generally good predictors of their character's identity/appearance while white males and especially straight white males, with great statistical significance, tended toward the character/identity that was the closest approximation of white human male.

This seems to suggest what many of us surely already guessed, that the hegemonically privileged are distinctly resistant to relinquishing any of their privilege, even factiously, and more interestingly (and more disturbing to me) that those with hegemonically empowered identities appear to have markedly less interest in experimenting with other identities or attempting to imagine what it must be like to have another identity. And it makes sense, doesn't it? If the world/culture around you is basically designed with *your* needs in mind, what motivation is there to attempt to imagine what it must be like to be of a different identity. For example, if you are straight and white, it probably doesn't strike you as odd that vast majority of individuals you see represented on television and in movies are straight and white, that's just how it is right? Whereas if you are of a marginalized group (be it in terms of race/ethnicity, sexuality, sex, gender, etc) you may very well find yourself wondering why there aren't more people like you on TV or in the movies. If you're white, you never really have to pause and wonder why the flesh colored Band-Aids (until recently) looked nothing like your own flesh tone. And what motivation is there to experiment with other identities? By all accounts it's great to be a straight White male in America! Why would you ever want to be anything else?

It also suggests that individuals whose identity is in someway marginalized *do* have an apparent drive to experiment with other identities and are more prepared or prone to attempt to imagine what it would be like to be of a different identity. Not only that but it acts as a good control to demonstrate that the choices of White males are not simply part of a larger trend among gamers to select characters that are the best approximation of themselves.

All of this is pretty interesting in light of identity politics, which is a pet subject of mine and I'd love discussion of the implications of these sorts of findings or of similar examples or counter-examples.