This year, my wife and I gave our big-boy-first-grader son Hudson the right to pick his own afterschool activities, and, not surprisingly, he chose the one most likely to result in domestic mayhem: Tae kwon do.

In a more disciplined soul, martial arts might be a means to achieve focus and inner calm; for Hudson, it's mostly been a new way to menace the dog. Finally, after catching him demonstrating new kicks to (that is to say, on) his baby brother, I made a deal that if he would stop performing his mad martial skills in the house, I'd show him a slightly safer way to work off his urge to spar, in the form of our friendly living-room Nintendo Wii.

Through the magic of Wii Virtual Console, I downloaded the game that defined my adult arcade-rat career -- Street Fighter II: The World Warriors -- and prepared to teach my offspring the first of what would be many lessons in Not Messing with the Old Man.

Unfortunately, the match ended before it even began. Faced with the game's array of character choices, Hudson refused to play any of them except Ryu, which was of course unacceptable, since intense, fireball-wielding karateka Ryu is my traditional Schooling Instrument of Choice. Ha-dou-ken!

In fact, aside from the two blond American fighters Ken and Guile, and winsome Chinese kickmistress Chun Li (Hudson: "I don't want to be a girl!"), the grotesque "diversity" of the rest of the cast frankly terrified him: E. Honda, the enormously fat, face-painted sumo rikishi. Dhalsim, the Indian mystic with freakishly long limbs and a necklace made of skulls. Blanka, the green-hued beast-man from the jungles of Brazil, and Zangief, the bearlike, mohawk-sporting Russian wrestler.

Welcome to multiculturalism ... video game-style.

Pac like me

The incident underscored for me the degree to which video games lag behind in reflecting the real and complicated diversity of the world in which we live. Video games have come a long way since Pong -- game franchises like Bioshock, Assassin's Creed and Gears of War tell epic stories with rich, fully realized characters, taking risks with narrative and form that would be impossible in less interactive modes of expression. And yet the primary characters in each, and in the vast bulk of other PC and console games, are white men of a certain age while women and people of color are relegated to the virtual sidelines.

In fact, despite the questionable taste and authenticity of its visuals, Street Fighter II was actually a revolutionary step for video game inclusion. It was, after all, one of the first games in which players had the option of taking on a female persona (one who's still among the few video game women with a character design built on an athlete's body type, rather than a stripper's). And it was also the first game to feature a wide range of playable characters, each with distinct nationalities, ethnicities and backstories.

In essence, the breakthrough it offered was simply that it gave players a choice of identities, something that Matt Kato, senior associate editor for Game Informer, highlights as a game changer for the industry.

"That's because all the market research that [video game] publishers have done supports the idea that when players have a choice, the average gamer wants to be able to play as themselves," he says.

These days, you can interpret that statement literally: Budding gamers of Hudson's age and generation, kids who've cut their teeth on Nintendo's "Mii" build-your-own-avatar system, increasingly expect to be able to customize their on-screen representative with physical attributes that resemble their own.

When they can't, the research shows that they still prefer to have the alternative of choosing a character they can identify with -- at least in gender and in race.

Sadly, outside of the fighting genre that Street Fighter II spawned, it's an option that remains elusive.

In July of last year, researcher Dmitri Williams of the University of Southern California published the results of a study that took a "character census" of the top 150 games sold on nine popular video gaming platforms, including the Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation, PS2, Nintendo GameCube, PSP, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and the PC.

The study found that 80 percent of all video game characters were identified as white, a moderate overrepresentation relative to the U.S. population. Blacks, meanwhile, were underrepresented by about 13 percent and Latinos by a staggering 78 percent. And while males represent half of the U.S. population, they make up over 85 percent of all video game characters.

In some ways, this shouldn't be a surprise. "From the perspective of game publishers, if you're investing years of development time and many tens of millions of dollars, you want to make sure you're going to end up with a product that appeals to the broadest possible audience," says Kato. "And the vast majority of gamers in the U.S. are white males. So when someone pitches a game with a protagonist who's African American, the room goes quiet, and someone will say, 'Let's think about this -- is there a chance that if we do this we'll be cutting off part of our market?'"

When black or Hispanic characters do make rare gaming appearances, they're frequently portrayed in alienating fashion: They're murderous thugs, savage aborigines, creepy mystics and sometimes, even uglier racial caricatures. Asians, too: Although we're the only ethnic group that's overrepresented in games relative to our presence in the U.S. population, that's only because a disproportionate number of games are developed by Japanese companies, and thus by default include Japanese characters; the number of Asian American characters in the whole history of video games can be counted on one hand.

(It should also be noted that Japanese publishers are generally no more sensitive when it comes to racial and ethnic depictions than American companies. Capcom, the company behind the Street Fighter franchise, sparked controversy last year when it released the fifth installment of its survival horror game Resident Evil, which featured a white protagonist slaughtering hordes of black zombies in a poverty-stricken African setting.)

As for gender, even games centered on female protagonists don't necessarily represent a milestone for digital equality.

"When gamers are playing Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, they're not sitting around thinking about how much women make in the workplace," Kato says. "For a lot of male gamers, it's more that if you're going to be looking at the backside of some character for the next three or four hours, you'd rather it be a woman than a dude."

Still, at the end of the day, they're just ... games, after all, aren't they? Why should the players or the industry even care?

New game? Insert coin.

Latoya Peterson, editor of the blog Racialicious, notes that advocates have long been concerned with the distorted or incomplete view of reality represented in television. It's why there's been so much successful pressure to represent diverse and complex identities in children's television programming, given the extraordinary amount of time American youth spend in front of the tube (as of 2009, some four and a half hours a day, or only slightly less time than kids spend at school -- and more than most spend with their parents).

But the role of race, culture and gender in video games has been mostly ignored, perhaps under the false assumption that they represent a relatively small part of children's media diet. While that might have been true a decade ago, the average U.S. child today spends an hour and a half a day playing video games, a more than threefold increase since 1999.

The growing role of gaming in childhood is one of the key reasons for the panel "Social Justice and Video Games" at next week's SXSW Festival, featuring Peterson and another longtime friend of this column, N'gai Croal, former senior tech writer for Newsweek and proprietor of the game consultancy Hit Detection. "Gaming has a huge and rising impact on how children see the world, and yet in so many ways, the industry is repeating the worst mistakes of earlier forms of media," says Peterson. "You have a type of entertainment that has the potential to be a quantum leap forward, and you don't see that. Technology is changing, the world is changing, but the same old cliches are being trotted out again and again."

Peterson cites the critically acclaimed indie game Ching Chong Beautiful as an example of sour old wine being poured into a new digital bottle.

A satirical riff on wacky Japanese game shows (and "wacky Japanese culture" in general), the game's lemon-hued characters with narrow, slanted eyes spouting broken-English phrases will be familiar to anyone who's followed Hollywood "yellowface" history.

And while creators assert such images are merely being played for laughs, repeated exposure to the gaming world's flood of negative caricatures has real psychological consequences. In a study last year, researchers at the University of Maryland found hardcore adolescent gamers to be significantly more indifferent toward racist and sexist stereotypes than less frequent gamers -- and more dismissive when peers expressed concern about such depictions.

That's something parents are more likely to worry about than game developers. Yet Croal points out that there are bottom-line reasons for the gaming industry to push beyond stereotype as well. "We're moving into an era when other forms of media are aggressively moving beyond the stereotypical white-male-protagonist standard -- look at shows like 'Lost' and 'The Wire,'" he notes. "Why do so many games have to be some variation of 'Lord of the Rings,' 'Saving Private Ryan,' or 'Black Hawk Down'? I would submit that game developers, in being content to explore such an extremely narrow portion of their creative range, are leaving a ton of money on the table."

Nothing has as much leverage as money in the entertainment industry. That's why arguments centered on equity and responsibility tend to fall on deaf ears, whether delivered to video games or the movies.

But once a new idea or phenomenon proves it can ring the register, it's invariably subject to endless duplication.

The success of Street Fighter II hasn't just spawned an entire category's worth of clones; the original franchise itself continues to thrive two decades later, having generated 62 different games that have sold more than 27 million units and earned billions of dollars. Along the way, it's brought dozens of new and increasingly sophisticated characters into its virtual world, with richer motivations, more interesting designs and in many cases a surprising authenticity in fighting style and backstory.

The next installment, Super Street Fighter IV, is due in stores and arcades next month. SSFIV promises to bring back two of the franchise's most popular black characters, Jamaican kickboxer Dee Jay and British pugilist Dudley, as well as the series' sole Native American, T.Hawk. Also slated for inclusion: A hotly anticipated new female character, Han Juri.

A flamboyant, lightning-fast fighter with a cybernetic eye and a taste for devilishly taunting her opponents as they crumble unconscious to the ground, she's the first Korean Street Fighter combatant -- and, in keeping with her ethnicity, the first to specialize in the art of tae kwon do.

Which means, with any luck, maybe Hudson will want to play as her and stop bugging me to give up Ryu. HA-DOU-KEN!

PopMail

I mentioned above that you can count the number of playable Asian American protagonists in videogames on one hand. You might as well make that one finger: If you don't count Boy Scout Russell in the various licensed games tied to the movie "Up," there's really only one major game whose central character is undeniably Asian American.

I'm referring to True Crime: Streets of L.A., which tells the tale of half-Chinese rogue detective Nicholas Kang. While it wasn't without flaws, True Crime: SoLA sold more than two million copies, putting it in the top 100 best-selling games of all time -- even beating out notable titles like Enter the Matrix, The Sims and the original Guitar Hero.

A disappointing, bug-riddled "sequel," True Crime: New York City, replaced Kang with African American gangbanger-turned-cop Marcus Reed; it proved to be a resounding flop. Now publisher Activision is trying to resurrect the franchise, tapping new developers United Front to handle the reboot, simply titled "True Crime." And yes, the protagonist is once again Asian, though not Asian American: Detective Wei Shen of the Hong Kong Triad Bureau, who's been tasked with going deep undercover to take down the island's most powerful mob organization, the Sun Yee On.

True Crime's voice cast, meanwhile, is almost entirely Asian American. Jack Yang (" Commander Kenji Tenzai " in the Command & Conquer: Red Alert series) plays Wei Shen; notable Hollywood talent like Will Yun Lee and Kelly Hu are involved as well ... and persistent rumors also mention roles for Hong Kong icons like Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh. Oh, and my pal and editorial partner on the book " Secret Identities Parry Shen plays a desperate Triad underboss whose voice you can hear on the game's white-knuckle initial trailer -- "I just wanna get along! Make some!" I hear ya, man.

Although the voice of a game character could be provided by anyone capable of pulling off the right performance, Shen notes that producers are generally adamant about casting actors whose ethnicities match their characters. "There's actually more typecasting in videogames than in films and TV, not less," he says. "I do a great Irish accent, and I'd love to show it off, but I'd never get a chance -- not when they can patch in an actor from Dublin and get the real thing."

Part of the rationale is that these days, character designs are increasingly modeled on the actors providing their performances; True Crime utilized a technology similar to that pioneered by Jim Cameron's "Avatar" to actors' capture real-time expressions and facial nuances as dialogue was being read.

"The cool thing is, in this game, for the first time in my life, I get to be over six feet tall," laughs Shen. "This is a character I'd never be able to play live action. I'd look like a Danny DeVito parody."