When 20-year-old Jonathan Priester was younger, his parents would talk to him about the lack of diversity in video games. They would examine the games he wanted to play. If one contained questionable content, they didn't refuse to buy it. Instead, they asked him to justify the purchase.

"In making you talk about it — Is that something you would grow up to do? Is it something that's positive?' — you come to the conclusion yourself that maybe this isn't the best," Priester says. "This is how other people could possibly view you. Would you want to be viewed in this manner?"

By the time Priester was a teenager, he had decided to limit his play to mentally challenging games such as SimCity and Intelligent Qube. The series NBA: The Life alienates Priester because it shows basketball players using their salaries to buy rims and other materialistic goods. "When you're younger," says Priester, now a Boston University sophomore, "you're not cognizant of these stereotypes. As you grow older it becomes more and more glaring." Video games have long had a bad rap for stereotyping women and promoting violence. Grand Theft Auto IV is generating controversy for its focus on an Eastern European immigrant who goes on a car theft and murder rampage. But Priester is among a growing number of gamers and scholars criticizing the lack of diversity and high proportion of stereotypes in video games.

It's a sensitive issue. "The subject of racism and games is not really discussed," says Chris Mottes, chief executive officer of the Denmark-based game developer Deadline Games. And when it is, game developers and some gamers usually denounce the complainers as overly sensitive; a common response to critics is that these are "only games."

But the subject continues to resurface as gamers find more reasons to take offense. In a February post on MTV Multiplayer, blogger Tracey John wrote about her experience playing Carnival Games. She could change her character's pants, shirts, shoes and hairstyles, John wrote. "But when it came to skin color, it only offered different faces in one pale hue. In other words, as a minority (I'm a Chinese woman), I could not replicate my skin color for my avatar within Carnival Games (much less if I were African-American or Hispanic). I found that a bit offensive."

Last year, the trailer for the upcoming Resident Evil 5 depicted a white soldier shooting black zombies. A contributor to the blog Black Looks wrote: "This is problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, (and) the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing..." In March the Web site GameDaily posted an illustrated story about the "most allegedly racist games," which included Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, LocoRoco, Custer's Revenge, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Hitman 2: Silent Assassin.