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Because people like to play characters that look like them? If you want women, you add women. If you want blacks or hispanics, you add them. If you want lqbt, you add lgbt.
I brought up LoL earlier and just responded to someone else on the game; it's a good case study. A Riot study found that among female players, 97% exclusively played female champions.
This doesn't mean that it's a good strategy to target what are likely niche audiences, but I don't think it's confusing why people believe in it.
"Look like them" can cover a wide range of things. Yes, women often tend to play as women, much like men often want to play as men. But I've yet to see any good evidence or good reasoning that women would want to play as women who look like typical women, i.e. within the typical range of looks, as posited by the ideology in question, rather than women who look extremely attractive (whether they be cute or hot or sexy or whatever else). Same goes for men; if we presume that the video game industry of the past had properly marketed to men in terms of playable characters (posited by the ideology in question), then certainly men don't tend to want to play as men who look like them; they want to play as men who look like the top 0.1% of the population in terms of physique.
Again, the confusing part isn't why you'd want to expand playable characters (and NPCs as well, really) to include all sorts of sexes or other demographics. That tends to be just good common sense and also empirically supported and only tangentially related to the "wokeness" being discussed here. I've written elsewhere that Genshin Impact has seemingly done a good job expanding the waifu gacha game market to include many women who would otherwise not be interested in such things, by filling it with women who would almost certainly be at least in the 95th percentile in looks in most places (this extends to NPCs and enemy characters as well, with multiple female enemy characters getting lots of fans purely on their hotness alone).
The confusing part is why attempt to expand the market to women by putting in ugly (or more charitably typical-looking) women, as dictated by this specific ideology.
Why this specific ideology dictates it is very simple.
Women gatekeep beauty + the interests of women are supreme = beauty is a zero-sum game.
The less beauty in the world, the less competition women have for it; if we assume
maximum selfishnessrational self-interest it is thus logical and justifiable for them to hoard it. Therefore, female characters in media should ideally be as ugly as possible.Giving in and creating beautiful (enough) characters is negotiating this self-interest with reality (if all the characters are ugly the game might not sell- not everyone is a True Believer, after all). Designing ugly characters is specifically meant to appeal to the group of women who understand this.
Cultures whose circumstances restrict that kind of selfishness tend to produce works with more human beauty; that's part of why Eastern countries do it more often, and why Western countries used to do this but don't any more.
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