The psyche of America changed as the Asian stereotype changed, due to the shift in "quality" of the average immigrant from Asia. The perception of the Asian immigrant shifted from primarily being that of a laborer to being someone who might be involved in the service industry, insomuch as it might be a means to an end, whether for themselves or for their children. From here, the stereotype eventually made it to its current form.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the US isn't really the place to immigrate to unless you desire to work for what you want. A certain type of person finds this attractive, which is also a factor in the quality of immigrants the US attracts. Lazy people typically stay in the countries they're born in, considering the effort and risk it takes to immigrate, and thus groups with a large number of immigrants will typically have a larger number of people motivated to do the work necessary to succeed.

This importance on academic and professional success is something I've seen from most near-recent immigrant groups from the old world, outside of "The West", not just from Asians. It's just that Asians, as a demographic group, include a large proportion of near recent immigrants whose values are in-line with the sort that promote academic and professional achievement. There's another group that fares as well as Asians when it comes to near recent US immigrants, Sub-Saharan Africans. But this obviously throws a wrench into pseudo-scientific "theories" some might have about genetics, so it's not really mentioned here on /. too much...

Only if you've never visited the third world.

Whose rights are being crushed? It's your right to be able to say what you want, but it's everyone else's right to judge you on what you say. And if people decide it's better to exclude you from something because your presence and opinions are a detriment to the experiences of others, then you have to live with those consequences. You have rights, but many of them are limited to public space, and servers tend to be privately owned. Also, the groups you mentioned, libertarians, gun fans and christians, are not exactly something you're born as. Raised as, yes, but not born as. If you're a woman, minority, and according to scientific/popular consensus, gay, you didn't exactly have a choice. So that analogy isn't really equivalent.

Would a relatively brief period of there being no straight white males as front line characters be an innately bad thing? The reverse has been the status quo for a long enough period, and it hasn't exactly led to an earth shattering cataclysm as of yet.

Women and minorities outnumber the rest (at least in the US). They're the ones that will do the hauling and killing.

If representation in the real world had any influence over who is represented in videogames, then half of the main characters in games would be female, and in a game set in the United States, for example, the majority of characters under the age of 18 would not be white.

It's incredibly naive to think that the way certain groups are portrayed in media does not have any effect on how those that consume such media treat members of that group in their daily lives. Stereotypes are a "REAL WORLD" problem, so by minimizing the influence of those stereotypes by reducing their presence in media, part of a solution would be in operation.