TL;DR -- politics are everywhere in video games, your politics determine whether you see that and what you see.
Completely true. Just as in real life.
I doubt that many development teams sit down to decide what political message they will be conveying; whatever it is likely emerges naturally from the composition of the team.
Beyond that, I'm sure that specific decisions about how to portray characters are just as likely to be influenced by marketing considerations. The more you spend on a title, the broader the market you need to appeal to; not political, commercial.
As a rule, I would say that ( to my eyes ) most characters in all the RPGs I can remember have been pretty average looking, which is a reasonable reflection of what you see around you. Most of the time I have not been able to make a better looking player character, and the devs usually use the same tools.
Hair has always been a particularly problematic area, both in modelling and rendering anything convincing within the processor budget, and in dealing with the interactions with character and clothing. Short hair is obviously more easily handled, so it often dominates as a matter of practicality.
I actually trigger more on the random use of accents than looks, since in the real world accents are a better origin identifier than skin/eye/hair color or any intrinsic racial characteristic. It doesn't really matter which accent you apply to which fantasy group, so long as its invariant. Not necessarily easy to manage, as voice actors are not always able to do a wide variety of accents well, and those commissioning them may not really be familiar enough with the accents to select for them. I know I would have difficulty identifying the regional origin of most non-British speakers of English simply by accent.
