As with most, it really depends upon the game.

Mass Effect, for example, saw a Female Shepard for the Paragon playthroughs and a Male Shepard for the Renegade playthroughs. (Jennifer Hale is such a badass though; I'm told I need to do a Renegade FemShep to hear how well she plays those lines.)

Dragon Age was dependent more upon which class role I was setting for my characters. Dwarven Noble Male Warrior w/t tank spec, Dalish Elf Female Rogue w/ range spec, Male Human Rogue w/ backstab spec, etc. Dragon Age II saw the female character right away, and I have not played a male character yet.

In White Knight Chronicles, you create a player who has no certain role in the story, but is used in the multiplayer aspects of the game. Since the protagonist was male, I created a female.

In my MMOs, it tends to be a male character - though my main pilot in EVE Online is female. Most of the other games only see the female as an alternate character.

In Pokémon games, it literally alternates between games. As Pokémon Black is my most recent title, I have a girl named Freya. When Pokémon Black 2 rolls around, since it's technically a new character despite being a continuous storyline, I'll do the flip again and create a male trainer.

In Dragon's Dogma which I've poured 100+ hours into sporadically during my time MIA from here, my player character is male, dark skinned, and has elf-like pointed ears. I wanted to make him look as much like an Elvaan from FFXI as I could, and I'd like to think that I did so well enough. My pawn (for those who haven't played DD, a pawn is a personal companion - and you can hire additional user-made pawns to fill out your party) is female, but at max height with some crazy redheaded swoop hairstyle. She's ridiculously powerful, and still looks good - and because of this, she remains ranked in the top 4500 pawns on the ranking board despite there now being over 600,000 PS3 pawns ranked internationally. (Prideful moment, my apologies.)


There are many more examples, but I figured I got the point across well enough.