May 27. (Portaltic/EP) –
Video games have female characters, as supporting characters but also as protagonists, but unlike their male counterparts, they have less dialogue to the point that they speak half as much as men.
‘Gender bias in video game dialogue’ is the work of a group of researchers from the University of Glasgow, Aston University and Cardiff University (all in the UK), who have analyzed the gender distribution of dialogue in video games.
The objective of this study is to fill a gap, since “there are currently no large-scale, systematic studies” that quantify the distribution of dialogue according to the gender of the characters (who is speaking, who is speaking to them, and what is being said), as it does occur in movies, TV shows, radio shows, plays and books, the researchers note.
Video games have become a dominant type of multimedia content in much of the world, and although it is now estimated that there are as many male gamers as women, sexist attitudes persist that see female gamers as strangers to this field of entertainment.
“These attitudes are reflected in the presentation of female characters within video games,” they point out in the study, that a part of the industry continues to show hypersexualized or less important characters.
To fill the void, these researchers have created what they have called the ‘corpus of video game dialogue’. In it, 6,280,892 words of dialogues obtained from 13,587 characters from 50 role-playing video games (Final Fantasy, King’s Quest, Mass Effect, among others) have been included, because in this genre “dialogue is an important game mechanic”.
29.37% OF FEMALE CHARACTERS
They have also taken into account gender “as a typical gamer is likely to experience it”, even attending to gender indicators such as the use of bows, the color pink or makeup, which is traditionally associated with women.
In this sense, 29.37 percent of the characters have been classified as women, and 70.63 percent as men. One character, Quina Quen from Final Fantasy IX, was described as genderless.
From their analysis, it appears that in individual games, the proportion of female dialogue ranged from 6 percent in the case of King’s Quest VI to 80 percent in King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. Only King’s Quest II, King’s Quest IV, and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII had more than 50 percent female dialogue.
One fact that they have highlighted is that “female characters do not systematically receive fewer words of dialogue per character than male characters”, something that they link to the fact that “there are significantly fewer female than male characters”.
They also note that “no game had significantly more female dialogue than male dialogue compared to any baseline, including games with multiple female leads”, such as Final Fantasy X-2, King’s Quest VII.
And they have identified that the bias is “more extreme” in the case of secondary characters. However, they detected that the year of publication of the game is related to the proportion of female dialogue, with an increase of 6.3% per decade, between 1986 and 2020.
In the analysis of who is talking to whom, they preferred to adopt a statistical approach instead of resorting to the Bechdel test – which a work passes if it includes two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.
Here they found that “there is a significant bias for men to follow men and women to follow women, even accounting for the higher proportion of male characters.”
When it comes to dialogue content, female characters show more gratitude, apologize more, and use fewer swear words than male characters. In the case of non-playable characters (NPCs), female ones offer motivations centered around family and relationships, and in games where responses vary by player gender, 24 percent of NPCs perpetuated a gender stereotype. .
The researchers gather from the quantitative analysis that “there are almost twice as many dialogues between male characters than female characters in video games” analyzed. There are also “very few games” that contain more dialogue from female characters than male characters, and “an imbalance in who talks to whom, with female characters less likely to talk to other female characters”.
“These biases cannot be easily avoided through player choices, and there are clear differences in the content of male and female dialogue that align with gender stereotypes and tropes,” they say in their conclusions.
The existence of an imbalance in the proportion of female and male characters and the assignment of a more limited range of roles to female ones are identified as possible causes of the bias identified in video game dialogues.
