This is my idea of fun / Playin' video games

May 31, 2023 2:11 AM

Gender biases in fictional dialogue are well documented in many media. In film, television and books, female characters tend to talk less than male characters, talk to each other less than male characters talk to each other, and have a more limited range of things to say. Identifying these biases is an important step towards addressing them. However, there is a lack of solid data for video games, now one of the major mass media which has the ability to shape conceptions of gender and gender roles. We present the Video Game Dialogue Corpus, the first large-scale, consistently coded corpus of video game dialogue, which makes it possible for the first time to measure and monitor gender representation in video game dialogue. It demonstrates that there is half as much dialogue from female characters as from male characters. Some of this is due to a lack of female characters, but there are also biases in who female characters speak to, and what they say. [Gender bias in video game dialogue]

Male video game characters speak twice as much as females, largest study of its kind reveals [The Conversation]

posted by chavenet (26 comments total)

The Last of Us doesn’t seem to have been studied, the sequel especially featured rich and varied female dialogue. It is a major outsider in that way, however.
posted by glaucon at 3:10 AM on May 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

Gordon Freeman, doing his bit.
posted by nickzoic at 4:03 AM on May 31, 2023 [10 favorites]

Many of the games listed in the first link are pretty old. Daggerfall (1996), even Oblivion (2006) (which notoriously had very few voice actors doing way too many different character voices) for example.

I'm all for less gender bias in games, but unless I'm reading that link incorrectly (I can't find the entire list of games studied), the authors didn't include very many contemporary games, or even games from the past five or eight years. And many of the games called out in the paper are almost ancient in video-game years.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:33 AM on May 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

WWGDD?
posted by johnabbe at 4:51 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is Anita Sarkeesians's work, on this exact topic, for which she was doxxed and threatened, mentioned anywhere? Because it fucking should be.
posted by emjaybee at 5:25 AM on May 31, 2023 [27 favorites]

Many of the games listed in the first link are pretty old

It would be interesting if the figures could be weighted by popularity - a real blockbuster presumably has more impact than something relatively obscure.

Interesting also that female characters speak less in spite of the stereotype that women talk too much…

It’s a somewhat academic point, but imo it’s not that games shouldn’t depict sexism, it’s that they shouldn’t normalise it. Showing realistic levels of sexism and challenging it is fine, presumably.
posted by Phanx at 5:32 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Did it matter that in Portal 2 Wheatley got more dialogue than Chell?
posted by Phanx at 5:33 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is no dialog. But I love the game Kingdom, and played runs of it 100s of times (Steam tells me I've played 383 hours over the 3 versions of the game....so no one can tell me I'm not a "gamer".) Have always played as the queen character, because I can. It makes me absurdly happy I do not have to play with my character as a man.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:40 AM on May 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

I suspect a greater sample size would be interesting, but would not yield hugely different results.
posted by Artw at 5:50 AM on May 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

This seems pretty fluffy and I am assuming it is a grad student project. It seems to me that the useful part of the work that they did is in developing tools and methods for extracting dialogue data from games and building their dataset, but that's not as attention grabbing as touting some of their conclusions, however shaky. I would want to see a much more rigorously defined sample set before looking to their conclusions for broad insights.

I agree with emjaybee I would expect to see Anita Sarkeesian cited in work on this topic, but it may be the case (I hope!) that her work is foundational enough by now that it is not always cited directly but would be cited by many of the works cited. I didn't have the patience to check though.
posted by Rhedyn at 5:52 AM on May 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

They only analyzed rpgs, which I can understand. It would be interesting if they had also tackled open world games (GTA, RDR, Infamous, State of Decay, various immersive sims (eg Dishonored) etc) and narrative shooters/similar type games (Uncharted, Last of Us, Alan Wake, Max Payne, the single player campaigns for the call of duty games, etc)

This is not to say the work is invalid. In fact I bet for narrative shooters the data would be even worse. But I would really like to see this outside of rpgs. (also, nothing from cdpr? I can't imagine the dialog from The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk is unavailable)
posted by Hactar at 6:02 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Looking through the github it looks like the initial analysis was on 50 games mostly from big series (final fantasy, kings quest, elder scrolls, persona, although it looks like there are some games in the data section not here, so they might grow it a bit) https://github.com/seannyD/VideoGameDialogueCorpusPublic/blob/main/results/GamesRankedByFemaleDialogueProp.csv

And yeah, I'm sure I can think of plenty of games that buck these trends (probably more in other genres like VNs or more obscure studios compared to this list of the biggest rpgs), but I'm sure those games are just filling in their end of the distribution.
posted by tealNoise at 6:02 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hah, I only play Warcraft and Starcraft, where there are strong female characters who speak all the time and are super-hot and wear tiny... oh wait.
posted by one more day at 6:32 AM on May 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

Interesting (though I guess not surprising) is that 3 of the top 5 spots in that data section are King's Quest games, which are of course designed by of one of the most prominent female game designers, Roberta Williams. I did not, however, expect to see KQ2 - which is a "go-find-your-bride" quest with King Graham as your playable character score higher than KQ7 which features not one, but two playable female leads trying to reunite.

I get the impression that this is useful in a Bechdel-test-y sort of way - a jumping-off point for discussion, but the actual nuance of representation is more complex than just gaming the femword score
posted by gee_the_riot at 6:35 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is no dialog

Sure is.
posted by Phanx at 6:47 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

This might be related to why, when an RPG-style game has a choice between male and female voice acting for the main character, the female voice is typically superior - there's an unconscious bias towards writing the character as male, I think, so the female actor gets to stretch a little more.
posted by Merus at 7:21 AM on May 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm about 6 hours into God of War Ragnarok, I don't think I have heard a female character speak as yet. Not even sure there has been one on screen.
posted by biffa at 7:42 AM on May 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

One of the reasons I didn't play God of Whatever. Don't care about dudes, don't care about their testosterone-related problems. Also, as I found on my brief trial when it was free, the combat is kind of shit.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:48 AM on May 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

This might be related to why, when an RPG-style game has a choice between male and female voice acting for the main character, the female voice is typically superior - there's an unconscious bias towards writing the character as male, I think, so the female actor gets to stretch a little more.

Mass Effect had this in spades.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:01 AM on May 31, 2023 [8 favorites]

From the supplementary material. The years the games were taken from. Number at the end is the total for each year band.

1985 - 1989 FFI; FFII; KQ3; KQ1; KQ2; KQ4 (6)
1990 - 1994 FFIV; FFV; FFVI; KQ5; KQ6; KQ7; MI1; MI2 (8)
1995 - 1999 ChronoTrigger; FFVII; FFVIII; KQ8; MI3; SMario; Daggerfall (7)
2000 - 2004 FFIX; FFX; FFX2; KH; KOTOR; Morrowind (6)
2005 - 2009 DAO; FFXII; FFXIII; KH2; ME1; Persona3; Persona4; Oblivion (8)
2010 - 2014 DragonAge2; FFXIV; FFXIII-2; FFXIII-LR; KH3D; ME2; ME3; Skyrim (8)
2015 - 2021 FFXV; FFVII-R; HorizonZeroDawn; KQChapters; KH3; Persona5; StardewValley (7)
posted by antiwiggle at 8:02 AM on May 31, 2023 [5 favorites]

I wonder how Guild Wars 2 would rate. You can play as a male or female character of different races, so they've got (at least) 10 different voice actors just covering your own character's dialog. There are plenty of female NPCs in positions of power and/or badassery and/or villainy. Tons of random NPCs have incidental dialog/monologues just to set the stage -- arguing about the shopping list, complaining about guard duty, humming to themselves, selling questionable fish, flirting, gossiping, talking shop, children playing or trying to get their parents' attention, etc.
posted by Foosnark at 8:19 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is no dialog

Sure is.

Huh? There are no words in Kingdom. The characters do not speak and there are no words on the screen except when you start and the game ends. Can you elaborate on what you mean?
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:26 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Phanx was confused because you said something after they said something button-pushy, and were therefore clearly responding specifically and only to their button-pushing, based on only the first four words of your comment.
posted by cortex at 9:26 AM on May 31, 2023 [5 favorites]

Anyway I would personally love to see less "okay the core results of this are probably correct, but the methodology might be imperfect and anyway there's SOME games where WOMEN talk more, and also well actually..." energy ooze immediately into the conversation about this. I don't think people are generally even trying to do that but, geez, it just kind of underscores how systemic and reflexive a lot of the cultural defaults are that drive this kind of easy-to-identify, effortful-to-quantify bias in media content.
posted by cortex at 9:30 AM on May 31, 2023 [14 favorites]

Phanx was confused because you said something after they said something button-pushy, and were therefore clearly responding specifically and only to their button-pushing, based on only the first four words of your comment.

I cannot follow any of this and am more confused than I was originally. I don't think I even saw their comment before posting.
posted by tiny frying pan at 1:15 PM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was feeling very salty and was being needlessly arch in expressing that frustration. In plain words, Phanx misread your comment as being a reply to their comment about Portal 2 rather than being about what you were actually commenting about, which is why their reply to your comment about Kingdom made no sense. Your confusion was understandable and was not owing to any error on your part.
posted by cortex at 2:03 PM on May 31, 2023 [2 favorites]