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. 2023 May 24;10(5):221095.
doi: 10.1098/rsos.221095. eCollection 2023 May.

Gender bias in video game dialogue

Stephanie Rennick  1 , Melanie Clinton  2 , Elena Ioannidou  3 , Liana Oh  3 , Charlotte Clooney  3 , E T  1   2   3 , Edward Healy  3 , Seán G Roberts  3
Affiliations

Gender bias in video game dialogue

Stephanie Rennick et al. R Soc Open Sci. .

Abstract

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. We make suggestions for how game developers can avoid these biases to make more inclusive games.

Keywords: computational linguistics; corpus linguistics; gender; video games.

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Conflict of interest statement

We declare we have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Proportion of female dialogue compared with male dialogue in 50 video games over time. Acrynoms refer to game series (FF, Final Fantasy; KQ, King′s Quest; KH, Kingdom Hearts; MI, Monkey Island; ME, Mass Effect; DA, Dragon Age; KOTOR, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). The regression line shows linear change, excluding two outliers (KQ2, KQ4).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
(a) Estimations of gender bias in 50 video games. The horizontal axis represents the extent of the character bias: the likelihood of the observed dialogue balance being generated if characters were assigned gender randomly. The vertical axis represents the extent of the dialogue bias: the likelihood of the observed dialogue balance being generated if character gender was permuted. Values further from the centre indicate more extreme results. (b) The proportion of words spoken by female characters in each game as a function of the proportion of female characters. The space is split at the identity (intercept 0 and a slope of 1) to show games where female dialogue is over-represented given the proportion of characters, and games where the female dialogue is under-represented given the proportion of characters.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
How the proportion of female dialogue varies according to player choices in dialogue trees. For each game, the figure shows: the proportion of female dialogue written by the game authors (red dot); the range of proportions from a player making random decisions (red whiskers); and the range from the proportion of female dialogue experienced if an omniscient player tried to maximize male dialogue to if they are trying to maximize female dialogue (black whiskers).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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