A study of 13,000 game characters revealed that ``male characters have twice as many lines as female characters.''

Researchers from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and Cardiff University in the UK have conducted the largest ever study of game interaction. A study of over 13,000 game characters shows that men speak twice as often as women in games.

Gender bias in video game dialogue

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-largest-video-games-reveals-male.html

A paper published in the Royal Society Open Science journal investigated gender bias in gaming dialogue and speech. According to the paper, similar research on movies, television, books, etc. has been conducted in the past, but there was a lack of data on video games, so the team decided to create a ``video game dialogue corpus '' and make it open source. He said he did.

As a research method, we first limited the genre of games to be investigated to ``RPGs where dialogue is the main element.'' We have compiled a list of games that have sold at least 1 million copies worldwide. After that, we collect information such as date and time of release, target audience, criteria for whether it is aimed at teens or adults, etc., in a well-balanced manner according to the sampling frame.

We collected text about the selected games by obtaining data directly from the source code and by referring to records created by volunteers. By combining the collected data with scripts and manual editing, we were able to identify which characters were saying which characters and then aggregate and analyze them.

As a result of analyzing a total of 404,0609 lines and 5,679,321 words of dialogue, 35.16% of these were spoken by female characters, and 64.84% were spoken by male characters, indicating that male characters spoke about twice as much. I understand. Only 6% of the games included in the study had more than 50% female dialogue. The bias in the amount of conversation is likely due to the characters appearing in the first place, with the number of male characters being 70.63% and the number of female characters being 29.37%. Please note that characters whose gender is not clear are excluded from this calculation.

The same study also found an imbalance in 'who the characters talk to.' Even considering the absolute number of lines that female characters have and the small number of female characters in the game, female characters speak less to each other. Furthermore, female characters have been shown to be biased in the content of their dialogue, such as apologizing, being hesitant, or being polite. The number of comments made by female characters tends to gradually increase as new games become available, but if it increases at the same pace, it will take more than 10 years for men and women to be equal.

Stephanie Rennick, a philosophy researcher in the Faculty of Humanities and Humanities at the University of Glasgow, said in response to the study's results, ``We had expected a high proportion of male conversations overall, but we are surprised at how few games have a high proportion of female conversations. I was surprised to see the results.In a survey of game players, many players predicted that there would be a lot of male conversation, but they still overestimated the number of games that had a lot of female conversation. 'I was there,' he says.

Shaun G. Roberts, Lecturer in Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, said: ``About half of gamers are women, and they experience a lot of discrimination and exclusion. We want more diverse representation, so we hope developers will consider addressing the disparities we've discovered to create more inclusive games.' Masu.