They are already as many as them. Women represent half of video game players worldwide, but gender biases remain alive in this industry, which is the largest in entertainment, already surpassing music and cinema. Female characters are less on the screens, have more sexualized images and play less important roles, so that their representations reinforce already known stereotypes. A new study now adds to this evidence, showing that female characters not only appear less, but also speak less and have less relevant dialogue.
The investigation, published today in the magazine Royal Society Open Science, has analyzed six million words spoken by more than 13,000 characters from 50 role-playing video games, where conversations are crucial to the plot. According to the authors of the study, it is the first time that gender representation in fictional conversations has been measured on a large scale and the results show that the dialogues of the female characters account for half of those of the male ones. In part this is due to the lack of female characters, but there are also biases in what they say and who they talk to. On average, they are given less important dialogue and there is a tendency for them to interact less with other characters of the same gender.
Although the dialogues in video games can also vary according to the will and decisions of the players, the research results suggest that this does not have a direct effect on gender representation. In the sample, 11 games allow players to choose the gender of the protagonist. Of these, only two ―the trilogy mass effect and Dragon Age 2―, provides more feminine vs. masculine dialogue when the character is a woman.
In 24 games, in addition, the researchers had access to the structure of the dialogues marked by the algorithm. They simulated an omniscient player, trying to maximize the dialogue of a genre. When trying to optimize female over male dialogue, the player would succeed on 36% of the attempts, which is an average of 10 more words spoken by women in each conversation. However, if the character tried to maximize the masculine dialogue, success would occur in 65% of the cases, with an average of 33 more words. “This suggests that bias against female dialogue cannot be easily avoided by gamers,” the authors say, in the study.
There has been an evolution. The study also looks at games from the last 50 years, and found that the number of female dialogue increased by six points each decade. Despite this, at this rate, the gender gap would only be overcome in 2036. stephanie renick, a researcher in the philosophy department at the University of Glasgow and lead author of the research, explains that the fastest way to achieve parity would be for games to add more female characters. “While men talked twice as much as women overall, we didn’t find that the average man talked more than the average woman. Instead, there were far fewer female characters than male ones,” she details by email.
However, simply increasing the number of female characters will not address all of the biases that were identified in the study, such as the underrepresentation of gender non-binary characters and other minorities. The studio leader argues that, in order to deal with these problems, measures such as monitoring the gender distribution of characters and their dialogues, diversifying roles and subverting so-called gender roles must be adopted.
One of the recommendations is to carry out what is known as gender flipping (gender change): create the character as belonging to a gender and, later, without changing other facets of his character, such as his relationships or his personality traits, modify the gender before launching him in the game. “It can be a useful way to identify prejudices or stereotypes because they become more noticeable after turning it around,” the researcher details. “The Royal Shakespeare Company did a production of Cymbeline a few years ago where the character changed gender to become a queen, and the previous evil stepmother was now an evil stepfather. This is different from when a character is played by an actor of the opposite gender, something common in Shakespearean performances. The characters were no longer types, but individuals, ”she exemplifies.
It is important that companies not only think about the main characters, but also the minority ones, because in some cases, as the researcher argues, the biases are more evident at the level of less relevant characters. “Several games had one or more female leads, yet less than half of the overall dialogue was female. Also, stereotypes can easily creep into background characters, like when all the guards are men,” Rennick stresses.
The research highlights that many biases are built into the algorithmic models used in the early stages of video game development. In daggerfallFor example, the distribution of supporting characters is determined randomly, and there is an equal chance that they are male or female. However, before they are assigned a gender, they are first assigned a role. If they are guards, they will be male by default. Thus, if it were not for this role determination, the gender determination could be more balanced.
The authors suggest that future research should focus on identifying patterns in narratives or in the way stories are told. The damsel in distress or the knight in armor create an expectation of what will happen in a story, but they can also reinforce problematic stereotypes. “If we know what patterns we continue to perpetuate, we can decide whether to subvert or avoid them,” concludes Rennick.
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