Largest study of video games reveals men say twice as much as women
The research (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.221095), published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, analysed more than 13,000 video-game characters and found that men speak twice as much as women.
The study, led by Dr Stephanie Rennick at the University of Glasgow and Dr Seán G. Roberts at Cardiff University, performed the first large-scale test of gender imbalance in the dialogue of 50 role-playing video games (RPGs).
It discovered that games include twice as much male dialogue as female dialogue on average. 94% of games studied had more male dialogue than female dialogue, including games with multiple female protagonists like Final Fantasy X-2 or King’s Quest VII.
However, the bias isn’t just with protagonists – the same imbalances were found in minor characters and persists even when taking into account player choices about protagonist gender and optional dialogue. The study also found the proportion of female dialogue is slowly increasing. If this trend were to continue, it would still take more than a decade to reach parity. Furthermore, there were few characters in non-binary gender categories: only 30 out of 13,000, or about half as much as in real life.
For more info (or to play a game to learn more about the research), see: https://correlation-machine.com/VideoGameDialogueCorpus/
