Male video game characters talk twice as much as female ones.

Nearly 3 billion people play video games around the world and make more money each year than the entire movie industry. But while around 50% of those gamers are women, video games have chronic problems with gender bias.

Female gamers have reported suffering sexist abuse online, and there have been multiple allegations of gender discrimination in game development. Let’s not forget “Gamergate”, the year-long 2014-2015 campaign of harassment of prominent gamers and developers.

Male video game characters talk twice as much as female ones.

And the problem does not end there. The results of the largest study ever conducted on dialogue in video games reveal another stark gender imbalance in the industry. Our analysis, published in Royal Society Open Sciencestudied more than 13,000 video game characters and found that male characters have twice as much dialogue as female ones.

Part of the blame lies with the content of the video games themselves, which are more likely to have male than female protagonists. In addition, many games limit women to stereotypical roles: Princess Peach, a character from Nintendo’s Super Mario video game franchise, for example, often plays the role of a damsel in distress.

Sexist prejudices come to light in dialogues

Studying dialogue is one way to better understand gender bias. Previous studies have already shown that most movies and TV shows devote more dialogue to male characters. By building the largest open source database of video game dialogue, we’ve discovered that video game dialogue is no different.

Our study of 13,000 characters from 50 video games found that, on average, video games include twice as much male dialogue as female. Additionally, 94% of the games we analyzed had more male than female dialogue, including games with multiple female protagonists (for example, Final Fantasy X-2 o King’s Quest VII).

The exceptions were the games of King’s Quest from the 1980s and Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returnswhich has a female lead (and still only manages 55% female dialogue).

However, the bias did not only occur with the protagonists: we found the same imbalances in the secondary characters. The pattern persisted even when player choices regarding the protagonist’s gender and optional dialogue were taken into account.

Although it seems that the proportion of female dialogue is slowly increasing, we also observe that female characters tend to be apologetic, hesitant, or nice, which perpetuates stereotypes about gender-based behavior.

Finally, although the results presented here refer to male and female characters, we were interested in knowing the distribution of dialogue for all genders. Unfortunately, we were unable to perform reliable analyzes of non-binary and other gender characters, as there were very few characters from these categories, which is revealing in itself.

Difficulties in the search for data

We were inspired by a study on gender balance in dialogue in Disney movies, which showed that men had more dialogue than women in 88% of movies. This simple statistic was a startling demonstration of a systematic imbalance. We wanted to measure this stat for games, but quickly discovered several challenges.

First of all, what games to include? We select 50 role-playing games in which dialogue is crucial. These games were balanced in terms of sub-genre, age of the target audience, and year of publication. They included games from big developers –Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls– and games from smaller developers, such as Monkey Island y Stardew Valley.

Accessing the data was more difficult than anticipated. Some games have accessible scripts, others were hard to find. For many, we relied on amateur transcriptions, even though we had to do over 20,000 manual corrections.

Even when the game code was available, turning it into a script could be an epic adventure. The series games Elder Scrolls o Dragon Age they can contain 1,000 characters speaking half a million words. We wrote more than 10,000 lines of code to process the data.

Finally, identifying the gender of 13,000 characters was not always easy. How did we classify the costumed characters? What sex is a talking book? And a guard who only appears in one line of dialogue?

In the end we based ourselves on the conferred gender, that is, the one that a typical player would attribute to it. This required meticulous research, searching videos of people playing the game, fan wikis, and discussion forums for clues.

How can game creators correct the imbalance?

First, developers can keep an eye on dialogue distribution and use our results to determine how their games compare to others.

Second, we found that the average male character doesn’t speak more than the average female character. The general imbalance is due to the fact that there are twice as many male characters as female characters. So a key strategy would simply be to increase the ratio of female main to supporting characters.

There is an important caveat: more dialogue does not guarantee better gender representation. in the recent remake of Final Fantasy VII, the female character Jessie has ten times more dialogue than in the original. However, most of the time she spends flirting with the protagonist.

Another approach is to use gender-flippingthat is, writing characters of one gender and then changing them during development, as in the case of Fang from Final Fantasy XIIIwho began as a man and ended as a woman.

Much remains to be done in this field, especially with regard to the study of non-binary characters and harmful stereotypes of male behavior (for example, that dangerous jobs are always assigned to men). Our resources are open source, and we hope gamers, programmers, and other academics will contribute to expanding the database.

* Seán Roberts, lecturer in linguistics, Cardiff University, Steph Rennick, research associate in Philosophy, University of Glasgow. The Conversation.