We all know it's been a long road for female characters in video games. It's not always easy to find good female character representation, whether it's not appearing at all, existing only as a love interest, or dying within the first hour.
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However, research from the University of Glasgow found that male characters still have twice as much dialogue as female characters.
In the largest ever study of video game dialogue, researchers found that out of 13,000 video game characters, men spoke twice as often as women in over 94% of titles. This imbalance still occurs even if the protagonist is a woman.
The study also acknowledges that although this imbalance is gradually widening, it will still take more than a decade for women's dialogue to reach that of men. Moreover, this finding applied not only to the main characters, but also to the secondary characters.
“I expected that there would be a large proportion of male conversations overall, but I was surprised to find that there were only three out of 50 games where female conversation exceeded 50%,'' said Philosophy Researcher, Faculty of Humanities. Dr. Rennick said. at the University of Glasgow.
It seems like the players share our surprise. The study expected a general pattern of more male talking, but overestimated the number of games in which women spoke the majority. ”
But how can we fix this? Researchers suggest that introducing more major and minor female characters in video games could help address this imbalance. However, just because a game features multiple female characters doesn't mean the quantity or quality of dialogue will improve.
All in all, this is a sad but unsurprising study, one that we hope will be rectified in the future as more and more complex female characters enter the video game world.
