Video game study finds male characters speak twice as much as their female counterparts

We all know that it has been a long road for female characters in video games. Whether they don’t feature at all, only exist as love interests or die within the first hour, good female character representation has not always been easy to find.

With recent years slowly improving with characters such as Lara Croft still as loved as ever as well as the arrival of Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy, Final Fantasy’s Tifa and The Last of Us’ Ellie and Abby respectively to name a few, things are looking up.

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However, according to a study by the University of Glasgow, it has been discovered that male characters still have twice as much dialogue as their female counterparts.

Discovered after carrying out the largest-ever study of video game dialogue, researchers have revealed that out of 13,000 video game characters, men speak twice as much as women in over 94% of the titles. So much so, that this imbalance still occurs even when the main character is female.

The study also acknowledges that although this imbalance is slowly increasing, it would still take over a decade for female dialogue to reach that of the men’s. Additionally, this discovery did not only pertain to main characters, but also side characters.

“While we expected to find a larger proportion of male dialogue overall, we were surprised to discover how few games – just three of 50 - had more than 50% female dialogue,” said Dr Rennick, research associate in philosophy, School of Humanities, at the University of Glasgow.

Players seem to share our surprise: when surveyed, they anticipated the general pattern of more male dialogue, but overestimated the number of games where women spoke the majority of the time.”

However, how do we fix this? The researchers suggest that this imbalance can be resolved by introducing more major and minor female characters in video games. However, just because a game features multiple female characters, it does not mean the amount or quality of dialogue will improve.

Overall, it is a sad but unsurprising study which will hopefully be rectified in the future as more and more complex female characters join the video game sphere.

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