Figure 25 - uploaded by Isamar Carrillo Masso
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A screenshot of the summary of player choices taken in The Wolf Among Us, compared to the stats of other players.
Source publication
In the past 40 years, computer games have become an overwhelming success in the entertainment industries as well as an established cultural medium. While the video game industry has well-established methods of data collection (in the form of game metrics) to deal with the inherent complexity of video games, the field of game research has not suffic...
Citations
... Indeed, this notion has been demonstrated and argued by mainstream-feminists such as Anita Sarkeesian (see Sarkeesian, 2014), whose synthesis of sexism in gaming culture became the focus of cyber-trolling. However, a commonality running throughout an overwhelming amount of literature into gender in videogames is a focus on how characters are visually realised, as opposed to represented in terms of the lexis and grammar used by and about gendered characters (see, for example, MacCallum-Stewart, 2014; Machin and van Leeuwen, 2016;Carrillo Masso, 2019). ...
Several videogames allow players to form their own narratives by making the player choose certain options with different dialogues and thus different representations. This can be problematic when exploring the representation of gender from the perspective of player’s experiences. I argue that one way to overcome this is to use corpus linguistic methods. In this paper, the videogame series The Witcher (CD Projekt Red, 2007, CD Projekt Red, 2011, CD Projekt Red, 2015) is taken as a case study for lexico-grammatical analysis of the representation of gender via corpus methods. Keyword analysis shows that male characters are more likely to occur than female characters and have a more diverse range of professions than female characters. I argue that the main female characters of the game are typically sorceresses, and so I explore how this term is used across the corpus. The analysis demonstrates that sorceresses are represented as educated and intelligent, but subject to a glass ceiling effect: they are only ever advisors and not leaders. I argue that regardless of what options players choose, they are statistically more likely to encounter these problematic representations of gender, thus raising questions about whether it is possible to escape sexist discourses in this medium.
