Are these the most SEXIST video games? Study reveals games with the least female dialogue

While around half of gamers in the UK are female, a new study has revealed a huge gap when it comes to the amount of dialogue spoken by female characters.

Shocking research of more than 13,000 video game characters has revealed that only 35 percent of words are spoken by women.

Kingdom Hearts 3D and King’s Quest VI scored the lowest of all, with only 6.7 and 6.4 percent female dialogue respectively.

The research comes at a time when female gamers are largely targeted within the community, the team said.

“About half of gamers are female, but they experience a lot of abuse and exclusion,” says Dr Roberts of Cardiff University.

There is a call for more diverse representation by players and developers. So we hope that developers will consider addressing the imbalances we found to make more inclusive games.”

The controversial study took into account 6.2 million words from the scripts of 50 popular role-playing games (RPGs).

This game genre often has a narrative format, using dialogue as a major driver of progression.

Research included only games that had sold at least one million copies worldwide and were also featured in the “top RPGs of all time” lists.

Only 29.37 percent of the characters were female, and almost all games featured more male-dominated conversations than females (94 percent).

King’s Quest IV, King’s Quest II, and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII were among the games with the most female dialogue, at 80 percent, 79 percent, and 54.6 percent, respectively.

But The Curse of Monkey Island was in the bottom three alongside Kingdom Hearts 3D and King’s Quest VI, with only 6.7 percent of words spoken by a woman.

Only 30 of the 13,000 characters were identified as non-binary, which is about half of real life.

Dr. Rennick from the University of Glasgow said: ‘Although we expected to find a higher proportion of male dialogue, we were surprised to find how few games – only three out of 50 – contain more than 50 per cent female dialogue.

“Players seem to share our surprise: during the study, they anticipated the general pattern of more male dialogue, but overestimated the number of games in which women spoke most of the time.”

Researchers believe the huge imbalance is caused by a lack of major and minor female characters, with many men talking exclusively to other men in games.

These games were also considered to be similar to movies failing the Bechdel test – a measure used to analyze the representation of women.

But scientists warn that reinforcing female dialogue or character representation isn’t always a problem solver.

In the recent remake of Final Fantasy VII, the female character Jessie has 10 times more dialogue than the original – but most of this is flirting.

Meanwhile, games like Stardew Valley saw characters react differently depending on the gender of their player character – perpetuating stereotypes 24 percent of the time.

For example, female players are described as beautiful, offered salad, and assumed to have little experience with video games.

Still, male players were offered pasta, described as “full of energy,” and believed to be good video game players.

“An important future step for research into gender bias in video games is to identify the tropes that result in the imbalances in dialogue so that they can be addressed directly,” reads the Royal Society’s research.

“Developers concerned about such biases should keep an eye out for these patterns and think about them.

“This is perhaps more challenging for video games than any other medium, as modern games can contain far more hours of content than the average movie or television show, and feature hundreds of characters designed by a large number of developers across multiple companies. ” .’