Language, Equality, and Gaming – LEG project
Conceptualised and to be carried out by Dr Frazer Heritage (Department of Linguistics, Manchester Met), the project Language, Equality, and Gaming (LEG) has been awarded a research accelerator grant.
Although significant work has being done to address inequalities in videogames, many analyses of videogame data typically stay at a visual level. One area which has received little attention is that of how language contributes to sustaining prejudices (though, see Heritage, 2021, 2022; Rennick & Roberts, forthcoming). While a number of videogame companies have Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) leads and EDI training for all staff, there are still all too often implicit biases (in the form of language) which persist, leading to unconscious bias still being included in videogames when dialogue is written, items are described, and in how characters are represented. For example, female characters might only ever occur with words which denote their mental abilities or intelligence, while male characters might regularly occur with words denoting their physical strength and muscles. Although such representations are less obvious, they are nevertheless equally problematic, and often EDI teams do not have the necessary tools nor training to identify these inequalities.
This internally funded project seeks to take one videogame, called Sea of Thieves, as a case study for close linguistic analysis, focusing on how identities are constructed and negotiated within the text. Through combining corpus linguistic methodologies (computer-assisted computational analysis of, for example, what words are statistically more likely to occur within a given collection of texts) with critical discursive analytical frameworks (systematic, qualitative frameworks for exploring how meaning is created in context), this project seeks to explore how identities are represented within Sea of Thieves, identify areas of both praise and improvement, and develop a training package for helping videogame companies identify EDI issues within their own game’s language.
The award received from this grant will firstly be used to collect, clean, and analyse data from Sea of Thieves. The project will leverage already existing links between Dr Heritage and RARE, the studio who develop the game. The project aims to culminate in a training day based on the findings, which in turn will also allow for the identification of more routes to developing tangible impact.
It is hoped that this work will lay the foundation for the development of additional research, which would seek to build a much larger corpus of several videogames, which would be tagged and annotated, to deliver more extensive training for a greater range of videogame companies. It is hoped that by providing such training and a resource in the form of an accessible corpus, videogame script writers may become more acutely aware of their linguistic choices and may begin to dismantle implicit prejudices and proactively enhance the language used in online videogames to be more inclusive.
References
Heritage, F. (2021). Language, Gender and Videogames: Using Corpora to Analyse the Representation of Gender in Fantasy Videogames. Palgrave.
Heritage, F. (2022). Magical women: Representations of female characters in the Witcher video game series. Discourse, Context & Media, 49, 100627.
Rennick, S. & Roberts, S. G. (forthcoming). The video game dialogue corpus. Corpora.