Do we use stereotypical adjectives to describe gendered characters in our mobile games?
As part of the volunteering DEI team (diversity, equality & inclusion) at my employer, I was able to support and contribute to a few projects with my technical skills. New in the efforts around this topic, our first goal was to assess and understand the perception of diversity & inclusion and status quo in the company.
Goal
One part of this audit was to understand how diverse and inclusive our products are. For this, I reviewed the characters of our flagship games and their descriptions to understand:
- The overall representation of genders* within our games
- Whether stereotypical words are used to describe the characters by gender
*It is important to state that diversity goes beyond gender. However, given the nature of the characters in the game, gender seemed like a feasible and good first feature to analyse
Main Findings
- Even though 55% of of mobile gamers in the US are women, one of our games has less than 25% female representation in game characters, and 17% neutral character representation.
- Words, and especially adjectives, used for describing different characters seem at first glance evenly among gender when looking at positive & negative adjectives. Prominent words for all genders are cosmic, dangerous, good, powerful, dark
Wordcloud for male character description
Wordcloud for female character description
- When removing shared adjectives and displaying remaining adjectives that are most common by genders, characters are indeed described with stereotypical adjectives for genders. E.g. male characters are described as tough, legendary and aggressive, whereas female characters are described as desperate, beautiful and fairy
Adjusted wordcloud for male character description
Adjusted wordcloud for female character description
