How Genshin Impact writes men and women, measured from 800,000 words of dialogue

As video games grow, so does the evidence of violent and sexist content in some of them. Cultivation theory holds that repeated exposure to such content can shape how players see gender and violence, and because those ideas show up in language, they can be measured. Nilüfer Erdur studied the dialogue of Genshin Impact, the action RPG by HoYoverse, to find out how the game represents each gender.

Approach

The study used a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) approach, a data-driven method that combines keyword, collocation, and concordance analysis to inspect language patterns and the ideologies behind them. The corpus was 800,231 words extracted from Genshin Impact quest dialogue, patches 1.0 through 2.6. Keyword analysis compared it against the New Model Corpus, a reference corpus of one hundred million English words, to find words that stand out in the game. Selected keywords were then checked through concordance analysis to see whether they carried a gendered meaning, and collocation analysis measured how often gendered pronouns appear next to particular verbs, adjectives, and nouns. The tools were Sketch Engine and AntConc.

Findings

The word “he” appears among the 50 most frequent keywords in the game, while “she” does not. Male characters are mostly paired with verbs of bodily or physical action, while female characters are paired equally with bodily and mental verbs. Among adjectives, men are described positively as self-confident and negatively as guilty and impatient; women are described positively as hard workers and high-ranking individuals and negatively as irritable. The strongest adjective collocates of “he” include awake, sensitive, upset, stubborn, and confident; for “she” they include angry, mad, tired, alone, famous, happy, and busy.

Both genders are given familial roles, but male roles are tied to a patriarchal hierarchy while female roles imply domestic ties. The pronoun “they” showed no gendered use and served as an ordinary plural. Overall, the absence of sexualization and violence leads the author to conclude that Genshin Impact represents gender better than older games did.

What comes next

The study only covers quest dialogue. Erdur recommends extending it to in-game books, item descriptions, and character stories, and combining visual with linguistic analysis for a fuller picture. The method could also track how gender representation in Genshin Impact or similar games changes over time.

Source: Erdur, N. (2022). Gender in Genshin Impact: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis. Language Education and Technology, 2(1), 74 to 93. langedutech.com

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