Gender in Genshin Impact

A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis

Abstract

With the prevalence of video games and becoming a hobby of players of all ages, discussions about violence and sexist content in games have come to the fore. According to some theories, these contents, can cause negative changes in the behaviors of individuals by corrupting their perspectives on gender and violence. These ideologies can exist linguistically as well as visually. For this reason, it is essential to examine the gender representations that appear in video games that contain a lot of repetitive linguistic input. In this study, dialogues of Genshin Impact, an action RPG video game developed by a Chinese company known as HoYoVerse was examined through corpus-assisted approach to find out how each gender is represented. SketchEngine and AntConc applications used for keywords, collocation and concordance lines analyses. The keyword analysis showed that women were underrepresented compared to men. Collocation and concordance lines analyses revealed that while males were represented mostly with verbs that denote bodily actions, women were almost equally represented with bodily and mental verbs. Adjectives indicating the psychological state of women were also found to be higher than men.  Males were found to be the receivers of the violent acts while women were associated with supernatural powers, successful careers, and fame. Both genders were represented with familial roles, yet male roles were more related to patriarchal hierarchy while women roles imply a domestic bond. In general, the absence of sexualization and violent acts showed that there were better gender representations compared to previous games.