Understanding Gender Stereotypes in Video Game Character Designs: A Case Study of Honor of Kings

Bingqing Liu, Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou, Danlei Zhu, Jaihyun Park


Abstract
In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of gender stereotypes in the character design in Honor of Kings, a popular MOBA game in China. We probe gender stereotypes through the lens of role assignments, visual designs, lines, and background stories, combining qualitative analysis and text mining based on moral foundations. Male heroes are commonly designed as masculine fighters with power, and female heroes are designed as feminine “ornaments” with ideal looks. We contribute with a multi-modal dataset for understanding gender bias in games and a moral-, visual-, and role-based inspection of gender.
Anthology ID:
2023.nlp4dh-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities and 8th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Tokyo, Japan
Editors:
Mika Hämäläinen, Emily Öhman, Flammie Pirinen, Khalid Alnajjar, So Miyagawa, Yuri Bizzoni, Niko Partanen, Jack Rueter
Venues:
NLP4DH | IWCLUL
SIG:
SIGUR
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
125–131
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-1.15
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bingqing Liu, Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou, Danlei Zhu, and Jaihyun Park. 2023. Understanding Gender Stereotypes in Video Game Character Designs: A Case Study of Honor of Kings. In Proceedings of the Joint 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities and 8th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages, pages 125–131, Tokyo, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Understanding Gender Stereotypes in Video Game Character Designs: A Case Study of Honor of Kings (Liu et al., NLP4DH-IWCLUL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-1.15.pdf