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Towards an Analysis of Gender in Video Game Culture: Exploring Gender-Specific Vocabulary in Video Game Magazines

We present preliminary results of a project examining the role and usage of gender specific vocabulary in a corpus of video game magazines. The corpus consists of three popular video game magazines with 634 issues from the 1980s until 2011 and was gathered via OCR-scans of the platform archive.org. We report on the distribution and progression of gender-specific words by using word lists of the LIWC for the categories "male" and "female". We can indeed show that words of the type male are considerably more frequent than words of the type female, with a slight increase of female words during 2006–2010. This is in line with the overall development of gaming culture throughout these years and previous research in the humanities. Furthermore, we analyzed how the usage of negatively connoted words for female depictions (e.g. chick, slut) has evolved and identified a constant increase throughout the years reaching the climax around 2001–2005, a timespan that coincides with the release and popularity of games encompassing rather sexist concepts. We discuss the limitations of our explorations and report on plans to further investigate the role of gender in gaming culture.