The Verbal Language of Video Games in a Multidimensional Perspective

This chapter is part of the institutional proposal of the “Multimodal/multilingual portal for the advancement of open science in the Humanities” (Portal multimodal/multilíngue para o avanço da ciência aberta nas Humanidades), currently underway at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The Portal mission includes both fostering open science practices in the Humanities as well as being a repository for open science research. The project presented in this chapter will contribute to the Portal by sharing the information collected and the results found, in addition to chronicling how the project is being carried out by posting blog entries discussing the problems and solutions encountered as the research develops. The major goal of this study is to identify the key discourses in the character dialogues of popular video games. Previous research has shown that video games embody a large number of different discourses, such as male dominance discourses, war discourses, and stereotyping discourses, to mention a few. At the same time, most discourse-based studies of video games either are theoretical or rely on restricted data samples or both. In this study, we want to fill this gap by carrying out a discourse-based investigation using a large, comprehensive corpus of video game dialogue. To identify the discourses in the corpus, we employ Lexical Multidimensional Analysis (Berber Sardinha, 2019, 2020; Berber Sardinha & Fitzsimmons-Doolan, in prep.; Fitzsimmons-Doolan, 2019, forthcoming; Clarke et al. 2022). We will compare the gender of each game character on each factor, to determine if there are systematic differences across gender categories for the different discourses. We hope to show the range of discourses conveyed by video games and the different ways in which these discourses are phrased. Overall, this chapter will help shed light on video games as loci of contemporary discourses, as well as illustrate how to text mine a corpus for discourse using Lexical Multidimensional Analysis (LMD).