128
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Demifriend@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccamwrites.bsky.social/post/3m6a62btty226

Here's the dataset and their website if you are interested, there's more games beyond Final Fantasy that they've looked at.

Main findings

  • 35% of words were spoken by female characters.
  • 29% of characters were female, which suggests the imbalance is driven by a lack of female characters.
  • 94% of games had more male dialogue than female dialogue.
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] blunder@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago

Hm, I've only played 7 but if you keep Tifa / Aeris / Yuffie in your party the whole time surely that number goes up?

[-] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago

I think this counts all the words in the game files, not based on playthroughs.

[-] Demifriend@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

As chgxvjh says, I'm pretty sure it's analyzing entire scripts. I did notice in the linked research article on their GitHub that they took a look at that as well though.

How the proportion of female dialogue varies according to player choices in dialogue trees. For each game, the figure shows: the proportion of female dialogue written by the game authors (red dot); the range of proportions from a player making random decisions (red whiskers); and the range from the proportion of female dialogue experienced if an omniscient player tried to maximize male dialogue to if they are trying to maximize female dialogue (black whiskers).

this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
128 points (100.0% liked)

Games

21195 readers
128 users here now

Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.

Rules

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS