‘I didn’t know they could one-shot me!’
Real-time change in gender categories and pronoun use in the Dark Souls community
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.23838Keywords:
real-time language change, singular they, trans linguistics, videogame, RedditAbstract
This article presents a corpus study spanning 11 years (2011–2022) of language referring to Gwyndolin, a boss in the videogame Dark Souls. Like many aspects of Dark Souls, Gwyndolin’s gender is open to interpretation, and this study tracks how both players’ readings of Gwyndolin’s gender and the pronouns they use to refer to Gwyndolin have changed over the past decade. The results show that, while players overwhelmingly read Gwyndolin as a cis man and use the pronoun ‘he’, there have been significant increases in trans and nonbinary interpretations, as well as the use of ‘they’ after 2015. The observed patterns can be linked to social changes inside and outside videogame culture occurring around 2014–2016. The study provides valuable real-time support for the existence of a change in the pronoun system (and its relation to trans/nonbinary identities), which had previously only been proposed on the basis of apparent-time data.
References
Ackerman, Lauren (2018) Processing singular they with generic and specific antecedents. Poster presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) 2018. Berlin, 7 September 2018.
Ackerman, Lauren (2019) Syntactic and cognitive issues in investigating gendered coreference. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1): Article 117. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.721
Ackerman, Lauren, Riches, Nick and Wallenberg, Joel (2018) Coreference dependency formation is modulated by experience with variation of human gender. Paper presented at the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Salt Lake City, UT, 4–7 January 2018.
Balhorn, Mark (2004) The rise of epicene they. Journal of English Linguistics 32(2): 79–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424204265824
Baranowski, Maciej (2002) Current usage of the epicene pronoun in written English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(3): 378–397. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00193
Baron, Dennis (2020) What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He & She. New York: Liveright.
Bates, Douglas M. (2014) lme4: Mixed-effects Modeling with R. https://people.math.ethz.ch/~maechler/MEMo-pages/lMMwR.pdf
Baumgartner, Jason, Zannettou, Savvas, Keegan, Brian, Squire, Megan and Blackburn, Jeremy (2020) The Pushshift Reddit dataset. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 14(1): 830–839. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v14i1.7347
Bjorkman, Bronwyn M. (2017) Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1): Article 80. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.374
Bodine, Ann (1975) Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: singular ‘they’, sex-indefinite ‘he’, and ‘he or she’. Language in Society 4(2): 129–146. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500004607
Bradley, Evan D. (2020) The influence of linguistic and social attitudes on grammaticality judgments of singular ‘they’. Language Sciences 78: Article 101272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2020.101272
Braithwaite, Andrea (2016) It’s about ethics in games journalism? Gamergaters and geek masculinity. Social Media + Society 2(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672484
Cameron, Deborah (1992) Feminism and Linguistic Theory (2nd ed.). New York: St Martin’s Press.
Carrillo Masso, Isamar (2009) Developing a methodology for corpus-based computer game studies. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 1(2): 143–169. https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw.1.2.143/7
Carrillo Masso, Isamar (2011) The grips of fantasy: the construction of female characters in and beyond virtual game worlds. In Astrid Ensslin and Eben Muse (eds) Creating Second Lives 113–142. New York: Routledge.
Carson, Don (29 February 2000) Environmental storytelling: creating immersive 3D worlds using lessons learned from the theme park industry. Game Developer. Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/environmental-storytelling-creating-immersive-3d-worlds-using-lessons-learned-from-the-theme-park-industry
Cassell, Justine and Jenkins, Henry (eds) (1998) From Barbie® to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chess, Shira and Shaw, Adrienne (2015) A conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #GamerGate and embrace hegemonic masculinity. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59(1): 208–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2014.999917
Conrod, Kirby (2018) Pronouns and gender in language. In Kira Hall and Rusty Barrett (eds) Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212926.013.63
Conrod, Kirby (2019) Pronouns Raising and Emerging. PhD thesis, University of Washington. https://linguistics.washington.edu/research/graduate/pronouns-raising-and-emerging
Curzan, Anne (2003) Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Derr, Thomas M. (2020) The Road to Gamergate: The History of Gender Stereotyping in Videogame Culture, 1970–2000 and Beyond. PhD thesis, Rutgers University. https://doi.org/10.7282/t3-q34m-0w81
Ensslin, Astrid (2012) The Language of Gaming. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Entertainment Software Association (ESA) (2021) 2021 Essential Facts about the Videogame Industry. Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021-Essential-Facts-About-the-Video-Game-Industry-1.pdf
Erdur, Nilüfer (2022) Gender in Genshin Impact: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Language Education and Technology 2(1): 74–93.
Gosset, Reina, Stanley, Eric A. and Burton, Johanna (eds) (2017) Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goux, Mathieu (2022) Ludographie comparée. Essai de grammaire systémique du jeu vidéo [Comparative Ludography: Systematic Grammar of Video Games]. Liège: University Press of Liège.
Gupta, Kat (2019) Response and responsibility: mainstream media and Lucy Meadows in a post-Leveson context. Sexualities 22(1–2): 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460717740259
Hall, Kira (2005) Intertextual sexuality: parodies of class, identity, and desire in liminal Delhi. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 125–144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.125
Hall, Kira (2009) Boys’ talk: Hindi, moustaches and masculinity in New Delhi. In Pia Pichler and Eva Eppler (eds) Gender and Spoken Interaction 139–162. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harper, Todd, Blythe Adams, Meghan and Taylor, Nicholas (2018) Queerness in Play. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heritage, Frazer (2021) Language, Gender and Videogames: Using Corpora to Analyse the Representation of Gender in Fantasy Videogames. Cham: Springer.
Heritage, Frazer (2022) Politics, pronouns and the players: examining how videogame players react to the inclusion of a transgender character in World of Warcraft. Gender and Language 16(1): 26–51. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.20250
jElliottIV (n.d.) How old is the average Dark Souls player? Reddit. Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/rtja2/how_old_is_the_average_dark_souls_ player
Jongeneel, Jethro (2013) Environmental storytelling in games. Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://www.jethrojongeneel.com/articles/T3.php
Konnelly, Lex and Cowper, Elizabeth (2020) Gender diversity and morphosyntax: an account of singular they. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5(1): Article 40. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1000
Kosciesza, Aiden J. (2023) The moral service of trans NPCs: examining the roles of transgender non-player characters in role-playing videogames. Games and Culture 18(2): 189–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120221088118
Labov, William (1973) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
LaScotte, Darren K. (2016) Singular they: an empirical study of generic pronoun use. American Speech 91(1): 62–80. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3509469
Massanari, Adrienne (2017) #Gamergate and The Fappening: how Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society 19(3): 329–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807
Matossian, Lou Ann (1997) Burglars, Babysitters, and Persons: A Sociolinguistic Study of Generic Pronoun Usage in Philadelphia and Minneapolis. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/37664
Moulton, Keir, Han, Chung-hye, Block, Trevor, Gendron, Holly and Nederveen, Sander (2020) Singular they in context. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5(1): Article 122. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1012
Paterson, Laura Louise (2011) Epicene pronouns in UK national newspapers: a diachronic study. ICAME Journal 35: 171–184. Retrieved 1 May 2024 from https://icame.info/icame_static/ij35/Laura_Louise_Paterson.pdf
Proferes, Nicholas, Jones, Naiyan, Gilbert, Sarah, Fiesler, Casey and Zimmer, Michael (2021) Studying Reddit: A systematic overview of disciplines, approaches, methods, and ethics. Social Media + Society 7(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211019004
Richter, Jon (5 October 2021) How Dark Souls mastered a new type of storytelling. Game Rant. Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://gamerant.com/dark-souls-storytelling-newuniquegood
Stefani, Barbara (2022) Gender, Language and Videogames: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis of Gender Representation in Videogames. BA thesis, University of Padua. https://thesis.unipd.it/handle/20.500.12608/40781
Stewart, Bart (12 November 2015) Environmental storytelling. Game Developer. Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/environmental-storytelling
Stryker, Susan (2008) Transgender history, homonormativity, and disciplinarity. Radical History Review 2008(100): 145–157. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2007-026
SuperBeast4721 (n.d.) What’s the average age of a dark soul player? Reddit. Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/x3b1z/whats_the_average_age_of_a_dark_souls_ player/
Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2012) Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Thach, Hibby (2021) A cross-game look at transgender representation in videogames. Press Start 7(1): 19–44.
Weil, Colette (1980) A Study of Two Game Centers and the Profile of Their Patrons. MA thesis, San Jose State University.
Weil, Elizabeth (30 November 1997) 21st: the girl-game jinx. Salon. Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://www.salon.com/1997/11/30/feature_361
Wikipedia (2023) Gamergate (harassment campaign). Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
Yee, Nick (19 January 2017) Beyond 50/50: breaking down the percentage of female gamers by genre. Quantic Foundry. Retrieved 18 February 2024 from https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre
Zimman, Lal (2018) Transgender language, transgender moment: toward a trans linguistics. In Kira Hall and Rusty Barrett (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212926.013.45
