Blog Post #1

Blog 1: Road to Approval

How did I get to this question?

After working on my first question of how toxicity related to the players, my idea got rejected and I had to start over. Instead, I went with more of an analytical path rather than working to interview people. With some inspiration from Mrs. Dobis and Mr. Barker (my mentor), I came to the conclusion of looking to see if there was rather toxicity in the games themselves. With some talk, I went into the ideas of how women are created in games and what this means for how they are portrayed. A lot of my research found that women, while being very relevant in gaming, are underrepresented and when they are playing, they are seen as players lower than those of male characters. Because of this, I want to determine if there is a correlation between the relevance of women and how they are portrayed in video games, and how successful the games themselves they are.

Because of this, my research has been a little bit behind. I am trying to keep up and as of now, I have most of my project complete and just need to make a few minor adjustments!

In the image, you can see an example of a female character from the game League of Legends. She is one of around 4 female characters you can play out of over 100 male characters. This showing just how underrepresented female characters can be in video games.

Source: https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/champions/

Methodology

For my data collection, I am going to be doing an approach using qualitative and quantitative data. I am going to be looking specifically at the top MOBA games from the past 5 years. I want to secure a background of each game explaining the different statistics from the game like the amount of female and male characters. The last part of my quantitative data will be looking at the success of the game from profit margin and how many people are playing (who is playing) so I can compare it to the qualitative information I get. I will want to be looking at the more apparent aspects such as how much clothes they are wearing or the type of player they are portraying. Things like determining if they are an NPC or an actual character you can play with are important to analyze. After getting this research, I will take my findings and compare each game to their success. I will be looking to see if games that presented women less or presented women in a more suggestive way had more success in comparison to how many people are playing and how much profit they are making.,

This is a rough draft of what my data collection will look like in my trials, though it is still a work in progress considering I have some revisions to complete. Some things changes I need to make in the future would be the different games I am going to use, and possibly a different system of qualitative data collection to ensure no bias is found in my research.

What Are My Next Steps?

As of now, my main goal is to get my research completely approved so that I can move on to writing the start of my research paper. After those two are done, I can start research analysis quickly! During or after winter break is when I plan to start my research and hopefully I can get a head start. Make sure if you want to see more details about my project, I have linked my research proposal and you can also subscribe to my newsletter here! Blogs

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