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Blog 3: Nearing the End!
This is a picture of me gathering some Smite data!
A recap!
To go over my research thus far: I am looking into male and female representation in video games. My goal with my research is to determine if more sexualization of females affects the success of the game. I also want to see if when females are more prominent or less prominent in games if it affects game success. Through my research, I am going to be conducting both quantitative and qualitative data and comparing the two. By this, I will be able to compare the characteristics of the game through representation and portrayal of the characters to how successful they are. So far, in my research, I am almost done with it and close to beginning my data analysis. I have yet to finish a few more aspects of my qualitative research and after that, I can start analyzing what my data shows!
Some Forks in the Road...
I have run into a couple of problems in my research and one of those was looking at the number of video games I was doing. Prior to the start of my data collection, I decided I was going to analyze 10 games and the 5 most popular characters in that game. Along with that, I had to do a series of quantitative research aspects for each game. Because of the amount of data, this would have taken, I decided to cut my games in half and only do 5 games. My original list of games, which I determined through the most popular MOBA games, was: League of Legends, Smite, Heroes of the Storm, Dota 2, Strife, Vainglory, Arena of Valor, Battlerite, Awesomnauts, Overwatch. This list then boiled down to the top 5: League of Legends, Smite, Heroes of the Storm, Dota 2, and Overwatch.
Another issue I ran into was collecting qualitative data. When collecting my “popularity” data, the issue arose with the devices the games were on. Different games were found on a multitude of consoles, such as Xbox, Playstation, or PC. I wasn't quite sure how to gather this data, so I ended up asking my mentor, Mr. Barker for some help! He recommended that I take an average of these different numbers so that I can have one clear number across the board. This was able to make my data collection a lot easier and more convenient to comprehend.
What Is My Research Looking Like?
To show my research thus far, I decided to show a more in-depth version of one of my games, League of Legends, rather than showing every game with less detail. In League of legends, the 5 most popular characters consist of Ezreal, Lee Sin, Thresh, Leona, and Lux. These are in order of the first most popular character to the fifth most popular character. One of the first things you can notice about this is how every single player in the top 3 is male. Along with this, you can see sexualization in some characters, but not all. This sexualization is relevant in both the male and female characters. Down below, I have put images of each of these characters in their rank. Looking at them, though not all of them are necessarily sexualized, it does show more male representation for the more popular characters. Following him, Lee Sin is the second most popular and is slightly sexualized with more of a bare body compared to Ezreal. In third, guess what, yes another man! He is not as sexualized but this shows the general trend of male dominance in video games. Then finally in 4th and 5th place, there are Leona and Lux whose body characteristics arent very real and their clothing is also not completely “regular”. They have a lot of clothing that doesn’t cover a lot of their body and this could be classified as sexualized. Overall, this has been able to show the male-dominated role of video games but it also doesn't completely say that males are dominant and not sexualized.
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/champions/: Up Above, in order you can see the league of legend players, Ezreal, Lee In, Thresh, Leona., and Lux.
Some of the other research I gathered, such as from Smite, doesn’t always show the same trends. Looking at one character, Neith: The Weaver of Fate, she is the most popular character in the game. While she is the most popular, she is also very sexualized. As you can see down below, she is a girl, but she also has a very minimal amount of clothing. Not only this, but after looking into her character a bit more, you can see her different skins (kind of life costumes the gamer can choose for their player). So Neith would be classified as a sexualized character. This is because she wearing clothing that doesn't cover much. She is wearing a small bra and a part of a bottom piece. Along with this, all of her skins are also seen as sexualized with minimal clothing, especially on her breasts.
https://smite.fandom.com/wiki/Neith: The images above are: on the left, Neith as her regular skin, and on the right, she has different variations of herself.
What Does This Show?
While I haven't been able to start my data analysis, some of the general trends I have seen with my data show in general sexualization amongst both male and female characters. Though, depending on the games they can either have more female-dominated characters or male-dominated characters. This information doesn’t exactly give me a clear answer to my question: if the success is dependent on the sexualization of characters. So, I can't interpret if my hypothesis (if more female sexualization and less representation) is right or wrong. But, I have been able to see trends that could go either way. A lot of my research generally shows both males and females (more so females) being sexualized and a lot of representation on both ends.
What are my next steps?
My next week in AP Research will be spent doing the last parts of my research. After all my data has been collected, I am going to start my data analysis. That should hopefully be at the end of next week and into spring break. Once I have my data collection and analysis all done, I will begin working on my slideshow presentation for my college board presentation! My presentation will be towards the end of March so I will be pretty busy in the upcoming weeks! Thanks for the support and can’t wait for the next update.
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