Designing the Monstrous : What Character Design Attributes Contribute to Video Game Monsters’ Gender Expression?

Sammanfattning

As monsters may be presented differently depending on the context they belong to, determining their gender based on visual identity alone might be imprecise. This study aims to find out how video games monsters express their gender and how specific traits may help define monsters of specific genders beyond just appearance. Using a thematic content analysis, traits from 80 different monsters divided across 10 different games were observed and placed into broad themes to explain their relation to gender, or lack thereof. As the studied characters belong to games that were released between the late 1990’s to the mid 2020’s, not all of them accurately reflected gender depictions that were up to date. Our study suggests that that gender expression in monstrous video game characters reflect gendered ideologies and human culture, something which could potentially affect future depictions of video game monsters.