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Sociolinguistics in Video Games

Alejandro Ciuba, alc307@pitt.edu

Background Information

I wanted to do this project because I wanted to see what sociolinguistic phenomena occur in video-game dialogue, I also just enjoy games and game design, and thought this would be a great way to combine two of my passions. I hope you all enjoy it!

Thanks!

I want to say thank you to everyone who visits this repository. Your feedback is very valuable to me!

Notes:

Tianyi's Feedback

  • What was done well: I think you posed very interesting research questions in what I believe to be an understudied form of media. You were very clear about the focus of your research and took into account the contexts in which the games were developed (such as their respective genres and the sizes of their respective studios).

  • What could be improved: I think you could be a bit clearer about what techniques you plan to use to analyze the data. There is a lot of dialogue in the games that you chose to analyze; Hollow Knight alone, for instance, has 215 pages of dialogue. How do you plan to analyze all of that data? Will you be writing a script to pick out certain linguistic elements, or will you be sampling from the data and analyzing them manually? If the latter, how do you plan to select the samples?

  • One thing I learned: It was interesting how you parsed the dialogue for Hollow Knight using two different file formats, though you were lucky to have found a data source that was so well-formatted. Also, your use of IPython.display looks like it'd be really useful for getting nicer-looking output (though I'm not sure what it's meant to do since it looks the same to me on GitHub).

Rohan's Notes:

Something I liked: I love the concept, and I really liked the way you organized your data: it was really easy to get a good idea of your data without having to wade through it myself (which would have been especially difficult since it was in pickled format). I'm really excited to see what you find on the sociolinguistic variations between and within games.

Something to improve: I thought you were really ambitious, but I wasn't quite sure what the end goal of your project was. You seemed to have a lot of different questions to answer, and I wasn't sure which was your main one and how feasible it was with your dataset. A little clarity on that would be much appreciated.

Something I learned: I've played a good number of video games myself, but I've never delved into the ones you're analyzing here, so I learned a lot about the structure of these intensive world-building games! I've never thought about how much written material there is in your standard RPG, but I'm looking forward to seeing your analysis.

Misha's Feedback

One thing that was done well: You have some really great coding in your project already, stuff that's way above my paygrade! Great start at considering your linguistic research questions

One avenue for improvement or suggestion: I'd be interested in seeing more about how you operationalize your variables for pragmatics and discourse

One thing I learned: I'd never thought of it that way, but it makes sense that video game dialogue is going to break gricean maxims

Man Ho's Notes:

Something I liked: You have a very interesting and ambitious project! Your project can get quite complicated as it develops but you also have well-organized directory and data structures.

Something to improve: You may need to explain what game writing is about. Since I have not played RPGs, I am a bit unsure what exactly happens during a game, e.g. how dialogues in a game differ from real-life conversations? What are the formats, e.g. audio or text? What do people usually talk about in a game? Lastly, does "game writting" mean? Does it mean writting a script or a story about the fictional world of the game?

Something I learned: I like that you have an overview JNB to connnect every work you've done together. I will also do this for my project!

Kinan's Feedback

  • What was done well:

    • I like the data_description.md file I think that its honestly really useful for your project and your data sources specifically since you obtained a lot of data from various sources/ different games.

  • What could be improved:

    • I don't know much about these games so maybe a link to the websites or youtube videos on what they are just so that people who don't know can properly visualize whats going on and picture it in their heads as they read through the project would really help your code come to life.

  • One thing I learned:

    • overview.ipynb is cool

Emma's Feedback

  • What was done well: Absolutely nailed it with the data_description.md. Having a whole separate file to describe all of the data columns & whatnot is a really good idea, and it definitely helped me get a quick grasp on how everything was structured. I really like the strong semantic/syntactic background present in the research questions in the analysis notebook (talking about performative speech acts and their conventional constructions).
  • What could be improved: It's not a huge detail, but linking the files on the README could make it easier to navigate the repository. The data description file could include short descriptions of the games and the role of the text data, as well, just so the differences in the nature of each dataset are clear.
  • One thing I learned: I had forgotten how much text data can be stored in a video game. I tend to only think of the coding behind games, but not about the dialogue & narratives within them.
    (Sidenote: The Elder Scrolls dataset reminded me of this BDG video).

Caroline's entry (2022-04-13)

  • What was done well: Pretty sure a lot of people have already mentioned this, but your data_description.md is really well done and a not required, yet welcome component of your repo. Also, your research notebook is well organized, and it seems like your analysis is off to a great start!

  • Possible improvements: You have a README.md for the scripts subdirectory of your main repo with a small blurb about what's going on in the subdirectory, but you don't have a README.md for either of your other two subdirectories. This isn't really an issue, but it may be nice for continuity's sake to add one to all your subdirectories or remove the one you currently have. I have to say, though, I kind of like the more specific README.md per subdirectory!

  • One thing I learned: spaCy named entity recognition!

Ben's Entry

Your README was very well laid out; the data description file was really helpful and made it easy to get a high-level overview of the data and its structure. One potential improvement could be having a consistent coloring/style scheme for your plots. The differences between the games were quite interesting!