A Study On The Changes Of Female Roles In Video Games From The Perspective Of Communication Studies ——Taking Chinese And Foreign Role-Playing Video Games From The 1980s To The Present As An Example

With the development of economy and the improvement of people’s living standards,people have more need to enrich their spiritual life.Based on this,the entertainment industry arises at the historic moment.And video games are an important branch of the entertainment industry.Although video games have attracted a lot of attention since they were born.But in fact,the heated debate around it has largely focused on the commodity value and addition of video games.Nevertheless,few people have noticed that video games are also a mass media.The author wants to explore the communication attribute of video games as a mass media,and chooses women’s topics in various specific research directions.There are several reasons for choosing this research direction.First,the popularity of women-related issues in the field of public opinion and academic research is relatively high,but the number of cross-research on women and video games is not much.Second,a number of reports show that the number of female players is almost the same as that of male players around the world,so in this case,can the game spread the concept of gender equality with reference to the gender composition of its audience?With such doubts,the author launched a research.In the introduction,the author explains the research background and the academic and practical significance of the research.After that,the author consulted the relevant literature of electronic games,role-playing electronic games,cross-research between women and electronic games,and cross-research between women and role-playing video games,and summarized the mainstream viewpoints of the research.and focus on referring to the relevant research from the perspective of communication,to consolidate the theoretical foundation and find a breakthrough in the research.Through the collation of the literature,the author has not found any literature which is highly similar to the research content of this paper.That is,there has been no research on the 1980s（the first female role in the world was born in this period）.Since then,the space covers both Chinese and foreign countries（there are similarities and personalities in the development direction and types of games in different periods at home and abroad）.Roleplaying video games have been selected（the world’s first female game role appears in this category,and the core of this category is role shaping）.The literature on the changes of female roles.Therefore,this study has a certain innovative value.Then,the author puts forward two research questions:First,what are the iconic changes of female roles in Chinese and foreign role-playing video games since the 1980s?The second question is whether there are gender prejudices and stereotypes about the shaping of female roles in the selected games,and their causes.After introducing the detailed reasons for selecting the object of study,the author uses the method of text analysis and interview to carry out the research.Among them,the purpose of text analysis is to study whether there are gender prejudices and stereotypes in characterization from the aspects of character introduction,character lines,character appearance,role status,controllability,number of occupations to choose from,professional status,numerical balance and so on.The interview method is that the author makes use of the advantages of employment to conduct in-depth interviews with several female game industry practitioners and senior female gamers to introduce a third-party perspective and conduct supplementary research.In the aspect of the display of the research results of text analysis,according to the development stage of game technology and the division of the development stage of roleplaying electronic games by game library and game media,the author divides role-playing electronic games into a group every ten years.to show the changes of women’s roles in the selected range.And due to the different stages of development at home and abroad,the results are divided into two parts at home and abroad.Through the vertical comparison at home and abroad and the horizontal comparison at home and abroad,there are gender prejudices and stereotypes in the role-playing video games selected at home and abroad.However,with the development of the times,the overall trend is for the better.In the interview results,according to the different identities of the interviewees,the author divides them into two parts:game practitioners and experienced gamers to show the interview results.The interview results not only provide evidence for the author’s textual research results,but also provide suggestions and suggestions on how to solve the problems of gender bias and stereotypes in role-playing video games.Finally,the author summarizes the research conclusions and analyzes the causes of gender bias and stereotypes in role-playing video games since 1980s from the perspective of communication.Hope to help promote games as a mass media and spread the concept of equality and positive gender by tracing back to the source.