Linguistic Accents in Videogames
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
This research is part of a larger project, The Language of Gaming, which started in 2010 and
brings together videogame studies and applied linguistics (and specifically sociolinguistics). It
looks at how games and gamers communicate and negotiate meanings within their specific
communities of practice, and seeks to identify game/gaming-specific patterns of representation
and interaction. The first stages of this research, which looked at the different layers of
discourse in games design and communication about games, came out in monograph form in
2012 (The Language of Gaming, Palgrave Macmillan). Following an international conferences
dedicated to videogames and language studies (Videogames and Language, Alicante, May
2016), where the project leader gave a keynote speech on videogame paratexts (Let’s Plays and
cosituated gaming), a book-length collection of papers reporting on current research into
videogames’ lexicology, discourses and language pedagogy (eds Ensslin & Balteiro) is currently
in preparation.
One of the key ideas driving this project from the start revolves around language ideologies,
and in particular how linguicisms (stereotypical, popularly held attitudes) toward linguistic
accents of English are used, perpetuated, functionalized, or indeed flouted by contemporary
game designers. The first stages of this research, which was published in chapter form (Ensslin
2010; 2011), looked at how conventional and unconventional oppositions are conflated, e.g. by
pairing moral binaries (good and bad) with artificial opposites like Received Pronunciation vs.
Black English, and by looking at how Pax Americana (American hegemonic superiority; Bayard
et al. 2001) is embedded in and iconized by the voices of heroic characters (Irvine and Gal 2000;
for a related study on Disney characters, see Lippi-Green 2011). This research was largely
anecdotal and centred around a select set of narrative 3D games (Black and White; Return to
Castle Wolfenstein; Aion; Fable; Wizard 101).
The proposed project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Departments of
Humanities Computing, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, Linguistics and Computing
Science at the University of Alberta. It seeks to perform a considerably more comprehensive
content-analytical study than was previously possible, using actual natural language data
collected and publicly displayed on websites like the BBC’s Voices / British Library Sounds
(http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/BBC-Voices ), the SAA (Speech Accent Archive;
http://accent.gmu.edu) and the International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA;
http://www.dialectsarchive.com) projects as training data for machine learning. The resulting
accent classifiers can then be applied to automatically identify accents in other speech datasets
such as voiceovers in AAA games. A large part of these games (e.g. the Dragon Age and Mass
Effect series) will be from Edmonton-based Bioware, with whom our research team enjoys
strong professional links.
Our findings are expected to give a far more nuanced picture of how friend and foe, as well as
more hybrid, dynamic and rounded character roles may be framed phonetically – through
allocation of linguistic accents – and how these vocal attributes may tie in (or not) with other
semiotic modes such as visuals (facial features; body language) and written language (e.g.
dialogue). It may also tell us about the degrees to which local accents tend to be artificially
constructed, or faked, by voice actors, and about what particular varieties of so-called Standard
North American (if there is indeed such a thing) tend to be chosen by game developers. Our
findings will be used to inform academic circles in game studies and sociolinguistics, as well as
future game design, and our ultimate goal is to encourage independent, experimental game
designers in particular to aim for more diverse and egalitarian representations of linguistic
realism than are routinely displayed in commercial videogames.
Machine learning methods used in the project will be accelerated with CUDA-based software
such as Nvidia digits and Matconvnet for Deep Learning and gpuArray-based MATLAB
computations for dimensionality-reduction techniques such as the non-negative matrix
factorization. In-kind funding has been provided by nVidia, who has donated a Titan X GPU
(worth approx. $1,500) to facilitate this research.
References:
Bayard, D., A. Weatherall, C. Gallois and J. PIttam (2001) ‘Pax Americana? Accent Attitudinal
Evaluations in New Zealand, Australia and America.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(1): 22-49.
Ensslin, A. (2010) ‘“Black and White:” Language Ideologies in Computer Game Discourse,’ in S.
Johnson and T. Milani (eds) Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Policies,
pp. 205-222. London: Continuum.
Ensslin, A. (2011) ‘Recallin’ Fagin: Linguistic accents, intertextuality and othering in narrative
offline and online video games’, in G. Crawford, V. K. Gosling and B. Light (eds) Online Gaming
in Context: The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games, pp. 224-235. New York:
Routledge.
Ensslin, A. (2012) The Language of Gaming. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Irvine, J. and S. Gal (2000) ‘Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation,’ in P. V. Kroskrity
(ed) Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities, pp. 35-83. Oxord: James Currey.
Lippi-Green, R. (2011) English with an Accent: Language Ideology and Discrimination in the
United States. London: Routledge.
FACULTY-DEPARTMENT
Modern Languages and Cultural Studies / Humanities Computing
OPEN TO STUDENTS FROM THE FOLLOWING INSTITUTIONS
University of Sydney - Australia, University of Western Australia, IIT Bombay - India, IIT
Kharagpur - India, University of Auckland - New Zealand, Nanyang Technological University
(NTU) - Singapore, National University of Singapore (NUS) - Singapore, University of Leeds - UK,
University of Arizona - USA
DESIRED FIELD OF STUDENT STUDY
English language and linguistics (especially phonetics and sociolinguistics) and an interest in
videogames
INTERNSHIP LOCATION
North Campus
NUMBER OF INTERNSHIP POSITIONS
1
INTERSNSHIP START AND END DATE
May 1 – length 12 weeks
ARE THE DATES FLEXIBLE?
Yes