“Better Dead than a Damsel”: Gender Representation and Player Churn

Gender representation in games is an important consideration at least in part due to its pervasiveness, from toxicity shown towards both non-male players and non-male people that work in the industry, to the sexualisation of characters and persistence of tropes like the damsel in distress. Player churn is an important concept for industry as it shows disengagement from the product and can cause the developer to lose income, such as through lost microtransaction revenue, and cause higher acquisition costs to replace the lost players. Despite the first male protagonist appearing on screens in 1968, it took until 1996 for the first female protagonist to be developed in the form of Lara Croft and, despite progress, gender representation in games still has room for improvement. To critically assess and analyse this issue, this paper explores a history of damsels, design of protagonists, gender identity and cultivation theory. To contribute towards the literature on player churn and gender representation, this paper investigated player churn through protagonist gender. A Brunner-Munzel test was conducted to compare the gender of the protagonist (males or non-males) of 48 games with player churn. Gender was identified through either self-identification of the protagonist in-game, or through pronouns used by other characters when referring to them. Player churn was identified as the difference in daily players playing the game averaged over the first 7 days from the release of a game, days 30-37 from release and days 90-97 from release. This data was acquired from SteamDB, which records daily players of games that are played through the Steam client. Whilst no significant difference was found after either 30-37 days or 90-97 days between the two conditions, within the games investigated, those with a male protagonist generally attracted higher initial playerbases and also saw a steeper drop off in these players after both 30-37 days and 90-97 days. Whilst this could indicate that, despite not attracting as many players initially, games with non-male protagonists attract a more loyal playerbase. These results show that investigation of player churn in this way shows promise to quantifying gender representation.