Gender in the Wasteland

One thing I do with the bit of leisure time I have is play video games. I feel like I need to be a bit self defensive about it, given my age and place in life, but according to surveys the average age of gamers is somewhere between 30 and 37, so I fit right in there (although, the age distribution probably has a strong leftwards skew, so it'd be nice to know the median age). Many mainstream games have socially problematic themes, like violence being the only available recourse to progression in the game. A really cool video series on that point is the Grand Theft Auto Pacifist. Another common problem games have is their portrayal of gender (the topic of this post), and on that topic, you should obviously go watch Tropes vs Women in Video Games.

I think these socially problematic themes are a bigger deal than when they show up in other media. Video games are unique in requiring an alignment of the audience's motivations with the main character. For example, the experience of watching Breaking Bad and observing Walter White's moral descent would be very different from playing a Breaking Bad game and controlling Walter White. What I've learned playing video games is that while it may be projected on your TV screen, the game is really in your head.

I've recently been playing Fallout Shelter, a mobile game set in the post nuclear apocalypse Fallout universe from Bethesda Studios. Fallout 4 is maybe the most highly anticipated game coming out in time for Christmas this year, and Fallout Shelter is fun diversion for fans to play in the meantime. Your role is the overseer of a Vault-Tec vault where dwellers escape the radioactive wasteland. You build out and populate your vault, and assign dwellers tasks like food, water and energy production.

It's kinda like an ant colony.

Our story begins when I assigned a dweller to the Science Station I'd built so she could produce RadAways (a treatment for the omnipresent radiation). I wanted to equip her with the Professor Outfit, which would boost her Intelligence stat, speeding up the production of RadAways. I scrolled through the inventory a few times, and couldn't find the Professor Outfit. The only possibility I considered was that I'd forgotten to unequip it from the dweller who was wearing it before. But as I messed around, it became clear that you're unable to equip female dwellers with the Professor Outfit... Yeah, I know.

Here are two dwellers, Alexander and Judy, in the Science Station.

When I select Alexander and scroll through the outfits inventory, the Professor Outfit is right there between the Nightwear and Radiation Suit. When I select Judy, it's just absent. It's not even greyed out, just invisible.

This is a problem. There is a very strong cultural expectation that "Professors are Men", and this expectation gets visited upon my female friends and colleagues in really unfortunate ways. The most common and obvious day-to-day experience I've been told about is people assuming that "Prof Smith" is a man in e-mails. Or it's assumed that they're administrative support staff instead of faculty at meetings. Sometimes people assume female profs are students showing up for the first day of class, instead of being the instructor. One friend of mine said they got student feedback on a course saying that they were a great teacher and would doubtless be successful "in whatever career she pursues."

These are all obvious examples of women not being taken seriously in their professional roles, and the "Professors are Men" expectation has some obvious impacts on their careers. Women are grossly underrepresented at the highest faculty levels, and get paid about 90% of what men at equivalent levels do. So what's it matter that in Fallout Shelter, Alexander can wear the Professor Outfit and Judy isn't even presented with the option?

An all too common scene.

Well, first, it's just re-enforcing the "Professors are Men" expectation. Who is this message reaching? For one, me, and probably many of my students, and we're the ones who do a lot of the damage with the "Professors are Men" assumption. But it's also probably reaching a larger portion of women than even other games with poor gender portrayals do. It's a mobile game, and mobile games are disproportionately popular among women. Also, it has an undeniably The Sims-like element to it, a game which was also disproportionately popular among women. So, it's a fairly negative message about women, in all likelihood being disproportionately directed at women.

This is also a game with a bit of cultural reach. There is some speculation that it's out earning Candy Crush Saga, and it topped the App Store charts for a while. Bethesda is also a really big and popular game studio, and Fallout Shelter bears the "Editor's Choice" badge.

Preventing female dwellers from equipping the Professor Outfit is also the only gender based equipping restriction I've come across in the game. All of the other outfits can be worn by male and female dwellers. Both Alexander and Judy can wear the Combat Armor, but it's drawn a bit differently for their different bodies.

Sometimes, with things like gender representation, there is an in-game explanation for why things are the way they are, and we need to have a conversation about why gender representation in fictional worlds is an important issue for our real world. But I don't think that's what's going on here. The fact that the outfits are drawn differently for male and female dwellers, and the fact that the Professor Outfit is just unceremoniously absent without any kind of in-game explanation suggests to me that they just didn't bother drawing a Professor Outfit for female dwellers. That is, we're observing here a real world instantiation of the "Professors are Men" assumption rather than some kind of intentional fictional representation of that assumption.

But just because it isn't intentional doesn't mean it isn't sexist, and doesn't mean it shouldn't be changed. Being unintentionally overlooked is exactly the problem my female colleagues are facing. I've sent Bethesda an email briefly outlining this, and asking them to rectify it in an update. Don't know if I'll hear back from them, or if I'm better off yelling at no one in the Wasteland.

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Edit: The pregnancy mechanics are also pretty messed up too.

Once pregnant, otherwise-competent women will become hysterical and run away from danger while flailing their arms. pic.twitter.com/NgKmae4Kqe

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) July 2, 2015

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Video games are a broad medium though (this is more self defensiveness), and can be utilized for all sorts of purposes. For example, the Iñupiat Cook Inlet Tribal Council had the game Never Alone made, in which they embedded parts of their oral traditions for their younger generation. It's a really pretty and fun game. There's also the episodic game Life is Strange, which is essentially a game about friendship, family, the near constant threat of vitimization women face, and the anxieties we all face in trying to make the right choices in life.

A Silly "Name" Generator

tl;dr: It looks like names aren't well modeled as a Markov process, but you can install my R package that does model names as Markov processes and mess around with it.

I don't know how I wound up writing a "name" generator yesterday, but I did. And now it's an R package (just on github for the moment), so you can play around with it too (https://jofrhwld.github.io/nameGenerator/).

I was messing around with some other research questions when I decided to see what would happen if I tried to model given first names as a Markov process. Here's a picture of a Markov chain that contains just the letters of my own name: Joe.

First, you start out in a start state. Then, you move, with some probability, either to the o,  j, or e character. Then, you move, with some probability, to one of the other states (one of the other letters or end), or stay in the same state. In this figure, I've highlighted the path that my own name actually takes, but there are actually an infinite number of possible paths through these states, including "names" such as "Eej", "Jeoeojo", "Jojoe", etc.

A Markov chain for all possible names would look a lot like this figure, but would have one state for every letter. Now, I keep saying that you move from one state to the next with "some probability," but with what probability? If you have a large collection of names, you can estimate these probabilities from the data. You just calculate for each letter what the probability is of any following letter. So for the letter "j", you count how many times a name went from "j" to any other letter. For boys names in 2013, that looks like this table.

from	to	count
j	a	176452
j	o	84485
j	e	26118
j	u	25616
j	i	1920
j	h	425
j	r	121
j	c	118
j	d	98
j	end	55
...	...	...

As it turns out, a whole bunch of name data is available in the babynames R package put together by Hadley Wickham. So, I wrote a few functions where it estimates the transition probabilities from the data for a given year (from 1880 to 2013) for a given sex, and then generates random "names", or just returns the most probable path through the states. How often does this return a for real name? Sometimes, but not usually. For example, the most probable path through character states for boys born in 1970 is D[anericha] with that"anericha" bit repeating for infinity. For boys born in 1940, it's just an infinite sequence of Llllllll...

So, that introduces a problem where the end state is just not a very likely state to follow any given letter, so when generating random names from the Markov chain, they come out really really long. I introduced an additional process that probabilistically kills the chain as it gets longer based on the probability distribution of name lengths in the data, but that's just one more hack that goes to show that names aren't well modeled as a Markov chain. 

Here's a little sample of random "names" generated by the transition probabilities for girls in 2013:

• Elicia
• Annis
• Ttlila
• Halenava
• Amysso
• Menel
• Seran
• Pyllula
• Paieval
• Anicrl

And heres a random sample of "names" generated by the transition probabilities for girls in 1913:

• Lbeana
• Peved
• Math
• Bysenen
• Viel
• Lelinen
• Jabbesinn
• Mabes
• Drana
• Lystha

The feeling I get looking at these is that they don't seem particularly gendered, even though there are clear gendered name trends. They don't even seem like they're from different times from each other. A lot of them aren't even orthographically valid. I don't know how they'd perform on "name likeness" tasks, but I don't even know what the point of doing such a task would be, since the Markov process has already failed at being a good model of names.

Maybe there's a lesson to be learned from the Markov process' failure to model names well, but for me it wound up being a silly diversion.

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Update: I've now updated the package to generate names on bigram -> character transition probabilities. The generate_n_names2() function generates things that look more like names. It's kind of fun!

10 generated girl names based on 2010 data:

• Rookenn.
• Lilein.
• Hayla.
• Dailee.
• Bri.
• Samila.
• Abeleyla.
• Eline.
• An.
• Rese.

10 generated boy names based on 2010 data:

• Briah.
• Dason.
• Jul.
• Messan.
• Kiah.
• Jax.
• Se.
• Frayden.
• Dencorber.
• Gel.

America's Ugliest Accent: Something's ugly alright.

I should really blog more often, instead of just when I feel compelled to slap down some nonsense, because the general tone of Val Systems turns towards scolding and away from my genuine positive passion for linguistics. That said, guess what I'm doing in this post!

If you read past the headline, it gets even worse. I won't always reply to examples I find of gross linguistic discrimination like this, because if I did it'd be a full time job. But I noticed that in the introduction they'd linked to a New York Times column that references a paper that I co-authored on the Philadelphia dialect. I didn't think the NYT column was appropriately respectful, and I said so on Language Log at the time.

The NYT columnist wasn't too happy about what I said, but I feel that I have an ethical obligation to the people who invite us into their homes and are generous with their time and stories, to provide them with a vigorous public defense if their communities and the way they speak are ridiculed as a result. Moreover, language shaming pieces like this Gawker tournament only poison the waters for future sociolinguistic research, especially if our names as researchers are attached onto them in some way.

And as I was writing up some notes for this response, and followed more links from the Gawker pieces, I was really shocked by how many articles they've linked to that are popular writeups of sociolinguistic research, usually including interviews with one or more sociolinguists! It's like half my facebook friends list in there! It feels so defeating to see these generally positive articles and interviews utilized to prop up an exercise as ugly and mean spirited as this one.

But what's the harm...?

Anticipating some reactions to this post, no, I'm not some grey humorless lump. But just because something is framed as a game doesn't make it fun, and it doesn't make it funny. For example, take Gawker's paragraph about New Orleans:

New Orleans is a steaming, fetid stew of aural bile, home to everything from the deep Cajun bayou accent to the Yat dialect, which derives from Irish, French, German, and even Italian into one completely incomprehensible mess. You need only watch this clip on the number of ways residents pronounce the city's name and neighborhoods and read this excellent article on the hodgepodge of New Orleans' accents to see how varied, and uniformly ugly, it all is.

lol?

Even if there was some intrinsic humor to that paragraph, instead of just raw nastiness, it would be important to reflect on who we're making fun of, and why. And on that count, I think the fella who compiled the Yat dictionary summarizes it well:

It's a working class language, probably, is what it amounts to.

And of course, that's what linguistic discrimination is really about. Maybe it's not always about class, but it's never really about language. It's about the kind of people who speak it. Predictably, the kinds of accents and languages which get dumped on the most, and get branded the "ugliest," always wind up being spoken by socially disadvantaged people. What exactly did this woman in particular do to deserve having a candid video of her slapped up on Gawker as an example of just how "ugly" the Chicago accent is? She works in a warehouse supermarket, that's what.

And this isn't a consequenceless game either. "America's Ugliest Accent Tournament" just puts a laughing face on a serious problem of discrimination that has economic and personal consequences for real people. To choose one example I'm familiar with, Anita Henderson did a study where she surveyed hiring managers in Philadelphia, playing them tapes of potential job applicants, and asked them to rate them on their job suitability. The topline summary from the abstract:

Those who sound Black are rated as less intelligent and ambitious and less favorably in job level.

In her textbook English with an Accent, Rosina Lippi-Green sums up my own opinion on the matter, but I've added some emphasis.

If as a nation we are agreed that it is not acceptable or good to discriminate on the grounds of skin color or ethnicity, gender or age, then by logical extension it is equally unacceptable to discriminate against language traits which are intimately linked to an individual's sense and expression of self. 

How's this different from these other examples?

A few of the supporting links from the Gawker piece are personal websites that are called "How to talk [City]" or "The [Dialect] Dictionary," put together by enthusiastic speakers of the area themselves. They tend to have a self deprecating tone, so isn't that similar to the Ugliest Accent Tournament? It sure as hell isn't! First of all, even if those personal sites do have a poking fun tone, the fact is the dialect must be important to the person putting together the site, or else they wouldn't have spent the time documenting it! Their self deprecating tone could either be due to the general difficulty of expressing seriously how important a topic is to you, or to their internalized linguistic insecurities driven by things like America's Ugliest Accent Tournament. Moreover, Gawker is a really large media organization, and should be taken to task if only due to their profile and influence.

Sociolinguists ask people what they think about accents and dialects too. It's a subfield sometimes called Perceptual Dialectology. Isn't that kind of the same? Don't even start! A goal of sociolinguists is to understand the social landscape of language as well as we can, and that includes people's sometimes crummy attitudes about it. But if we have a goal, it's to critique those attitudes, not revel in them in some kind of user engagement experiment so that we can go cash in our pageviews with advertisers.

The Fundamental Sociolinguistic Outlook

Real quick, let's contrast the overall tone of the America's Ugliest Accent Tournament with what I would call the fundamental sociolinguistic outlook on speakers. I think Bill Labov summed it up nicely at the end of his 2009 Haskins Prize lecture (go listen to it if you haven't already).

Versus Gawker

No matter who you are, you all sound disgusting.

What to do about it?

I for one will be writing a polite e-mail to Gawker asking them to remove the link that references my research, and to avoid linking to anything that references my research in the future. I'd encourage anyone else whose research they mentioned to do the same.