This book explores how corpus linguistic techniques can be applied to close analysis of videogames as a text, particularly examining how language is used to construct representations of gender in fantasy videogames. The author demonstrates a wide array of techniques which can be used to both build corpora of videogames and to analyse them, revealing broad patterns of representation within the genre, while also zooming in to focus on diachronic changes in the representation of gender within a best-selling videogame series and a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). The book examines gender as a social variable, making use of corpus linguistic methods to demonstrate how the language used to depict gender is complex but often repeated. This book combines fields including language and gender studies, new media studies, ludolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, and it will be of interest to scholars in these and related disciplines.

Frazer Heritage is an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Birmingham City University, UK. He actively researches the representation of gender and sexuality in different forms of media, with a focus on using corpus methods to do such analysis.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: What do we know? A background to Language, Gender, Videogames, and Corpora.- Chapter 3: The Problems With Videogame Data: Methodological Considerations in the Creation of a Corpus of Videogames and Problems with Different Methods of Corpus Compilation.- Chapter 4: Looking at Representations of Gender Across Videogames: A Corpus of General Fantasy Games.- Chapter 5: Looking at Gender in a Specific Series of Videogames: A Corpus of The Witcher Series.- Chapter 6: Looking at Diachronic Differences in the Representation of Gender: the (Re) Duplication of Gendered Discourses in World of Warcraft Quests.- Chapter 7: Conclusions and Lines for Future Research.