The Emotional Landscape of League of Legends: A Gendered Analysis

In gaming, human emotion portrayal is the key to a better experience [6, 18]. However, there are significant gender disparities in video game character representation. Men are frequently the main characters, depicting more dominance, with clear emotions, whereas women are often supplementary and overly sexualized with a narrower emotional range [5, 16]. Results showed that 61.5% of female faces and 78% of male faces displayed emotion. Males had less emotional diversification but more frequently exhibited facial emotions than females. This study also analyses moral and ethical personality using the D&D alignment system [14]. Male champions often display anger but are usually neutral for moral alignment. At the same time, female characters are less often morally neutral yet frequently have neutral facial expressions. This discrepancy highlights stereotyping in video game design and suggests the need for future research on its impact and comparisons with other games.