The Limits of the Evolution of Female Characters in the Bioshock Franchise

In this article, a multimodal framework is proposed to track the character development of female characters in the Bioshock franchise. The language part of the framework focuses on appraisal analysis. The appraisal framework is applied to understand the player’s interpretation of the linguistic resources found in the characters’ utterances. The nonlinguistic part of the framework utilizes Kress and van Leeuwen’s framework of visual analysis with Lim’s system of gesture. The integrated framework is applied to compare the different multimodal representations of the female characters in the narrative and gameplay. Through the analysis, I show there is some advancement in the depiction of female characters in the Bioshock franchise in terms of their increased independence. However, the female characters’ representation is still limited by the male player (character’s) perspective. A detailed account of the role of female characters over the Bioshock series of games is provided in this article.