‘I didn’t know they could one-shot me!’

Abstract

This article presents a corpus study spanning 11 years (2011–2022) of language referring to Gwyndolin, a boss in the videogame Dark Souls. Like many aspects of Dark Souls, Gwyndolin’s gender is open to interpretation, and this study tracks how both players’ readings of Gwyndolin’s gender and the pronouns they use to refer to Gwyndolin have changed over the past decade. The results show that, while players overwhelmingly read Gwyndolin as a cis man and use the pronoun ‘he’, there have been significant increases in trans and nonbinary interpretations, as well as the use of ‘they’ after 2015. The observed patterns can be linked to social changes inside and outside videogame culture occurring around 2014–2016. The study provides valuable real-time support for the existence of a change in the pronoun system (and its relation to trans/nonbinary identities), which had previously only been proposed on the basis of apparent-time data.