Our most detailed glances into the speech division (split by gender and race) come from the charts of percentage of speech by chapter. Gender division seems to be more or less evenly distributed between men and women. However, the knowledge that there are more than twice as many male speakers than female speakers in the game (20, 47) changes perceptions a bit. Despite having half of the overall numbers, female characters double their presence to be able to match up to male characters. This shows that there are more key female characters who deliver a lot of information compared to a higher number of males with smaller lines.
Note: Unknown gender tends to be generic animals like frog and squirrel as well as genderless appearing deities.
The graphs separated by race are a bit more complicated looking, but trends do appear with a closer look. Act by act, new story arcs and quests appear, and Link heads to new locations inhabited by new people of many different races. Once Link finishes this new part of his quest, his interactions with those different races disappear completely. One example of this is the red bar, for the Goron race. Before Act Three, there is no Goron presence in Links life whatsoever. In Act Three, where Link must help save the Goron Patriarch, there is a major spike in Goron speech before it drops off again immediately after. This happens with many of the races, making it possible to track the progress of the game.
Note: After the first act, the Twili race is always present because after her introduction, Midna is always with Link.
The raw number of speeches as split up per character depending on their role as a speaker, addressee, or in-speech reference is an interesting chart because it can display fairly reliably who our important characters are. Link never speaks, but receives much more as an addressee than any other character. Midna is almost never addressed, but speaks more than any other character. This is because she spends nearly all of her time with Link only, who doesn’t speak and therefore cannot address her. The relationships are complex and take a bit of thinking, but there are still some clearly interesting things being shown to us.
For the final count of our linguistic elements, a glance by act shows the general trends and by chapter is a more detailed look at the same information. Background information is the first element we see on our page, seeming to appear in three main peaks over all of the acts. What is interesting is that when being compared to Questions, a clear relationship starts to appear. Questions appear to have their peaks in Acts One, Four, and Seven (where background info is low), and Background Information peaks in Acts Two, Five, and Eight (where questions are low). Whenever something new happens in Hyrule, the people become more unsure of what is happening to their world. As we said, background information primarily comes from Deities, Sages, and Princess Zelda, who give Link the answers later.
Tutorial and Guidance speech types have their own trend with strong appearances at the beginning of our story and a steady decrease until the ending. This comes with both Link and the real world user getting used to the physical controls of weapons and therefore needing less frequent tutorials. Guidance is similar in that as the plot continues and our quests as well as the land become more familiar, and less prompting for movement and direction is necessary.
We plan on going back and adding the hover over function to the speaker graphs. Also, we might goback and look at the speech differences by hometowns. We were also considering comparing the English to the Japanese script, but decided against that because of time restrictions.