International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE) Vol. 11, No. 3, June 2021, pp. 2647~2652 ISSN: 2088-8708, DOI: 10.11591/ijece.v11i3.pp2647-2652  2647 Journal homepage: http://ijece.iaescore.com Gender inequality among champions and players’ reception of gender disproportion of utility support champions in League of Legends Doo Heon Song, Hae Kyung Rhee, Jeong Hoon Kim Department of Computer Games, Yong-In SongDam College, Yong-in, Republic of Korea Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Jul 31, 2020 Revised Sep 22, 2020 Accepted Oct 9, 2020 Designing female character in video game has been criticized as being sexually objectified and underrepresented in quantity (number of characters and their appearance rate in the game) and in quality (take only secondary role and inferior ability statistics given). In this paper, we analyze world leading multiple-user online battle arena game League of Legends to see if previously criticized gender inequality of champions still stands and conduct a survey of 1,403 players of that game and ask how they feel about serious gender disproportion of utility support champions (all females). The result shows that League of Legends still has serious gender disparity in performance parameters and there has been only a small change in 5-year span (2014-2019). The survey result tells us that game players also feel political incorrectness of such gender disproportion, but they accept such gender prototype because they have been taught as such as social role theory explains gender inequality issues. Keywords: Content analysis Female character portrayal Gender discrimination League of Legends Social role theory This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license. Corresponding Author: Doo Heon Song Department of Computer Games Yong-In SongDam College 571-1 Cheo-in Gu, Yong-in 17145, Republic of Korea Email: dsong@ysc.ac.kr 1. INTRODUCTION Mass media has the potential to influence many behavioral social norms including self-esteem, gender identity and even sexual behaviors [1]. As a form of media, analyzing video game messages can be useful in identifying the gender roles and stereotypes presented therein [2]. Unfortunately, recent game contents analysis reports [3-5] reveal that female characters in video game are vastly underrepresented and are often hyper sexualized when depicted. Sexual objectification of female characters is serious in that female character’s body images are distorted to emphasize the sexuality [6] and female gamers’ se lf-efficacy was negatively affected by game play with the sexualized female character and playing a sexualized video game heroine unfavorably influenced people’s beliefs about women in the real world [7]. More seriously, game- playing with a sexualized woman may increase adolescents’ acceptance of rape myths that refers to the degree to which someone endorses false, but widely and persistently held, beliefs about rape that approve male sexual aggression against women and tolerance for sexual harassment [8]. If such sexual objectification is something that gamers can explicitly sense by playing the game, there is another serious implicit message in female character’s underrepresentation in games. In a contents analysis of four popular massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), Waddel et al. [4] found that female characters are seriously underrepresented in quantity and appearance such that female