A person’s Word Profile is unique. As you learn to speak and get used to speaking a certain way, you gravitate towards certain words more regularly than others. This profile changes depending on the context of where you are in life and how you let life affect you. In stressful situations you can choose aggressive words, in one-on-one conversations you pick words that signal your shared history with the person, when talking to a crowd of people you choose words that elicit a strong leader role, when talking to a specialized crowd of peers you pick words that only make sense to that crowd because the context is already shared amongst everyone there.

You can find out the Word Profile by finding a person’s word choice when in similar circumstances and how often those people will gravitate towards certain word. You can also go deeper into grammar structure, sentence length, topics and topicality of discussion, but there are limitations to doing this based on how I got my data through YouTube’s subtitles.

What I went looking for was the distinguishing Word Profile characteristics between the Game Grumps channel and Markiplier’s channel, both because they talk a lot through their videos and because they have a substantial collection of videos with a different cast and they have seemingly similar temperament though play primarily different games.

Looking at the channels as a whole, there is already something to notice. Mark has to say “I” and “me” quite a bit more than the Grumps. You can attribute this to doing many solo let’s plays more often than the Grumps (who don’t have solo let’s plays at all). This might be a good measure to determine if a script is a solo let’s play over a multiplayer one in the future, but this is only a hypothesis for now.

Looking at the types of Sentimental words is important. It shows what a baseline for aggressive language looks like for a person but also how we can find when that aggression leads to aggravation when they deviate from that baseline. Again the Sentiment of a word is a quantifier of emotion, Positive Sentiment for positive emotion and Negative Sentiment for negative emotion.

The first thing to notice is the Grump’s ability to “yes-and” during their videos. They “yeah” considerably more than Mark does because of their improv-training to always keep the charade up and extend to absurd. You can also say that the Grump’s “yeah”-ing more is due to always in conversation and that’s how they affirm what they’ve heard before continuing the conversation.

The second thing to notice is the “fuck/shit”-counter is always considerably higher for The Grumps than it is for Markiplier (which we already knew was high from a past post). You can largely thank Arin for this, who has a much more aggressive language baseline but to be fair most of the Grumps have this. Maybe they’ve picked it up from hanging around Arin for so long? “You are the average of the 5 people you hang out with most”, after all.

This isn’t to say that Mark is completely stress-free in his language, it’s just not as overtly aggressive. He does tend to die a lot, though and he announces it as when he does. The Grumps would rather throw interjections around instead.

Less commonly used Sentimental words help a bit more in identifying which channel is which since these words are less likely to be used as affirmations or grammatical connections but deliberate and contextual.

Like The Grumps flagrant use of words like “asshole” or “fucker”, words that aren’t said nearly as much on Mark’s channel, though they can personify the frustration on screen and felt while playing so well. On the other hand, Mark’s go-to words are “douche” and “bastard” and probably make good divisive words when trying to predict who’s talking when given a transcript with no other information about the context.

Here are just the negative Sentimental words in case you’re interested.

Looking more into the Sentimental words used, this time the Positive Sentimental only, it seems like Mark’s channel is a much more fun place. They laugh a lot on Mark’s channel, like by a significant margin of a lot. Double-ish. You can probably blame this spike of laughter from the various compilation videos from Happy Wheels, Prop Hunt, Highlights, the comedy indie-games played and the variety of Co-op videos that are on his channel which have highly concentrated edits of laughter and exaggeration to keep the energy high. I don’t have a definitive answer as to why the laughter is so much more. It could even be as simple as Mark + gang are easier to laugh and joke and be goofy with one another where the Grumps tell stories about their lives and laugh at the ridiculous on screen rather than being generally goofy on-air.

The only take-away is that Mark’s channel has much more laughter per word said and The Grumps are generally more aggressive in language, fucker.

Game Grumps vs Markiplier Roundup

Other YouTube Words Posts

Markiplier RoundUp

Game Grumps RoundUp

YouTube Words Folder

Twitter: @Gintrospection

Blaugust Day 22