Feminists next target; Battlefield 1.

[elvor0]

Men weren't the primary soldiers in World War 1 because, "lol it doesn't matter if guys die!" Men were the soldiers in WW1 because highly "masculine" societies stated that women were incapable of fighting, and would distract their fellow soldiers with their "feminine wiles" and cause dissent among the ranks.

Are you going to base that on something, or do we have to take your word for it, because feminism?

I apologize in advance if anyone already linked you:

It's actually still a problem today. The UK articles are from 2002 however. But the ban on women in the front line for the same reasoning has only just been lifted, I can't say for sure if that attitude is one that persists back to WW1 and further, but presumably so.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/24/16680097-not-so-fast-women-on-frontlines-distracting-say-critics?lite

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1395053/Women-banned-from-front-line-as-a-dangerous-distraction.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2880029/Girl-soldiers-fight-frontline-2016-senior-officers-warn-allowing-women-infantry-tank-regiments-mistake.html

Today at least, it's less of an jab against women, and more that men are a bit crap at keeping their focus away from women, in that it may cause them to do more reckless things to cover a comrade. Of course I have no doubt that the attitude of women not being fit for combat also existed, but it was more about not wanting to subject them to war and men not focusing. So it's sexist for both parties.

However, this report shows that mixed genders cause lower combat performance.

http://qz.com/499618/the-us-marines-tested-all-male-squads-against-mixed-gender-ones-and-the-men-came-out-ahead/

Take from that what you will and with a little salt.

 

[Lightknight]

All hail Phasmal. Down with pixel dicks. Up with pixel boobs!

Can....can we have both? Can we be 'up' with both? At the same time?

What? Don't look at me like that.

I'll let Phasmal be the judge of that. The trade could have been anything for all I care if it gets rid of QTEs, escort missions and underwater levels (assumedly not counting entire games centered around water).

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

So the OP theorises that a few disgruntled gamers complaining about the lack of females in game will lead to the next feminist rant against a game, and everyone just rages away assuming that it has in fact already happened.

 

[CritialGaming]

Snip

Oh don't be like that. I was trying to be generous by saying that there could be more. That was the most soft hearted way that I could put that, at best, 20% of games let you play as a women and that's not really a lot.

The problem people have with that is that it's a compromise between wanting a female character and Zelda never getting her own freaking game, and the fact that most of the anger comes from Nintendo putting their foot in their mouths, making it look like they're run by idiots.

Well they did. And this convoluted nature was mainly caused by people launching a per-emptive strike against feminists. So...yeah.

20% dude? Really? You don't think it's a bit better than that? I mean what classifies playable character. Do Final Fantasy games count if you get a female party member, because technically you control them?

What about games that give you the choice in like a silent protagonist kind of way, like Skyrim?

Because I think you'll find a lot more female playable presence than you are giving the industry credit for.

Also I want to put on the record that Steam shovelware, Unity asset flips, and shit like that do not count in this debate. A line has to be drawn somewhere at least.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

I suppose we could push it up to 25%. Though, to be frank, I kind of consider games where you control all the characters and one of them happens to be a woman the easy way out.

I was counting them. And while I love those games, unless it's Mass Effect, it's kind of the easy way out.

I think I'm being very generous with the industry. It doesn't have the strongest track record.

 

[FakeSympathy]

Though people should forget about this gender crap and be more bothered about the fact that France isn't a playable faction. ...In a game about WW1, they may as well not have the Germans in it.

They had to make room for the Americans.

The French aren't the target audience. Everyone knows French people are disinclined to play video games on a genetic level. It's just science.

Well, duh! What's more. When have you ever heard of a french game developer? The mere idea is ludicrous!

And, yes, I'm joking.

Whilst there are many, they pretty much never actually have any French characters in their own games, unless they're shown in a negative light in some way or are comic relief stereotypes, which is generally how they're shown in every other game. The biggest exception is probably Assassins Creed Unity, but even for that, Ubi decided to suddenly drop the fact that characters speak with correct accents based on where the game is set.

 

[MHR]

Equality, it seems, is equal. Women fighting and killing just like the guys is almost unilaterally treated as such. Well, by "feminists," at least. Can't speak for the camp that complains every time a woman might be included.

Multiplayer characters are different because there is no emotional investment in them. A female dies, a little girly death-cry is heard, and the corpse disappears.

If it were equal we would see women in the campaign. Women getting brutally murdered in as graphic a way as the industry allows by the protagonist/allied men characters, or even a well-liked female companion dying brutally in cinematic fashion just the same as would happen to any man. Some feminists are decrying violence against women in games like GTA where it barely even happens, but what would happen if they truly were portrayed as equal?

If EA or a major publisher wants to nut-up and cast women in these roles and not spare them from emotional situations, then I'd want it. Have them there as a genuine part of the cast instead of just "ride-alongs" benefiting from camera time and token inclusion, but being spared the grittiness of reality so as not to offend the audience.

Cast women everywhere, break the history/lore whatever, I'd be interested just to see it. Until then, no it's not equal, and it's insincere.

 

[CritialGaming]

Snip

I suppose we could push it up to 25%. Though, to be frank, I kind of consider games where you control all the characters and one of them happens to be a woman the easy way out.

I was counting them. And while I love those games, unless it's Mass Effect, it's kind of the easy way out.

I think I'm being very generous with the industry. It doesn't have the strongest track record.

Let's do a little experiment then. Here is the release list for January 2015 from IGN. All games with an X next to them have playable women.

Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition (Vita) - January 6
Woah Dave (Vita) - January 6
Warhammer Quest (PC, Mac, Linux) - January 7 X
Chariot (Wii U) - January 8 X
Funk of Titan (Xbox One) - January 9
Assassin's Creed Unity: Dead Kings DLC (Xbox One, PS4, PC) - January 13
Atelier Ayesha Plus: The Alchemist of Dusk (Vita) - January 13 X
Evolve Open Beta (Xbox One) - January 15 X
Blackguards 2 (PC) - January 20 X
Citizens of Earth (PS4, Wii U, Vita, 3DS, PC) - January 20 (this kinda counts because you micro manage characters. Half point)
Gunman Clive 2 (3DS) - January 20
Ironclad Tactics (PlayStation 4) - January 20
Planetside 2 Beta (PS4) - January 20 X
Resident Evil Remastered (Xbox One, 360, PS4, PS3, PC) - January 20 X
Saints Row IV: Re-Elected / Gat Out of Hell Expansion (Xbox One, 360, PS4, PS3, PC) - January 20 X
Grey Goo (PC) - January 23
Dying Light (Xbox One, PS4, PC) - January 27
Grim Fandango (PS4, Vita) - January 27
Heroes of Might & Magic III - HD Edition (PC) - January 29 X
Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 (PC) - January 29 X
Pix the Cat (PC) - January 29
Supreme League of Patriots (PC) - January 29
Life is Strange: Episode 1 (Xbox One, 360, PS4, PS3, PC) - January 30 X
Unmechanical: Extended Edition (Xbox One) - January 30

As you can see 11/24 of the games in January alone have playable female characters, or roughly 46%. Which is a great deal more than your 25% estimate. And this is a very slow release month. So if we average it out, nearly HALF the games released last year have playable female characters.

I think Video games are moving right along.

EDIT: The release list for the entire year can be seen here: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2015/07/27/2015-video-game-release-schedule.aspx for context.

ALSO NOTE: This is a rough pass. To throughly do this study, you'd have to exclude games in which you have no gendered playable characters like "Unmechanical" or "Forza Motorsports" as there technically are no player avatars. The same would apply to games like Civilization. Games can only count if the player directly controls a character, even if that control is part time.

 

[MHR]

There's no problem with any game including characters of any gender or ethnicity where they actually make sense.

Taking a setting where it doesn't make sense like most of WWI and telling people "make it make sense" is annoying.

You'll find that there are very few games where women wouldn't make sense.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

So it spiked above normal for a bit. It doesn't change the fact that if I take a deep look through those lists, I'm not seeing a whole lot of female characters. And if there are more than enough female characters, how come they still face pushback in media? You brought up Life is Strange, the devs for that game had to fight tooth and nail for a publisher that would publish a game with a lady main character.

Let's be frank, those cars aren't driving themselves and games like Civilization have characters too.

 

[Something Amyss]

How did you clear this up? We know that there was a petition that managed to get GTAV banned from a couple of stores in Australia on the grounds of "depicting violence against women", which is true enough, if you completely ignore the fact that it also depicts (a lot more) violence against men.

As for Anita, she has become the be-all end-all of feminist critique in gaming. It was gaming sites that put her there and she gladly accepted the role. You really think that this promotion has absolutely nothing to do with the outcry over certain games? GTA has indeed been doing this since the PS2 games and at the time the only people to complain so vocally about it were Jack Thompson and his ilk.

I haven't played GTAV yet, but I'm pretty sure you could kill the hot-dog vendors in GTAIV and they practically provided the same form of service, in terms of gameplay and mechanics.

Well, I wasn't attempting to clarify for you, for one.

I'm only going to do this once. I don't like making a habit of quoting people I have on ignore, but let's straighten a few things out:

1. WW specifically responde dto someone who named Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian didn't have anything to do with the Target petition.
2. The Target petition was made by former sex workers and spoke of acts against sex workers. It describes things you can do to prostitutes, who never fight back as I mentioned. Hence the restoring health bit, among others.

This game spreads the idea that certain women exist as scapegoats for male violence. It shows hatred and contempt for women in the sex industry and puts them at greater risk. Women in the industry are 40 times more likely to be murdered by a man than any other group of women.

To my knowledge, you can't fuck a hot dog vendor for health in GTA V, the game that's actually being talked about. And even in IV, you didn't have sex with them. And I've got a couple thousand hours on V by now, so if it's not the case, I've been missing out.

3. What you said is also completely true, if you ignore what the petition itself said.

4. Anita Sarkeesian only rose to "prominent enough to talk about" in gaming because people threw a fit that she asked for like 6 grand to buy some camera equipment and such on Kickstarted. So offended were these people that they made games attacking her, threatened to kill her, and launched a massive industry of faux ethical journalism to whine about her. I doubt many people outside of gaming and, as Brogan pointed out, probably outside of specifically the people who hate her, consider her any sort of face of feminism. When I looked for Anita in the news just now, most of the hits were in one of two camps: they didn't mention her being a feminist, or they didn't have anything to do with her and were more people screaming ANITA SARKEESIAN! because they didn't get their way over Tracer in Overwatch or something. It seems the only people branding her this way are...her opponents.

5. Killing prostitutes was an issue even when the games first dropped. Let's not pretend that the only people who took issue were Jack Thompson's ilk. It's one of the best known and most derided elements of the gameplay. This is why Rockstar started to shift away from this before Anita reared her ugly head.

Hopefully, this clarifies things for you, because I'm not going to do this a second time.

It was honestly the weirdest thing coming at American war games from an Australian background - all our history classes talked about shit we did, then all these American games are like 'Australians? In our War? No thank you!' and turned all the Rats of Tobruk into Bostonites or something.

...Hell, I recall one of the various Gamecube Medal of Honor games that resulted in the player character participating in the fucking Siege of Stalingrad, so... yeah. Historical Accuracy? Not what these games had in mind.

It's weird coming at it from the perspective of the child of a history nerd. I mean, I doubt I knew anywhere near as much about Australian involvement as a native for the same reasons I don't expect someone from Wisconsin to know about Ethan Allen, but I thought it was weird that WW2 was so heavily featured, but...there wasn't much of the world in it. US vs Nazis. Oh, and the Brits and French helped out a little. Sometimes. Years of WW2 movies prepared me for the historical accuracy of video games. Less WW1, but I was aware it got the same treatment.

I mean I wouldn't call them bogus. before the programmer made her twitter account private you could see that she did in fact tweet about those things. Plus she put on her resume that she has worked for DICE on the new Battlefield game.

I've seen quotes and captures from sites reporting on this, and they don't look all that ranty. This is exactly what I mean by dialing back the outrage. It goes from "woman says this wasn't the pitch" to "feminists (sic) next target." And while I can't speak for you personally, I am of the belief that with so many angered by implications that nerd culture is toxic, or that gamers are "angry young males," we might want to be a little slow labeling others in the way we don't like.

Well, that depends. If you think what "They" are doing is wrong, you probably shouldn't do it.

Oh, and you said it later turned out to be false. So when I said "bogus," I was absolutely correct to use it. At least, going by your own words.

 

[CritialGaming]

Snip

So it spiked above normal for a bit. It doesn't change the fact that if I take a deep look through those lists, I'm not seeing a whole lot of female characters. And if there are more than enough female characters, how come they still face pushback in media? You brought up Life is Strange, the devs for that game had to fight tooth and nail for a publisher that would publish a game with a lady main character.

Let's be frank, those cars aren't driving themselves and games like Civilization have characters too.

What gender is the car? Or the God-like entity controlling Civ people? The player's? Then the representation is up to the player and it's out of our control and therefore disregarded for our purposes.

And Life is Strange! Isn't that a shining example of how the industry is changing? That they are FIGHTING to make the game they want to make with the characters that they want!

The very thing you're asking for is happening! It may not be instant, but it is happening. Dig deeper into those releases, google the playable characters, don't just look at the title's you know. Because I googled every game on that January list so that I wouldn't give you a false percentage.

Every month might not have a 46% ratio, but I bet the ratio goes up and down from there and has a fairly decent number overall.

The problem isn't that there aren't enough playable females in games. The problem is that there aren't enough playable woman in HIGH PROFILE games. That's what everyone's problem is. It's simply a demand to be at more of the forefront, but by saying shit like there aren't a lot of playable women in gaming. I mean that is just plain FALSE.

But all of this digresses from the point of the thread.

Put simply. Yeah they pulled women from Battlefield....mostly? But technically there is still a female character in the game, so this is a 6-page thread argument over....what? WW1 accuracy?

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

Didn't I freaking say it wasn't driving itself? And you pick the leaders in Civilization, all of whom have personality, even if it doesn't match IRL (Ghandi)

More like an example of how it's fighting change considering how hard the devs had to work to get it published.

Did I deny that? My point is that it isn't perfect and could still be improved, something that seems to be taken as a radical statement on this website for some damn reason. I did, I freaking did thank you very much.

No, even in the lower profile games you're more likely to find men than women as main characters, and as someone with three hundred games in my Steam library, I think I know what I'm talking about.

More like people complaining about how feminists are never happy with anything, despite them not having said a damn thing about Battlefield 1. If anything it's living proof of how people overact to feminists. Oh, and this game is set to have a very loose connection with realism.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Out of any curiosity, has there been any feminist "outrage" about female characters that get hurt or killed in video games when said female character is an active combatant?

Don't think I've seen any.

Put simply. Yeah they pulled women from Battlefield....mostly? But technically there is still a female character in the game, so this is a 6-page thread argument over....what? WW1 accuracy?

This is a six page thread about hypothetical outrage that hypothetical feminists might hypothetically have in the hypothetical future based on the feminist caricature of Anita Sarkeesian living rent free in the OP's head.

 

[K12]

There's no problem with any game including characters of any gender or ethnicity where they actually make sense.

Taking a setting where it doesn't make sense like most of WWI and telling people "make it make sense" is annoying.

You'll find that there are very few games where women wouldn't make sense.

Well arguably military combat, organised crime and most historical positions of power arguably wouldn't be realistic or accurate with women in it. I'm fine with that but I'm also fine with the "reality isn't very inclusive but fuck it we're going to be" approach.

Has anyone actually found any feminists petitioning, campaigning or generally bitching (terrible choice of word) about this yet or is this still just pre-emptive counter-outrage.

 

[ThatOtherGirl]

This might be one of the most ridiculous threads I have ever seen. I don't think I have ever seen a more direct example of manufacturing outrage. Literally complaining about a thing you think feminists might do as if they have already done it. Wow.

Your all real god damn heroes for sticking it to those damn fem nazis! How dare they maybe do a thing in the future you assume they might do! I mean, it might be jumping the gun a bit, but the potential offense is so heinous I can see why it was necessary! It is obviously totally unreasonable that people might expect playable women in a game when such was explicitly promised to them!

 

[cleric of the order]

Personally I'd like to see some of the Indian regiments that the British deployed but honestly what the fuck does anyone care. IF they want to set it in those fronts and have those fronts represent accurate history that's admirable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Battalion

russians? oh that's going to suck for the Russian players I'd be surprised if they actually did that set it in the eastern front.
Greman's OP in eastern front, dice plz nerf
Czra iz cancaar remove hem.
Also by the look at it only 500~ of those women fought in the front the rest were likely support roles like in ww2.
Though given some of those women are from Petrograd they might have been shot at anyway.

Personally I'd be fine with this decision going either way. "We want to be inclusive and give players options" and "Female soldiers were extremely rare in WWI and we want to save a bit of money" are both valid justifications in my book.

And that is likely what they are going to do for ottoman conflicts, and pretty much anything outside of the anglo fronts. I don't have much faith it will include the french fighting the Germans back at the boarders, not the Italian front, nor the Ottoman v arab v indian conflicts or really much more than a nod towards the eastern front.
Which is why i don't understand why females need to really be considered when the conflict doesn't include quite a number of fronts and combatants. You can't just slap inclusive on the end of it because you can play as someone who have problem been handing out white feathers or doing factory work as the menfolk got killed. Aside from what you pointed out "we want to save money" what i figure all of this is a bit of smoke screen for them having probably very few maps and shit like that just like starwars shitshow.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

Some gamers did not find this decision to be a good thing, since just about every FPS multiplayer games nowdays have option to play as woman. Hell, even Star Was Battlefront EA, as much as that game was a piece of shit, had an option to play as female.

There are still a ton of (FPS) games that have no reason to restrict the gender option which still don't allow you to choose a gender other than male.

It doesn't bother me so much that Battlefield 1 doesn't have that option because it is supposed to be a historically accurate game (hopefully it does do that justice concerning ethnical groups etc. however)). That said, if the game wants to bring a strong singleplayer feature, they'd do well to adress the role of women in WW1 as well.

 

[Angelblaze]

Speaking as a feminist, I said I wasn't going to buy Battlefield 1 when they announced they weren't going to add female soldiers; someone called me 'fucked in the head'.

Listen, and listen very well, if a product does not provide me with what I want I won't buy it. Simple as fucking that.

It doesn't matter if its for (disproven) 'historical accuracy', nor am I saying that 'every game needs to be historically inaccurate' because even if it was I wouldn't buy every game. But I'm not buying Battlefield 1, not just because female soldiers did actually serve, but because frankly the player base is absolutely fucking toxic and disgusting and this only proves to me that this isn't a player base I want to be a part of (if the discussion about my purchasing decisions wasn't enough).

That being said, hope you all have fun with it though.

 

[kilenem]

Does it matter? I dont think EA is going to touch on how the military was segregrated at the time. If they decide to have any Black soliders I doubght they'll keep it acurate.