No girls allowed! (Pictured: A screenshot from Bad Company 2. A soldier in brown fatigues and a helmet, holding an assault rifle, stands in the foreground. In the background, a brown battlefield with a brown building to the right and a brown tank in the far background to the left.)
Face, meet palm. On last week’s Kotaku podcast, Gordon Van Dyke, producer of recently-released Battlefield: Bad Company 2, attempted to explain why there aren’t any women in his game, but the reason isn’t anything female gamers haven’t heard before:
“When you actually put in female characters, typically you have to put in an entire new skeleton model and that entire new skeleton model adds an entire new level of animation and an entire new level of rigging. You basically double the amount of data and memory for soldiers that would need to go into your game.
“So it turns into one of those things that’s like: How much will putting something like this in give us, whether the rewards of putting something like this in [are worth it].
In short, technological limitations meant adding female characters would have cut into the engine’s ability to handle other things, such as the destructible environment, and the developers decided that destructible environments add more to the game than female characters would.
The story is rather ironic because BC2 was developed by DICE, the same studio behind Mirror’s Edge, whose producer described ME’s protagonist, Faith, as a deliberate attempt to improve the representation of women in games.
Van Dyke’s reasoning came across as a bad excuse to me, as well as others. GamingAngels.com’s Trina said, “I don’t buy Gordon Van Dyke’s reasoning since Halo & other titles have done it.” Plenty of shooters have female playable characters as well as female enemies, such as Mass Effect 1 & 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Left 4 Dead 1 & 2. Border House contributor Jadelyn said that “those excuses are just a way of saying women weren’t *important* enough for them to devote resources to.” Many of the problems of not having the technology or resources for female characters can be solved by planning for them in the first place, instead of considering them an extra feature that would be nice to implement but inevitably gets cut. KC quipped, “But we can’t afford teh wimminz! And those boob physics are just so hard to program!” Indeed, female characters aren’t that different from male ones, especially if they are in armor or uniforms.
But when it comes down to it, as a critic, I don’t really care whether there aren’t any female characters because the developer ran out of time or money, or there are technical limitations, or if they forgot, or if they are raging misogynists*. The result is the same: the developer has created a universe without women in it, and I’m going to criticize that.
What also bothers me is the framing of the article, which posits innovation and inclusion as mutually exclusive, that focusing on representing women in games is not as important as, if not a barrier to, innovative gameplay. For example:
Imagine the gameplay implications of Pac-Man being able to bash through a wall to escape Inky, Blinky or Clyde. It would certainly have had more profound impact on how Pac-Man played than adding a bow to Pac-Man’s “head” and calling him “Ms. Pac-Man,” right?
Wow, way to completely undercut the achievements of a feminist icon! But seriously, it’s entirely possible to innovate without doing it at the expense of women. In addition, that sentence also implies that innovation is always more important than being inclusive to women. More important to men, perhaps. But men aren’t the only gamers, and they’re not the only gamers that matter, either. At this point in the gaming world, inclusion is still a deeply important issue for many female gamers since, for the most part, we aren’t included. The idea that interesting gameplay is worth getting rid of female characters is a privileged perspective, one that doesn’t completely understand what it is like to participate in a culture that routinely excludes you, or how important and meaningful those few female characters that do exist are.
The post ends with:
Do female characters need to be put in virtual combat? Or, more to the point, are they more important than crumbling walls?
Women: less important than walls. Ouch. Happy International Women’s Day, everyone!
* I care as a consumer what the reason is, because obviously I wouldn’t buy any games from raging misogynists, but when criticizing a game, the reason doesn’t matter.
If this was REALLY the case they would have included female avatars for the PC version and excluded them from the console versions. As it is, I don’t buy a word of it. The textures would be the same, only the dialogue and models would have to be added. The animations would be the same (they’re already saving on that because of the lack of a Prone position) and not all of the models even show their face.
It’s a false dichotomy. I would believe the MW2 guys if they said “either we make a game that’s full of bugs every year or we make a good one every 3 years” but the resources used by destructible environments (processing power) are entirely different from the resources used by additional avatars (RAM).
As it is, I hope they fix this with the expansion. I’d much rather see female Russian and American troops than other factions.
Well why not make all the characters androgynous? Not that hard to do, I mean, they’re under 16 layers of frikkin armour there.
The BF series uses a “socialize” button to spot enemies, which allows tanks/snipers/helicopters/etc seen by a spotter (or anyone) to be highlighted on their team-mates’ maps. In this particular edition, characters also yell things like “GRENADE” or “STOP SHOOTING ME PLZ!”, Russians speak in Russian, Americans speak in the American Dialect of English. But yeah, the models wouldn’t need to be tweaked.
TAK, exactly. And what is with “boob armor” in games anyhow? Female armor in games and actual photos of women wearing armor.
Thanks so much for the pics. They make the point better than my post does!
Not better than the post I thought the post was excellent, but seeing is sometimes important.
I do not truly believe male and female models require different skeletons or animations in a game where everyone wears such bulky armour. All they would need is a seperate face texture and a seperate voice. If BC2 is anything like the first one, all the models are the same anyway, so this would just mean two American models and two Russian models instead of one. This guy’s excuses are bullshit.
That said, throwing a token female character in for the sake of it would be no matter than the token black guy in most squad shooters.
Tokenism stinks, but I’d still prefer it over not having any female characters at all.
Good points on using the same models, all.
What tokenism? I’ve played with 3 female gamers over the weekend.
As far as single-player, yeah I’d agree. Really the single player is awful anyways. It exists to explain “here is why Russia and the US are fighting which seems very weird”.
Don’t go reading the Kotaku comments. It’s more facepalm. It’s all “reasons wimmenz shouldn’t be included in war games” along the lines of “women aren’t in real frontline combat therefore unnatural to have them in game combat”, and “I don’t like hitting women, so shooting at them in war games is wrong”.
“I don’t like hitting women, so shooting at them in war games is wrong”.
Oh, I am writing an entire other post about that one!
I’d like to apply that same logic to Resident Evil 5, and all violent videogames in general.
God, I hate arguments like that. It makes just as much sense to claim:
“People don’t come back from the dead, therefore it’s unnatural that they respawn in game.”
Oh god, that’s awful. It just shows that women weren’t even considered when making the game, at all. “We’d have to make new CHARACTER MODELS! That would be so so hard!!” Which assumes that women would just be something “extra”.
I think they also pulled that for not having female versions of aliens in Mass Effect 1.
It also assumes that they have to sexualize the character model to make it female, instead of using the human in armor model. Because you know that’s what they are thinking when they think of female models. They certainly aren’t thinking real world here.
I think it’s just so awesome how Totilo framed the issue in his tweet about it. Surprisingly reasonable!
And by awesome, I mean “Now I see why this once good journalist joined the ranks of misogyny central Kotaku: cause he fits right in!”
There is nothing surprising nor reasonable about that explanation. Just more of the same, sexist bullshit.
I mean, all the women soldiers should have asses that move like Madison’s in Heavy Rain, amirite? (Seriously, great, her character moved more “femininely” in Heavy Rain, but I think they took it to an extreme).
They’re talking about throwing in one female character as the token female character to “appease the masses.”
In the Russian military there are 10% of female recruits and in the US military i think even 15%. So in a military shooter with somehow realistic setting there should be some female combatants.
But please don’t underestimate the development cost, in technical terms Van Dyke is talking about a new character skeleton and new rigging not new feminine animations. This is for a console game a lot amount of data and memory, if you look ad actual shooters you see that many decide to not integrade female character models. ( Modern Warfare 2 or Brink)
I don’t write this to justify the decision of DICE, i just want to say that he is right when he says that some bigger feature of the game had to be cut for this. (some weapons,destructible environment or general quality of the graphic)
Probably this was a sexist view on the target audience of Bad Company 2, maybe DICE thought that the percentage of gamers how care about this issue is very low.
15% for the USA seems reasonable, Canada is at 15% women in armed forces. Also some women in combat, only 2%, but still that is some rather than none.
The thing is, they DON’T NEED a new model or a new skeleton. Make a fairly androgynous character and work with that. But OH they can’t do that because they want to sexualize the female model and have them run all..women like, when in real combat people run the same as others.
There is NO justification for it.
A fun thought experiment: would this justification ever be used in reverse to explain why an all-female world was created? Would a game like Tomb Raider with a female protagonist create a world with no male NPCs then explain that creating “extra” male skeletons was too expensive, time or resource consuming? Not likely.
Not so unlikely, if you say you have a game where the producer assumes the target audience don’t care about NPCs of the opposite gender.
You will find from the generic horse game up to sexist stuff like DOA Paradise games without male counterparts because they don’t want to add the costs off voice acting, skeletons and whatever.
Sure, it is true that there are games in which the universe is all-female. I was actually thinking within the action/adventure type of game, I admit. But my point was not about whether such universes exist in games. Instead, my point was about the explanations offered for the existence of such universes in games.
Even in the case of DOA Paradise, the explanation offered is not that including men is too expensive, but instead that “For us, the goal was really to offer a little bit of paradise to the users, and we hope that people playing the game will be able to come away with the feeling that they’ve visited paradise.” because women “have beautiful bodies.” From Eurogamer
Perhaps the costs are involved in the decision, but it was really the explanation that I was questioning. I really don’t know about horse games, but if you wold link to somewhere that offers the cost as a primary explanation, I’ll eat my hat.
Nope i don’t have a link sorry
but it is a general decision any development studio has to make if they have human characters to support both genders or not. if they concentrate at one gender they save some resources (not much just some)
DICE decided to cut female NPCs, probably because they thought most of the Bad Company 2 Players wont care about playing as/shooting at female NPCs. I cant remember any female NPCs in BC 1, so probably this was not a feature the fan base highly demanded.
Still i don’t want to defend DICE in anyway, i think this was is mistake.
Also, really the skeletons would have to be different? Have the developers never seen women in the army? see my comment above for photos .
Yes the skeletons need to be different when you have a level of detail like in BC 2. That is the reason why NPCs in many games have no different body figures.
Of course you could use one skeleton or even one mesh for female and male NPCs but not with a detail level like this and the same graphic quality : http://badcompany2.ea.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/Screenshot-Full/screenshots/bfbc2genscrntracersart/bfbc2genscrntracersart.jpg
After watching some actual gameplay vids I wouldn’t be surprised if no one really noticed if all one did was scale down the mesh a little* and add a facial-hair-free face…
For the multiplayer mode and for generic enemies no one will notice.
But the ingame cutscenes in the single playermode would look a bit oldschool.
For the multiplayer mode and for generic enemies no one will notice.
But the ingame cutscenes in the single playermode would look a bit oldschool.
( sorry for the spam that was a reply to Matt in : http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=1786&cpage=1#comment-2986 )
I’m still not buying it, really. As Bakka pointed out, female soldiers don’t look different from their male counterparts, except in their faces. So unless all the male soldiers have the same face, there really isn’t an excuse. It’s not like the characters are huge, muscle-bound, Gears of War-style soldiers. They’re regular people. And real life isn’t like Metal Gear Solid, where you can tell which soldier is the lady by the way her butt waggles when she walks.
Yes you are right in a realistic setting with this huge bulky body armor it would probably be enough when using scalling, and no diffrent models. (no new models maends no new rigging)
But on the pictures of Bad Company 2 they give the characters a slittly slimer and more agile appearence then real soldiers, so i think in a ingame cutscene it would be noticebale if the same mesh would be used for both genders.
Anyway this are all technical issues which could be solved without reducing the graphics under a level where the game would not sell. I think DICE or EA ignored willingly the actual amount of female shooter players. other high quality games can do this.
Great point, and I think Mass Effect serves as a concrete example of this. There are four alien species that have both males and females: Salarians, Quarians, Turians, and Krogans. The first game has one each of Quarian, Turian, and Krogan party members, the last two of whom are male and the Quarian is female. Now, we see Turians, Salarians, and Krogans all over the place in the game, but the only Quarian in the entire game is your female party member. The explanation is that they only had the resources/technology to have one model for each non-human species.
So we have a situation where it is normal and unquestioned to have masses of only males of a species running around, but it would be unnatural to only see females of a species (unless that species is ONLY female–the Asari), so we never see any other Quarians. Does that make sense? I’m not sure I’m describing the imbalance accurately.
I know there are in-fiction explanations for some of these things, but most of them are very flimsy, and the result is the same: males are the default person, so if there are only females running around, it must be because the males don’t even exist.
yes especaly mass effect is a very sad example.
it always puzzeled me where the the female krogans,hanar,salarians,volus,turrians and batarians are. ME 2 added male quarians but changed nothing to the rest. But of course there would be a posibility to show females for this alien races. i mean they are aliens they even dont “need” obvious sexual characteristics, so it wouldnt even be nececary to add a female mesh.
i think the sad truth is that a female krogan or turian is not feminine or sexy enough and that the developer and/or the players only want a attractive female and nothing else,
i think the sad truth is that a female krogan or turian is not feminine or sexy enough and that the developer and/or the players only want a attractive female and nothing else,
Yeah, I suspect that is true as well. I wish developers had a little more faith in gamers. I don’t think most male gamers NEED to be staring at hot chicks all the time, they can handle some ugly lady aliens, jeez.
Mass Effect 2 has male Quarians and different models of Quarians. You actually do meet a Salarian female: The Salarian member of the Citadel Council. The Salarians have both males and females, but they look the same. The Salarian codex entry says that Salarian society is matriarchal and that all political and leadership positions are held by females. By that logic, the Citadel counselor would be a female because it is one of the most important positions in the galaxy. Turians and Krogans are the only two races left where only the males have been depicted and the females have not. I hope Bioware rectifies that for ME3.
That is a interesting observation … probably because nearly all of the Salarians are refered as “he” i assumed that the council leader is male too. the evil sexist unconscious
Anyway i think the problem we had with Mass Effect was that in the general public no “normal” female aliens are around regardless of flimsy in-game explanations. Why invent a universe where all visible aliens are dominated by males except the “hot” looking ones ?
Guess it takes alot more office hours to animate their boobs ^^ lmao Lord know you gotta get those right or the whole game is ruined.
Just to reiterate, I DON’T CARE why there aren’t female characters in a game. I don’t care. So don’t bother giving yourself carpal tunnel over how much time and money and processing power it takes to add content to a game. I know this. And I still DON’T CARE.
Because as a critic? I have no idea, nor do I care, HOW a game came to be made, or what the process is, or what or why decisions were made. I have some idea what it takes to make a game, yes–I have friends in the industry and I have made games myself, actually. But when I come to this blog and put on my critic hat, all of that gets put to the side, and all I have to work with are 1. the game that’s in front of me, and 2. the gaming culture and greater society surrounding it. That’s it.
So when you create a game with no women in it, I look at that, and I look at our culture and how it treats men as the default person and women as the “Other”, as lesser than men, and I see the connection there. So I’m going to criticize the fuck out of it. I don’t care about the whys and the hows–the only thing I can write about is the final product. No matter the path it took to reach this point, the result is a game without women in it. And that says something about our culture at the same time it reinforces those aspects of our culture. Writing about that is WHAT WE DO at this blog.
Exactly, and in this case it seems fairly certain that it was a made up excuse, kind of like Ubisoft’s excuse about their DRM being down for some customers. They honestly want us to believe that hackers DDOS’d their DRM? They want us to believe they could tell the difference between users hammering servers by trying to log in repeatedly and leet haxxors.
At any rate, for the DICE excuse to ring true we have to believe that they considered including female avatars at any point in development. To be honest I find that harder to believe than Cliffy “More sexist than commenters on Kotaku” B.’s quotes in Game Informer about leaving out female Gears because using the same animations would make them look strange.
I think such situations often have different layers, sometimes it’s just idiotic exuse, sometimes blatant lie and bs, sometimes it’s hard to make any sense out of this mess. So there are games that have female characters and female playable avatars and games that don’t, sometimes from the same developing studio. I totally agree that critic’s job is to deal with final product and point out what’s wrong with it, but how it comes to this final product is often not a clear cut case. For example : We have a lot of buggy game releases recently but i think it would a bit simplify to state : these developers couldn’t code a s…, it may be the case or it might be that publishers totally rushed the game or maybe they cut money for beta-testing, or maybe someting complelety different.
Definitely, which is why I focus on the game, and avoid making judgments about the developers personalities or motivations or whatever. That’s what I was trying to get at with, all I can look at is the final product, since I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes. And if a game has no women in it, it’s the game that is sexist, not (necessarily) the developers.
It’s a shame you don’t have the access Meagan VanBurkleo got when she wrote “The Gender Gap” for Game Informer’s April issue. Link to her blog entry about it here: http://www.meaganvanburkleo.com/?p=1679#more-1679
Although I despise print, kind of worth it to read details about Portal 2, and quotes from Cliffy B, the folks at Gearbox, the folks who made crackdown, etc about inclusion in games.
Ooooh thanks for the heads up! I was thinking about picking it up just for the Portal 2 coverage, but I definitely want to read that piece!
I think you are absolutely right, exept for some historic or very low budget games, games should`t exclude female npcs. espacaly in modern day military games where even reality slowly shows more equality then many shooters.
I would like to know the actual games that do/dont use different skeletons. We know that ME2 uses at least the same animations in combat.
In this case, does skeleton refer just to the bones/rigging, or the mesh as well?
I keep thinking of the Iron Man movie, in the beginning when Tony is in the armored vehicle, and says to one of the army personnel, “Good Lord, you’re a woman”.
I would say that all of today’s AAA games where the camera is close to the characters use different skeletons for both genders.
( Except games which uses some sort of dynamic skeletons like the Sims 3 )
the skeleton refer to the bones of the 3d model
->needed when 3d models have different proportions
the rigging is the connection between the bones and the model
-> needed for every 3d mesh
but most animations can then be used for any humanoid 3d model
i am a graphics programmer and not a technical artist so i cant give much more details, but if you are really interested in this topic check sites like
http://tech-artists.org/
http://www.cgsociety.org/
http://www.gameanim.com/
So I just figured out how to reply to comments by allowing Javascript -_-
My reply is here: http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=1786#comment-2984 but since then I’ve found another vid that illustrates my point a bit better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHxRekd3u3g
I thought the focus was on actual games ? Rune was released nearly 9 years age.
In this good old times some stuff was a lot easier because the low graphic detail. Having a look at the characters the animators probably got away with just one skeleton. But i doubt that the this is possible with the quality of animations today.
…”actual”…
Seriously, I don’t see any meaningful difference in gameplay quality between Rune and Bad Company 2. Here’s the weapon, here’s the target, here’s the target’s weapon behaviour you need to avoid, here’s the environment and where you can go in that environment, here’s how you heal damage.
There’s a huge difference in the singleplayer cutscenes as you’ve said, but the need to dick around with cutscenes to show off pretty crap is probably the bigger part of why I haven’t seriously bothered with any game from any major publisher post 2003.
On a somewhat less snippy note, in actual play it looks quite pronounced in Rune that both sexes are using the same skeleton, at least if you’re not used to it. We’re hardly talking about four-frame sprites meant for 320×200 here.
I think discusing a game with Rune-like graphic makes not so much sense because current shooter games has to have pretty good graphics to sell. If this would be a discusion about a free to play shooter like battlefield heroes (which has only male characters too) then i would agree you.
but a fullprize shooter for the xbox 360 with runelike graphics ? unlikely
I remember that part too! You know a funny thing about that? You don’t see the woman soldier die. The other two male soldiers with Tony Stark die, but she just leaves the vehicle and is not seen again. I find that interesting…
Yeah but in a comic book/comic book movie you can never say for certain if anyone is REALLY alive or dead. Here’s betting all of them appear again in the sequel as villians, out for revenge, motivated by how their lives were carelessly thrown away to develop Tony Stark’s backstory.
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What’s really funny about this is that every girl gamer I run into when playing BFBC2 is absolutely slaughtering the men. Obviously, we are good at these games and we have an interest in excelling.
I understand that Gordon and the rest of the development pride themselves on destruction 2.0, the advanced weapon skins, etc. But, I would love to play a female. And…I certainly would not require the DD’s I sport in real life that aren’t visible under the uniform and ceramic armor anyway. I would settle for a voice and a face.
Kudos to the dev for an excellent game. Maybe, they truly were unaware of their female following. Have you looked at their twitter followers? I think there may be five or ten females.
Well I’m hoping the sales will be such that they’ll do expansions ala BF2 or BF 1942, rather than just moving on to BFBC3, expansions could conceivably add in female voices/faces.
I have to agree about the easy pickings in this game. A lot of players don’t understand the key to winning conquest is to take AND HOLD the objectives. How hilarious is it to watch a spawn camper, wait for his squadmates to spawn on them, then take 3 for 1 out with a mortar? Heh.
I also would like them to animate something so we can see when the engineer is ready to repair some more. Show ‘em feeding in some more core or hooking up another gas canister…something.
@Twyst (#39): Have you played Rune: Halls of Valhalla? It’s a third-person fighting game with a weapon-focussed mindset like you’d see in a Doom/Quake/UT-style shooter – the character you play is entirely a cosmetic choice, while the weapon you have makes all the difference. Since it’s a melee fighting game the exact location of your weapon and various body parts is important, so to keep things homogenous all the characters’ skeletal animations are the same – men or women.
Here’s a male character’s movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXupja4irII
And here’s a female character’s movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVxBbXsDtNQ
(that said, the latter video took me way, way too long to find -_-)
i hadnt seen this game before! thanks!
The Battlefield series has never let you customize the look of your soldier, unlike some other shooters that let you alter your costume, head, and voice. Every class on each side uses the exact same models. So for Bad Company 2, the technological explanation makes more sense than for other games that let you customize an exclusively male avatar. DICE would have to create an avatar customization system from scratch.
I think it would be better to ask why all those other games that already have the technology in place to alter your model, like MAG or Counter-Strke (for which user-modded female models exist), don’t include females. The GRAW, Rainbow Six, and SOCOM series are the only modern military FPSs I can think of that let you use female avatars. What’s interesting is that FPS games with fantasy/futuristic settings are a lot more likely to have female avatars than modern military ones. Seems more like a cultural issue than a technological one.