The Brink Logo (modern black sans-serif font in all-caps)
Critical Kate at CriticalHit! blog has an interesting post covering Bethesda’s post regarding the huge number of options on offer to players with regard to character customisation. Apparently a player can create 102,247,681,536,000,000 unique characters if you include minor tint variations and body types, but this doesn’t include an option to play a female character. Critical Kate writes:
Some guys might not understand what the big deal is, being that there’s no shortage of shooters featuring characters of their own gender. It can be difficult to comprehend how alienating it can be for a genre to so rarely include you, when you haven’t experience that same level of exclusion. There may be a few shooters, like Perfect Dark, where you’re forced to play the campaign as a female character, but even the multiplayer in that game has males to choose from (more males than females, in fact). Male characters in multiplayer shooters are never considered optional or included as an afterthought; they’re mandatory.
For a company to boast how impressively customizable the characters in their first-person shooter are, only to then exclude half the population from having their character be the same gender as themselves, doesn’t exactly say to female gamers “you are welcome here.”
The explanation from developer, Splash Damage? It was a matter of resources (hm, sounds familiar). Read the full analysis at the CriticalHit! blog.
The devs have gone on record saying they wanted female character models but found themselves painted into a corner by the limitations of their male models and art style, something to do with the female models they whipped up not looking right if they tried to use the existing hit boxes and animations and not having the resources to go and double up on everything to make it male and female.
Honestly, Splash Damage isn’t exactly a big game studio. When EA and DICE exclude stuff out of Battlefield, it’s lazy. When Splash Damage leaves stuff out of an original IP that is, quite frankly, being undermarketed by Bethesda, that’s the little guy trying to get their product to market under budget and before the heat death of the universe.
I think they also said they might try to do it post-release though.
Well, I hope all that is worth missing out on 50% of their potential audience.
“OOOHHHHH we’re little guys! We couldn’t have planned this better and make it wooooork!!! *WHIIIIINE!*” >:P Yeah I’m not buying it.
There’s no question some better planning would have allowed them to make this decision without (as much) of a sacrifice to other features. So fair enough.
But the point that they started looking into it, it was a choice between bankrupting themselves by overhauling everything they’d done to include these, or proceeding with development. Not sure why it’s fashionable in these parts to demonize that. But hey, I guess it’s easier to preach to the choir on this one! So yeah, evil splash damage! You guys are jerks with your small studio and new IP and everything because what you’re risking and what I think you should risk* are different things!
*that being, the risk of scrapping a ton of development work to go back and redo something, not the non-risk of having female models.
>>But the point that they started looking into it, it was a choice between bankrupting themselves by overhauling everything they’d done to include these, or proceeding with development.
You make it sound like including female characters was an idea that came to them much later in development, claiming that they’d have to “overhaul” all this work they’d done, when that is not the case. In a forum post from 16 months ago, this concept artist mentioned that they nixed the females in the concept art stage.
The reasons given are fairly vague. First he says it was so they could make the male characters that much more customizable, which is a pretty weak excuse. The second time he says:
“Since women naturally tend to be smaller than men in reality, it meant we had to be pretty exaggerated in terms of their proportions when concepting the early designs. It actually worked fairly well in the end but it was a lot more work than getting the males to look right at the same size.”
Why it was a lot more work, he doesn’t say…it’s all kind of vague. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I do sort of wonder if it was related to the too common notion that, for example, a female heavy wouldn’t look “attractive” enough.
Your excuse doesn’t exonerate them. What reason did they have to wait so long to even think about including females in the product, besides considering them “optional” or “not important”? Why couldn’t they have planned them from step one?
You know, that came out alot meaner than I wanted it to. Disregard the above, if you’d be so kind.
Given how exaggerated and customizable their male models are, I think I could buy that. Still, that one MASSIVE oversight, both on their part… and mine.
Quote from the article :
“This reason sounds pretty silly now, in light of 102,247,681,536,000,000 unique character variations. 27,181,440 variations (minus tints) was more important than including both genders?”
On a technical and ‘achievement’ standpoint? Yes. The whole hyper-customization of the character is a selling point for the game, something they really, really wanted to do. And before anyone says anything and brings up City of Heroes, I believe making a character look good in movement is a lot harder in action games than in ‘static’ games like MMORPG.
Every time I hear “but female characters didn’t fit the art style!!1″, I remember this article on Game Career Guide on female TF2 chars: http://gamecareerguide.com/features/854/the_aesthetics_of_unique_video_.php
Alex even wrote an article about it: http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=2364
I completely agree that having more than one type of characters means additional cost. That said, when I see them a) introducing other types, like the different male builds and b) talking about WHATEVER not fitting into their setting, all empathy ends.
Yes, there are “heavy”, “medium” and “light” builds, from what I’ve seen. But when they talk about female characters not fitting into this set, they want to talk about “but the small, fragile girls, they just can’t be the same size as even the LIGHT build!”
They exaggerated male builds, introduced some comic style into their characters – but when it comes to women, they need to fit the standard? Eff that. See the linked article on how to create heavy, medium and light builds for female characters that still fit into a *very* unique setting. It’s possible, but someone needs to do it.
Additionally, it’s *their* setting. There is no such thing as “D’oh, half the population does not fit! Too bad.” Instead of adapting the setting to their needs, they hide behind a wall of glass.
We still see your real argument, Splash. Bethesda Softworks didn’t want to “waste money” on dem womenz. Now you take the fall.
Wow, thanks for that link. I don’t play TF2 but it was really interesting and refreshing to see those designs.
I bought Brink and I’m enjoying it, because Splash Damage deserve my money – it’s a good game with a lot of great intentions. However, over the past few months I’ve also sent them messages and left comments on various press outlets to express my dissatisfaction with the exclusion of female characters. I was hoping that, as a company that grew out of modding, they would give the community tools to fix the problem, but I’m comfortable with them patching it too, so long as it actually happens.
There’s an argument above as to whether it’s ok that they found it technically difficult to add female characters. I sympathize with the “they should have planned to have women from the beginning” argument, but it really seems to me like they did plan it, but found that having different genders was more difficult than they expected. The blame lies in abandoning women entirely when they ran into that wall.
On that topic, I don’t buy their reasons for why it’s difficult. ChemicalAlia’s TF2 women show that a talented artist can make a convincing female character given some pretty diverse male starting dimensions, so if they weren’t able to create and balance two (er, six) sets of hitboxes, they should have stuck it out and made burly/rangy women that fit the existing hitboxes. It’s not like the male cast of Brink are lookers, after all – nor are they realistic.
But then, fans would have whined. Because our culture is shallow, and fans are the shallowest of the shallow. Female characters have to be as pretty as possible—usually a lot prettier than the male characters—because fans demand it.
A tiny studio that made its male characters so custom that it’s downright stupid. Sorry, if their best excuse was “oh, we completely forgot about half that world’s fickin’ population until we’d done everything else”, I’m not going to reward them for it.
I have seen a early demonstration of brink 2 years age at the gamescom in colonge, and the first thing what the developer said what he deeply regreted is that they excluded female characters at all. they said it was a very early decicion, the art style argument is somehow valid because they have very muscular and wiry characters and the recource cost to add female characters would be 200%. but i ask myself why using such an exluding art style then ? its true that brink looks rather unique and that this is important for an sci fi shooter so that they dont look like all other shooters.
any ideas who to keep this piratelike cargo cultish look, keep both genders and dont double the recource costs ?
Honestly, this comment winds me up so much. The devs are literally saying “well, we thought about putting women in, but we had to obviously draw all the guy models first”. “Painted in by their limitations” could be translated as “didn’t even occur to them to have women characters until it was too late”. I think offering women as a DLC is so far beyond cheeky it’s ridiculous – it’s literally a tax on women wanting to play the game. If they really cared about it they’d say something like “hey, we know it’s rubbish there’s no women in, we will definitely include them in a patch soon after release”. As it is it’s half promises and maybes and half-assed excuses.
However big the game studio is, just simply not considering female models to such a degree that their dev tools can’t even manage it is literally sexism by design.
So instead of bragging about the number of possibilities, the headline should be: “Brink only has enough resources for half of 204 quadrillion variants.”
When it comes to a developer not having enough resources to include other genders in a game, I think we know what kind of “resource” is being talked about. It’s that elusive magical mineral Inclusivium, which makes people not be sexist.
As a note, though it really shouldn’t be said, the small comment thread there is full of fail. Avoid reading if you don’t have the cope for it.
I saw a trailer, only male avatars runing and shooting, looks pretty stupid, another studio that fails big time.
There’s only one game I’ve ever heard the “A matter of resources excuse” for and actually bought it. In the original Skate, the developers said they wanted to include a female option, but the execs wouldn’t give them the money or time they’d need to implement this accurately — as females have a different center of balance and other factors that would actually make a difference in portraying skateboarding realistically. They said they would definitely include them in the sequel, and true to word, they did.
An FPS or third-person shooter? … Sorry, no. There is nothing about running around and shooting that makes implementing female characters any different from implementing males. Saint’s Row 2 added the option to play a female character and still expanded the game from the original. Freaking Unreal and Quake 2 had female models for multiplayer — and you could use the same models for singleplayer in Unreal. The reason was that you just didn’t think including females mattered. That’s it.
And call me crazy, but when I can fairly call your game less progressive or advanced than Saint’s Row 2 or some of the first modern 3D shooters in existence? I think that’s a bad thing.
or some of the first modern 3D shooters in existence
Is it just me or has there been a serious sliding back since around Unreal Tournament? Even the white male protags from older FPSes were a significantly more varied and diverse group than the shaven mesomorphic 6’2″ scowling thirtysomething we see in every other game now.
From a technical perspektive it is really the double amount of work to do customizable charackter models for both genders, especially in a FPS game and when the art style is so distinctive like in Brink. (the muscles are very detailed, and nobody runs around in full body armor, etc)
But the decicion to exclude the female gender was done long ago and the question is why?
They could had sacriviced the 50% of the options you can modify in brink and included 50% of the population. But then they couldnt say anymore they have 102 QUADRILLION Unique variants.
Probably they thought this wasnt worth it and this is really sad and backward.
There’s a fairly active discussion of this going on over at The Escapist. With, of course, the usual frenzy of derailments and people toting Splash Damage’s sedan chair.
Enjoy, or something.
Wow. The “best” part is [TW for body policing] when several of them try to argue that female customization wouldn’t work because “there are three body types[: l]ight, medium, and heavy” and that no one would want to look at medium or heavy women, because “not only would medium and heavy sized women be impossible, but they would also be grotesque.” Way to both totally disregard the existence and potential desirability of non-petite women and blatantly admit that the only possible use for women in your worldview is as eye candy, “internetzealot1.” This opinion is then held up as valid and true for at least two more pages (at which point I just couldn’t take it anymore), with any examples of muscular women disregarded as either “ugly” or “effectively drag queens. Men with shabby faux female features.”
Seriously, friends, if you value your faith in humanity, stay away from that thread.
Yeah, I was pretty well disgusted with how willing people were to tote Splash’s sedan chair there.
Now, someone did eventually post a TF2 “Heavy Weapons Gal” concept—beefy and “Hollywood Homely,” but decidedly effective-looking and far from “grotesque.” And that actually took the wind out of a few sails.
By the way, got any idea if we’ve got any character artists around here? Some self-proclaimed pro on that thread just threw a hissy fit.
Perhaps we could take up a collection fund and pay Chemical Alia to go in and kick their butts. Hir TF2 mods are, no exaggeration, stunning.
Funny you should mention that: Chemical Alia actually just showed up (independently) and schooled the guy. (Seems my knowledge of character modeling—while quite limited—was, in fact accurate.)
To say this is infuriating is an understatement. Over and over and over again and again and again, women — if we are allowed to exist or even considered at all — have to be Twiggy with monster teats. How is the female body image that exist in the industry NOT “grotesque” as well as unrealistic? Hell’s bells, how is the stereotypical Hulk on steroids MALE hero not absolutely grotesque, unrealistic and hideous? But apparently that’s fine because it’s by boys, about boys and for boys’ wish fulfillment. Whereas female characters apparently must not be designed (IF they are designed) for the benefit of female players or for *our* power fantasies, but also for the boys’ wish fulfillment.
I actually did a blog post about this the other day. When I first heard about Brink I was super excited about a parkour-style MMO shooter, with super-duper customization. Then I kept reading about it and found out there’d be no female avatars and my excitment immediately turned into ranty-anger. All of their ‘reasons’ are so sexist it hurts. It’s a shame the gaming companies and communities seem to refuse to progress past their exclusionary bs.
I was hoping that a discussion about Splash Damage’s decision would find its way here.
I found out about Brink being developed about a year ago when I was researching up and coming shooters with co-op that my husband and I could play. It took a bit of hunting at the time to find out that I wouldn’t be able to play a female character. I’d also got quite excited about the game until that point and then the excitement rapidly faded and I was filled with a familiar frustration. ( Well I actually got very angry.) Although on the upside it led me to this place and the wonderful, “A Matter of Resources”, article on this site.
I also found a great article that Brad Gallaway wrote on GamCritics.com about Brink and this topic about a year ago. It’s a good read called,”No Girls Allowed”.
Apparently the developers have said that they will probably look into making female characters if Brink sells well and they get to make a sequel.
Personally I think they will just decide that it sold well without female avatars so there will be no need to make them for Brink 2. I have zero faith in Splash Damage’s condescending appeasement and Brink will not be finding its way into my household anytime soon.
A link to Brad Gallaway’s post at Gamecritics, http://tinyurl.com/Brink-article, for any one who is interested.
AUGH! >_< I tried to cancel Brink, only to discover it already shipped before I could. Glargle! Now I'll have to refuse the shipment or return it. (Really don't want it anymore, now that I've found out it has no female options)
Although, at this point, since I’m getting it anyway… I might try it. Not holding my breath on that, though. There’s some temptation, but I don’t really need yet another thing that forces me to pretend to be male on top of my life offline — especially not something that touts its customization to the point that there’s no reason I should be forced to.
Even leaving aside Splash Damage’s paper thin ‘bu-bu-but our resources are limiteeeed’ excuse (I’d be a lot closer to buying that if one of their bullet points for the game wasn’t ZOMG CUSTOMIZATIONS) I think Brink’s claim to custom character fame is pretty thoroughly undone by the game being in first person.
really *that* part is the most baffling thing to me about the game, oh yeah it’s soo boss you get to make your guy and do jumps and all other kinds of crazy shit but *you* will almost never see it because the gaming industry is incredibly conservative and caters to the kind of sadnerd who complains about a game being ‘consolified’ on forums because it isn’t on DOS
But other players can see you and you can see other players so i don’t see how FPP view made your point on this.
“…because the gaming industry is incredibly conservative and caters to the kind of sadnerd who complains about a game being ‘consolified’ on forums because it isn’t on DOS”
Now, rants are okey, but this isn’t even making coherent sense ? Sadnerds complains on forums b/c thay are being catered by conservative gaming industry making games “consolified” ?
Yes, other players can see you, however I feel that it if you’re hoping to sell a game on the basis that their avatars are highly customizable and capable of visually impressive acrobatics, that it is a mistake to both prevent the player from seeing their own character in action, and limit their choice in character customization in a fairly major way. I didn’t mean to actually imply (I sometimes go a bit overboard on hyperbole) that the FPP actually *breaks* the game, simply that it is at odds in a baffling way with the game’s selling points in the same way that not being able to play as a woman is (and additionally that it was chosen because first person is seen as a ‘safe’ choice for a shooter which wont draw any criticism from the theoretical core audience for the game).
as for the rant, again a heavy dose of hyperbole, I was mostly just frustrated that the industry still caters to an audience that shouldn’t be listened to. and that the reason they shouldn’t be listened to is because they have are terrified of any and all change, as evidence I submit most of the articles on this blog (more specifically any links from here to Kotaku or Joysiq are pretty good choices I think), and another infamous group (though one that thankfully game devs don’t listen to on the whole) the people who regularly post on No Mutants Allowed for a good example of people who rage over seemingly minor game play changes (most notably for my arguments: perspective)
As someone who does feel that the gaming industry has ‘consolefied’ my games, I’m a tad offended that I can’t dislike the way the gaming industry is going and not be a feminist at the same time. Nor that I can appreciate oldschool games and want more of them at the same time?
I am a fan of old school RPG’s, including the first two Fallouts (both incredibly inclusive and well-written games, if gory and somewhat triggering). I am irritated that isometric RPGs have seemingly gone down the drain. If you’re wondering, no I did not like Fallout 3.
Mostly because Fallout 3 effectively was anathema to the first two games. Not because it was first person, but because it had some of the worst writing and game design I’ve seen in a while. On the other hand, I did enjoy New Vegas, mostly because it included a lot of content from the real Fallout 3, Van Buren.
The industry does not cater to this audience, or they would not sit there on their websites screaming about it. When was the last isometric RPG made? Or a shooter without health regeneration? Exactly.
Then again, the fact that the gaming journalism industry tends towards on the whole to be a bunch of developer-bribed sycophants.
One of the problems with the industry, including with the way it portrays women, is that everyone tries to copy everyone else and you end up with the same white muscular, assumed cis and straight guy, shooting generic aliens for 10 hours.
I can’t see an edit comment, but I would like to add
Most of what the NMA community did rage about was a turn-based isometric RPG turning into a FPS with a lot of RPG elements. Thats a pretty significant element of gameplay, isn’t it?
Its like turning, say, Dragon Age into a flight sim where you fly Flemeth around and have to destroy the Archdemon with proton torpedos.
Yeah… refused the package from Gamestop. May pick it up after all if a female characters patch does materialize, but I don’t currently even approach a mindset where I’d be comfortable playing something like this when it forces me to play a male character.
I remember finding out that there would be no lady characters not long after Brink surfaced in the media. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to buy that kind of product, especially upon hearing the developer ‘reasons’ for why lady counterparts could not be included. Then there was the customization video that showcased the many ways to customize (male) characters (touting millions of options), and that only served to remind me how much I will not be purchasing the game.
Sidenote: For a game that prides itself on customization, I have not seen that much diversity shown in the media. The general facial structure and noses tend to all look alike to me, with only variations in body fat.
This is pretty shocking and the excuses by the devs are, as always, insulting. When one of the main selling points of the game is customization, to not include an option to play a female is so blatantly sexist, I’m surprised to see it in 2011. I want to see more backlash for this, but sadly I feel like it won’t happen.
That’s why we make it happen.
Damned if I’m buying the game. I considered it at one point, despite the fact that I’m not really into shooters…and then, they made excuses for the lack of female characters, and excuses for their excuses. And that’s not even getting into the behavior of fans.
But for everyone who is still buying the game? Ian Cooper has a good idea in his comment at this article: Put something symbolic on your character.
And for hellsakes, don’t let the fanlets shout you down.
i noticed this and had a bitch to my friend – saying they either didn’t think of it, didn’t care, or went by their unconfirmed and outdated notion that women don’t do FPS.
So yea – if i choose to play this sort of stuff (i love customisation) you can pretty much figure whether i’ll do this or APB:R.
But actually there is a beautiful moment storyline-wise. The people are survivors from a vacation resort. I find the idea of a male-only vacation resort highly subversive. The graphics could do with a bit more of Tom of Finland influence but you can’t wish for everything….
It just struck me: They made a game with more possibilities of men than there have existed people in all of history! How did the wrongness of that never strike them?
There really is no excuse for this whatsoever by anything approaching a reasonable standard. Writing, coding, programming, and model-building for games is a very involved, very long process. Forgive me if I’m not charitable when I assume that it was pure sexism that prevented anyone from asking “Hey, why haven’t we created any women avatars yet?” over the course of that period. Forgiver me if I am highly disinclined to take them at their word when they throw their hands up about the “oversight” and mutter that they didn’t have enough resources to include women.
Once again we are confronted with the intellectually cowardly and morally bereft who dissemble, hand wringing as they say that developers can’t help it, they’re giving the people what they want, gamers themselves demand patriarchy inscribed in every game, women need to deal with it. Once again the very existence of countless *gamers* who find this fucked, regardless of their gender, disproves the argument and simply suggests that the opinions of sexist men matter more than the opinions of egalitarian minded people. Once again these individuals, even some who’ve posted in the comments thread here, have made abundantly clear that they believe sexism is a natural need that needs to be filled, rather than an expectation constructed by the availability of certain games.
So let’s be clear about the terms of this debate: women do not matter, men come first, and that’s perfectly okay because it’s what the people want, and anyway the decisionmaking here, to make *every* man in the game before making *one* woman, has nothing to do with misogyny, it’s just good business sense.
Let’s dispense with the dissembling obfuscations and free-market ideologue lies and remember that *that* is what is going on. Once accepted, we can have a proper discussion about incidents like this.
Short note:
They (Splash) DID come up with female avatars pretty early, apparently as soon as the concept stage. As Kate pointed out, concept artists publicly talked about female avatars 16 months ago. So, obviously, *some one* at Splash thinks that female characters are actually necessary in a game like this. However, on the way from concept art to publisher, they got lost.
I expect Bethesda said something along the lines of “Oh, your major USP is customization! That’s great, we don’t usually see that one in Shooters! Concentrate on great male avatars and don’t try to include female chars.”
This, of course, is a stupid idea. But if I’m right and the publisher told them they neither pay for female characters nor wait for Splash to create them themselves, Splash really had no choice.
I’m not saying it’s no one’s fault. What I’m saying is this: If the artists at Splash *wanted* to create female characters, and their talks strongly hint at this, it’s not “the dev’s” fault. It’s the publisher, who didn’t want to pay, who didn’t want to wait. It’s Beth’s fault.
Or maybe it never got lost and the talk of female avatars was just that, talk and no substance while they focused on male characters first and foremost. As there is no actual proof the developers didn’t just topple over immediately and decide to yank women out of production, this theory that they had no hand in how things went down isn’t really the most sound. I’d say it’d be a better idea to blame and call out both. Both should hold the responsibility for this, not just one.
Calling a fail before it happens.
*places bet on the table*
They’ll have a DLC pack for the addition of female avatars. BUT you’ll have to pay for it. Because it’s a feature.
It’ll be like that one MMO all over again where if you wanted an avatar that his a white person you had to pay for it, because having a non-white option is a feature.
*smdh*
Not heard that story before.
I’m not entirely certain, but Ansible may be talking about this.
Oh, that. I actually had heard of it before, but for some reason, it didn’t come to mind when I was thinking “MMO.”
I’m not sure if it is a MMO, which is why I was a bit uncertain on whether or not that was the game in question. Similar incident, at any rate.
Seems the game, and thus its forum, no longer exists.
But you can always slap “Black is an extra feature” into a search engine to find reports and comments on it.
And you may want to not look at the comment section of certain sites you’ll find in your hit list.
-Ansi8
I actually participated in that forum thread for a good while (page 9 to page 18), and pretty much I got the idea that everyone thought women didn’t want to play “those kind of games.” Ergo, no one really had a good enough reason to include them.
I’ve followed through with my boycott of Brink. I loved Mirror’s Edge, so this game is right up my alley, but I’m not buying. It’s time to put my money where my mouth is. >:(
The sad thing is, the “customization” they boast of is a joke.
There are 3 body types to choose based on what style of play you’d like, approximately a dozen different heads to choose as bases, and that’s really it as far as configuring your actually body and physical features go. Just clothes, hair and other novelties.
I tried to find videos showing that part of character creation, but all I can find are about the novelties. How does one select skin color? Is there a slider, skyrocketing the number of potential characters, or are there still X predefined colors to choose from? I just saw people selecting “archetypes”, pre-defined or randomized characters.
The archetypes are about as deep as it goes (I was referring to them as “heads” above). You can choose 1 of 5 different levels of lightness/darkness to your skin, and that’s it. The only other way you can change your body is via the different play styles (heavy, medium, light).
Thanks! Obviously I was expecting FAR too much from a game with that kind of advertising. *sigh*
Kind of ironic too, because even when not considering character customization, the game is really sort of mediocre at best. The gameplay is repetitive (which is saying a lot for a shooter), and plays like an poor combination of Unreal Tournament, Modern Warfare 2, and Team Fortress 2.
And I love the response of “Well, if you buy the game and we get enough money for a sequel, then we’ll totally think about putting in women!!”
Translation: Shut up about this now, and we’ll give you a carrot for being a good little girl.
NO THANK YOU. I will NOT be buying the video game, nor the sequel even if they DO put in women.
I’m not surprised by the lack of women in Brink, the same tired excuses for why ‘Women are too difficult to code/design’, the typical reaction of entitled people saying that women don’t play FPS anyway so what’s the big deal.
Tired, but not surprised.
The same excuses are touted out each time someone asks the simple questions of “Why are they all the same and why can’t we have at least some of them be different?”
Poor planning does not excuse limitations of funding or lack of consideration for half of the population. Poor business decision, lackluster reasoning and disappointing planning.
My favorite excuses always revolve around the dubious research of evolutionary ‘Science’ and “Women are weaker so they can’t be in an FPS- they wouldn’t be able to fight alongside men and hold their own”.
It’s a video game and not reality. We don’t get shot five times, duck behind a chest high wall for five seconds and magically heal. We don’t reload guns by pointing them to the far right or left. We can’t run for ten hours straight, shoot hundreds of people and never get winded. We can’t have a five day campaign and never go to the bathroom. Games are not reality- they are our fantasy and we are a privileged class if we have the opportunity to own and play them. We have the capacity to make women in FPS- we are simply choosing not to.
Evolutionary ‘Science’ says that women don’t enjoy FPS because women do not engage in combat. Women nurture and weave textiles because way back in time that’s how things were done. To these people I ask, have you ever seen women’s competitive sports? Women are ruthless, powerful, sneaky and can rip a basketball from your hand with the force of a category five hurricane- and they will smile while doing it. Game makers use evolutionary science as a way to conveniently backup the absurd notion of needing ‘realism’ or any of the other weak excuses used to exclude female players. It’s pathetic, childish and needs to stop.
Game designers create vast new worlds, entire cultures full of life and excitement. It’s time they took that creation seriously. Whether they realize it or not- they are teaching their daughters and sons how to view women and how women should be treated in regards to basic inclusion. Game creators are making a new reality – one they have massive control over. Perhaps it’s time more of us gave considerable thought to what legacy we are leaving with our creations.