My first thought: Good! It’s about damn time. After all, lots of games have had female characters in multiplayer mode for a long time (including Halo and Gears of War), sometimes even in the single-player campaign (Halo Reach, Mass Effect, Gears of War 3, Fable, Dragon Age, and others). Now perhaps it’s too bad that it was more important to them to announce new-and-improved realistic dogs at E3 than it was for them to announce the introduction of playable female soldiers (yup, the furry, tattooed German Shepard rated higher than women), but at least they are including women, right?
Right. Mostly.
And what inspired this inclusion? Well, I’d assumed – probably like many other gamers – that Activision or the development team had finally realized that women were not only people, but people capable of combat, even in a virtual, pixelated environment. (Yes, I know the snark is coming on strong today, but it’s August and I’m an academic, so just bear with me for a bit.) As Stephen Totillo notes in an article today, apparently not.
The reason (if you don’t want to click the link)? Technology. We now apparently have the technology to include women. Because clearly creating a single female model for a soldier is far too complicated for game consoles to handle… except that they’ve been doing it for years. Yes, I do understand that the actual point being made is about complex character customization – while it’s possible in Mass Effect or Skyrim to fully customize the appearance, color scheme, and other elements of the player-character, in a game like COD the memory required to display fully customized avatars for ALL the players in a game is significantly higher than what is needed for the player-character in a single-player campaign. I get that.
But here’s the thing. You don’t need full customization in order to have female characters. You can have three models of characters that aren’t at all customizable and one of them can be female. It’s pretty easy. Halo did it. Gears did it. Unreal Tournament did it (and that one was in the 1990s). But let’s say you only have one model in your game. Defaulting to male for COD is probably the better choice for a variety of reasons, including the fact that most soldiers are male and most COD players are male. Okay. I’m fine with that.
But what I’m not fine with is the deliberate effacing of the sociopolitical issue behind the decision to include women. It’s like Activision doesn’t want to admit that they were at one point excluding women, so they blame the absence of women on technology. They couldn’t admit that the culture fostered by COD was misogynist or at least sexist, so they said “Oh, we just didn’t have the capability,” instead of saying, “Hey, we think it’s time that we include women in COD and since we’re planning to include custom characters, we’re doing it now!”
I’m one of the first people on the bandwagon to defend COD against detractors who say it makes players violent or aggressive, but I’m also one of the first to say that the COD player community is about as far from welcoming as it gets (except maybe League of Legends). Don’t believe me? See these tweets in response to the alteration of a couple of guns. So when I see women being added to the roster of CODG, I’m pleased. But when Activision doesn’t have the courage to admit that part of why they’re including women is to be inclusive, I get annoyed. Because to have a major industry leader saying “Hey, guys, it’s time to include women in our games because that’s the right thing to do” would set an example. Saying “Oh, we’re doing it because now we can” dismisses the importance of including women and also sets an example, and not the good kind.