Mar 12, 2010
Women have been serving admirably in warzones for the U.S. military for years. But they’re absent from the ranks of modern video game armies. A game developer offered Kotaku a justification of why we virtually fight as men.
The answer, offered by Gordon Van Dyke, producer of the new Electronic Arts modern warfare game Battlefield: Bad Company 2, has to do with technology. Or, more specifically, it has to do with technology needs trumping any sense of consumer demand for representation of both genders.
Programming women soldiers into a virtual war just might not be worth the costs to the game and the servers that connect the people playing it.
The topic came up on last week’s Kotaku podcast, when I asked Van Dyke if there were women in Bad Company 2. I’d noticed that the games I’d played set in modern or near-future settings were almost always fought by men and men only.
“There’s no girls in our game,” he said around the 33-minute mark.
“It’s an interesting thing, though because … It’s fun that you bring that up because I can kind of give some insight into development and how games are made. 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]. The reward has to match what you have to give up somewhere else. Our games are pushing the edge of the system they’re on at such a high degree that it becomes more of a balancing act for implementing new things — how many vehicles you can have in a game or how many buildings with destruction — because every single one of those things needs to be calculated by the server and transmitted to every single play that’s playing the game. Every time you shoot a building or wall, they [need] to see it when it happens or, if you go past that, at a later date, the server needs to remember that data and then transmit it to all those players.”
It doesn’t require much special programming to change a virtual soldier’s skin tone. Heights and weights, though, usually stay fixed. So too, Van Dyke explained, does gender for likely the same reasons — unless gamers would want their virtual female soldiers to run and move like men.
And what of the trade-off? The ability for the walls in a virtual battlefield to break and stay broken may sound trifling to non-gamers. But within the context of games, it is a literal breakthrough. Walls have been immutable in games since the days of Pac-Man, and while games have, from time to time, allowed barriers to be broken, it’s still a rare feat.
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?
Video games can sometimes be accused of being behind the times in regards to social issues and minority representation. That women can’t even fight in 2010 war games such as Bad Company 2 and MAG — even as real women reportedly serve admirably in the real military — would seem to be retrograde, but maybe the tech excuse is a good one.
Do female characters need to be put in virtual combat? Or, more to the point, are they more important than crumbling walls?
Source: Kotaku.com
Coming from a technical background his point about it being extra work is sensible, especially from a business model. Women are begun to make their mark on the video gaming market, but these sort of games still draw a primarily male audience. I hope that it changes in the future and gaming becomes more and more mainstream. I do think businesses should consider that they alienate female users by not providing the option of female avatars.
I can understand the technical nightmares about designing a whole new skeleton. A post awhile ago basically put a nail in the FF7 coffin by saying they could never re-design it due to the size of the game.
BUT the point of this is how the developer said they pushed the boundaries of the system by implementing a lot of environmental damage, and went into vast detail why that was more important than implementing a female avatar, because it is the trend and in the support system to really only allow that mechanic.
It’s a trend that I think will change because the market will change to include more women over the next 10 years as children of the 2000s start coming of age to spend money more freely.
I mostly agree with the ‘excuse’ given, because I’d much rather have more in-game playable content and interaction than a different looking character. Generally it doesn’t matter to me who I’m playing as, aslong as the gameplay is good.
I also think adding female characters to wargames and the like might not be such a great idea, because you’d get all the idiots online being well….. idiots about it.
I get what you’re saying. Like women would probably be objectified or have a special option to unlock a bikini version or some such.
I have to say with my experience, though, most girl characters online are men and I find any female PLAYING another female will really over sexualize it, like dressing it up really slutty. Kind of goes against what you’d assume sometimes haha.
I have never not played a game because there were no female characters. As a matter of fact I never even thought of it until I read this article. I don’t see how creating a female character will change how (most) women look at a video game, as long as the game play is most awesome. I do think the excuse is a bit weak.
Yeah, I have to agree with you there. My favorite games have a male character as the lead. In fact, when presented with the option to either be a male or female, I usually go with the male, but mainly because the girl avatars turn me off ’cause they’re usually overly sexualized or their stats make them way too weak which is a rip off.
I think it depends on the game. Battlefield isn’t a game with a character editor, so the ‘excuse’ he gives is very valid if you ask me. But other games with character editors have no excuse not to have females as an option. I think games have come a very long way, they deserve a bit of credit. Sure they’re still behind the times, but games like Fallout and Mass effect have taken big strides.