Why Modern Video Game Armies Lack Female Troops
By
Stephen Totilo, Kotaku.com,
March 9, 2010
Women
have been serving admirably in warzones for the U.S. military for about
a decade. 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?
PIC via Flickr
