The football-simulator-sport-lad-grass industry has decided to acknowledge that women exist. What does this mean for the future of one of the most unexplainably successful video game franchises in the world?
The internet is a cesspool of bad jokes, wasted opportunity and people I am not sure should be allowed outside, let alone a platform on which to ‘reason’.
The only shred of comfort I get from this cesspit still existing is that it confirms that a Ra’s Al Ghul style band of assassins hell bent on eliminating the corrupt and stupid doesn’t exist in any capacity other than to ruin season three of Arrow.
Everyone deals with change in their own way.
Last week, EA, a company with as much public approval as a shit in a swimming pool, announced that their next FIFA (a company with as much public approval as many shits in a swimming pool) game would feature female players. And then, men, the bastards we are, gave the world another glint in to just how sensible we can be by reverting the whole decision to a series of period jokes, maternity jokes and ‘women not listening to men’ jokes.
I know, I know, as a white man I should be worried by the decision of a company to question my unashamed hegemony over the world by allowing 12 national teams of women into a game about a sport in which literally thousands of teams of women compete. But I just don’t see it. Why? Well, this ‘huge step for equality’ as I saw it labelled online still places less of a priority on the exploits of the best female footballers in the world than they do the fucking South Korean first division.
A young woman in England can pick between more players who moonlight as footballers after a day being an accountant or shits in a swimming pool cleaner than they can the peak of female sport.
Certainly, this is one small step for women? Or a sign of unbalance?
We don’t have these things though. Because that would be fucking stupid.
Let’s not ignore the still rampant imbalance of this for a series of threatened men’s jokes about how female players might require time off to deliver a baby. By the same virtue, we should have male players say they can’t turn up for training because they masturbated themselves into dangerous dehydration. We should have male players have to take 9 month breaks as they deal with their sexual assault or drug taking allegations – a much more realistic career mode twist than women refusing to turn up to training ‘because of the way the manager phrased the training schedule’.
Others have gone so far as to ‘demand’ (although how much EA listen to comments on The Lad Bible is beyond me) that the women players be rated at a non-league level.
For the uninitiated, this means that men, for fairness reasons, are demanding that the best female athletes in the world are rated in the 50s or 60s, while male players who play for teams as shit as Liverpool reach the mid-70s and 80s, while the best players reach mid-90s. This would make sense in a world where male teams and female teams played each other and men routinely beat them 4-0. But that doesn’t happen. Why compare two things that literally never happens? It would be the equivalent of giving all female players of Call Of Duty a potato gun by virtue of the fact they have boobs.
Acknowledging a diversity of players will surely strengthen the recently tarnished name of FIFA.
We’re already devaluing the female sport by only judging 12 national teams (in a women’s World Cup year no less) as worthy of playing. These are the best in the world – that should be reflected in the gameplay.
What we have here is a step in the right direction. As a result of this, FIFA games, which are already open to the millions of women who love football, acknowledges them. It acknowledges the incredible athletes at the peak of their game in the world. It still doesn’t redress the imbalance in a game which only has such a vocal male fan base because it only targets itself at men, but it is something, and who knows – ignorant men allowed on the Internet – it might give your long suffering girlfriend and you more to talk about.
As a lover of FIFA. A lover of football. And a man. I beg of you – don’t be dicks about this.
GUEST BLOGGER: The Apathetic Gamer
“The Apathetic Gamer is a journalist and gamer who cares so little, he writes about it in an impassioned rage. He is also aware of the hypocrisy.”
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