FIFA 16 is to feature women's soccer for the first time. Depressingly, a backlash quickly followed the announcement.
It’s somewhat ironic that the announcement by EA Sports that the nextFIFA game would feature women’s soccer came as the organization that gives the series its name were busy fighting their biggest ever corruption scandal. One can only wonder what Sepp 'Female players should wear tighter shorts to improve the viewing figures' Blatter might have had to say about it, if he wasn’t otherwise engaged with standing unopposed in yet another election while his enemies were getting arrested.
Fortunately for Blatter and his unenlightened views, the internet exists, so there were plenty of commenters and Tweeters chomping at the bit to step in and register their outrage at the very idea of expanding their favorite game’s scope to include an increasingly significant area of world soccer. These reactions seemed to divide neatly into two types: lame, predictable sexist jokes (usually involving the in-game stats revolving around "ironing” and “cooking”) or genuine, downright affrontedness at EA having the nerve to cater for somebody else.
It’s somewhat irritating that in the year 2015 we even have to go through this, but the especially annoying thing about the negative reaction is that it’s not even a feature that’s being forced upon these gamers, if they’re so desperate to avoid it. Do you know how you will be able to avoid playing with the female teams in FIFA 16? By choosing not to play with them. To quote EA’s own publicity, FIFA 15 contained “35 licensed leagues, over 600 clubs, and 16000+ players.” I strongly doubt that the majority of FIFAfans have played matches with even a tenth of those available teams – so why is the addition of twelve more teams such a big problem?
Indeed, the sheer scope that FIFA has grown to cover over the past decade is one of the things that makes the leaving out of women’s teams until now such an oversight: if it’s okay to include teams from League Two or the Irish Airtricity League, both of which can feature match attendances below a thousand, then what good reason is there not to represent the Women’s World Cup, which averaged 25,000 a match at the last tournament in 2011?
That’s to say nothing of the fact that FIFA has for many years included a Be a Pro mode, enabling players to play out an entire football career with an uncannily-realized version of themselves – so long as they’re male. But any girl or woman wanting to play a fantasy soccer life only really has the option of giving her avatar an Andy Carroll-esque ponytail and attempting to recreate the plot of the early ‘90s Screen One dramaBorn Kicking. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to play as a woman in this mode in the new game either – but at least it’s a step towards some kind of Mass Effect-esque equality of choice.
Perhaps the one argument against this addition to the game that holds any kind of weight (if a very small amount) is the annoyance that EA have prioritized this particular element over improving several elements of the game that are still frustratingly sub-par.FIFA series vice-president David Rutter spoke of “the time and effort required for travelling around the world to scan faces and heads, record motion capture, etc,” as well as the fact that they had to “rebuild the animation rig” to account for physiological differences. Evidently, adding these teams in hasn’t just been a five minute job. But to be frank, we’ve had 23 years of FIFA games being incrementally developed year on year in which to get it right: and it’s probably fair to say that, based on past form, any annoying glitches that were present in the last few versions wouldn’t have been fixed with or without the time spent on this anyway.
Another comment that Rutter made, incidentally, belied a slightly disappointing attitude on EA’s part, and one that suggests that maybe not everyone involved in the game was necessarily desperate for this to happen either. When asked if the female teams would be able to play matches against the male ones, Rutter was slightly dismissive in saying, “The sport itself doesn’t support that. If that changed, we definitely would.” Yet in every single previous installment so far, it’s been possible to play FIFA matches between two iterations of the same team, despite the fact that neither the Laws of the Game nor available cloning technology would permit that to happen in reality. So it’s a shame that, for the moment at least, the women’s portion of the game will remain arbitrarily walled off from the rest of it.
Of course, it should be no surprise that when you combine the twin groups of soccer fans and video game fans, you get a perfect storm of angry entitled teenage boys spewing misogynistic nonsense. It’s just that in this case, it seems so unnecessary. The standard FIFA experience will not be changed in the slightest by this – but the game will suddenly be more appealing and inclusive to a particular part of its audience (or even to a new audience entirely). It’s hard to see why anyone could get particularly annoyed about that – even if they’re Sepp Blatte
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