International Women's Day

[Monsieur OUXX]

I take offense at being called a Nazi sympathiser

Hint: That's literally the thing you're known for on the forums: You're the guy who always somehow adds a sprinkle of Oberschuzkriegsturmfuhrer to everything, and somehow brings edgy opinions (euphemism) to every discussion. You're the neighborhood nazi.

Remember this one? That was a good one :

Let me remind you, once again, that criminals are the same species as you and me.

We agree to disagree on this point.

@janleht : That's what womens' rights day is about: Reminding the world that every time someone says "hey, women should be equal to men", there's always some people crawling from under their rocks to say "ACTUALLY please don't make too much noise because you sound hysterical. And that goes for you too, LGBT, black people and every discriminated group. I'm all for freedom provided oppressed people ask nicely". So, you see, no digression here. And I think you're the one who should think twice, not Ali.

[WHAM]

Nevermind.

[Blondbraid]

WHAM: Regarding historical accuracy, that if it was truly about accurately representing the soldiers present in the war, wouldn't writing women and minorities out of a story be equally bad as adding them in? Just for example, Call of Duty: World at war took place both on the eastern front and in the pacific, yet we do not see one single woman in the game despite 800.000 women served in the Red army, and none of the Asian groups serving in the soviet army is seen either, and in the pacific campaign we only ever see white Americans and Japanese soldiers, despite the fact that there were tons of native south Asians living in the pacific during the occupation and native american code speakers played a huge role in the US army, and the same can be said for Red Orchestra and a whole bunch of other WW2 games that completely erase the women and ethnic minorities in the Red Army, yet that's somehow seen as an acceptable break from reality, but adding fictional black and female soldiers isn't?

And in Battlefield 1 they did limit female soldiers so that you could only play as a woman if you played as a member of the Russian women's battalion of Death, a real historical group of female soldiers, but it still got a ton of hate for being "historically inaccurate" and accused of being pandering.

[milkanannan]

Maybe we should rename the thread to 'International Women's Day thread (otherwise known as a place where dudes can hash out past arguments)'?

[TheFrighter]

(Look! I wrote a transgender Mexican communist superhero! Why don't people like my creation?)

Ehi, I could pay for a game like that!   

I worked twice in a companies where there were women programmers. In one of them, we were porting some mobile games, at some point the relation of men and women was 1:1 (this could also be because the company was hiring students). In another there was one female programmer who was treated as a senior colleague.

Thanks Wizard! I'd appreciate  more experience of working with women programmers from all of you...

_

[WHAM]

WHAM: Regarding historical accuracy, that if it was truly about accurately representing the soldiers present in the war, wouldn't writing women and minorities out of a story be equally bad as adding them in? Just for example, Call of Duty: World at war took place both on the eastern front and in the pacific, yet we do not see one single woman in the game despite 800.000 women served in the Red army, and none of the Asian groups serving in the soviet army is seen either, and in the pacific campaign we only ever see white Americans and Japanese soldiers, despite the fact that there were tons of native south Asians living in the pacific during the occupation and native american code speakers played a huge role in the US army, and the same can be said for Red Orchestra and a whole bunch of other WW2 games that completely erase the women and ethnic minorities in the Red Army, yet that's somehow seen as an acceptable break from reality, but adding fictional black and female soldiers isn't?

On the eastern front the female soldiers presence makes far more sense, although even the russians tried to keep female units from direct front line combat for the most part. Including them in Battlefield 5 as part of a Soviet force was something I saw a lot of people on the forums advocating for, as that would have made a lot more sense, and I agree with that. I wouldn't mind including soviet female soldiers in Red Orchestra 2, either, although the devs have long since moved on and are currently working on their Vietnam game.

You also mentioned black soldiers, but at not point have I had problem with their inclusion. The Americans brought plenty of those in, so as part of the US forces those make perfect sense. For the red army the inclusion of Siberien and Mongolian sorts would also make sense, but for some reason those particular parts of the world don't get much representation in media, either. Nor does anyone seem to be complaining of it, either, which is a bit odd.

The issue in the whole Battlefield 5 argument boiled down to the developers outright lying, claiming that something was historically accurate when it was not, and blaming their would-be customers of being ignorant, uneducated and sexist rather than facing the facts. I'm not sure if it was purely misunderstanding and miscommunicating on the devs side, or if they mistook the loud minority who actually did have a problem purely with the inclusion of women in the game as the entirety of their critics and reacted to that rather than the actual complaints held by most.

And in Battlefield 1 they did limit female soldiers so that you could only play as a woman if you played as a member of the Russian women's battalion of Death, a real historical group of female soldiers, but it still got a ton of hate for being "historically inaccurate" and accused of being pandering.

Battlefield 1 had a lot of other issues, mostly with historical accuracy and the general design of the game, so I decided not to buy into it early on. Thus I wasn't even aware of this inclusion. I'd think this would be another case of a tiny but loud minority complaining of something most people would not find much of an issue. The Russians have a far longer history of allowing females to fight in their armed forces (or rather, lacking the conviction and organizational control of other armies to keep their women away from the front lines) so for them such an inclusion makes more sense. A British female soldier with a missing limb, blue facepaint and a cricket bat leaping out of buildings in France, however, is far more out there.

All said, as I think I mentioned before: Dice and EA had a really simple solution in their hands, of simply omitting the whole "realism" spiel from their marketing and instead being more open and honest about what they were trying to do with the game: a flashy, fun, exciting and free game that was loosely based on World War. Sure, some people would have still complained, but those complaints would have had a lot less ground to stand on if the developers had been more honest to begin with.

Option B: Skip the whole World War 2 setting. They already had Battlefield 2142, why not go for another futuristic game and use that as basis for including all the crazy character models, hair colours and pink armour they wanted and let the players have fun with it? I already answered this in an earlier post, but still... it would have made the game so much more sensible.

[Jack]

I didn't mean to dominate in this thread, but I think a sensible conversation is difficult when people start seriously defending GamerGate. I haven't identified myself as a "feminist & LGBT rights activist". I'm not an activist, I just hold the (apparently radical) opinion that sexist hate campaigns and the actual Holocaust don't have an upside.

No one was defending gamergate, I was simply fascinated by your statement that it never happened. I was leaving this thread be with its conflicting logic, marxist posters and all. It was your intellect that dazzled me into responding.

And from the quotes it seems that WHAM was referring to the economic turnaround that Germany had before WW2. Germany had collapsed after WW1, the whole German nation was dirt poor. It wasn't the nazis, but Adolf Hitler that made Germany prosperous practically overnight. Knowing this will give you some insight into why the German people was ready to follow him into hell.

You probably think I'm singing his praises, that I'm a "nazi" too, but this is just history. Things that happened in history, like the soviets killing 11 million Russians (extremely conservative estimate). But this is so dangerous to your world view, you can't even look at it or admit that it is real. Furthermore, you regard people that know these facts as supporting them.

[Blondbraid]

WHAM, Battlefield have had more goofy and less realistic installments in the past, such as Battlefield: Bad Company, or even more extreme, Battlefield Heroes, which was set in WW2 yet full of cartoon physics and you could give your avatar a whole bunch of historically inaccurate gear, so it's not like the franchise was permanently destined to be realistic.

And with both Battlefield and Call of Duty: WW2, the campaign was historically accurate in the roles presented for women, there were less than a handful of female characters and they all were SOE personell or members of the resistance, it was just in the multiplayer people got to choose if they wanted to play as women, and all female avatars you see is because there are people who want to play as women.

And you haven't answered my question, why is it ok to write women out of history, but not add them into historical events? Shouldn't CoD: World at War or Red Orchestra receive just as much criticism as Battlefield got for excluding women from the events where real women fought and died?

As for the executive not wanting his daughter to feel left out, I can relate 100%. As a woman and a history buff, I feel endless frustration at how this is seen as some impossible combination that shouldn't exist and how everyone just accepts the notion that women didn't do anything in the war. I'm sick and tired of seeing countless war movies and video games either omit women altogether or reduce them to girlfriends waving their soldier boys goodbye, brutalized victims that only exist to show how evil the enemy is, or in the best case scenario you get one token resistance girl or femme fatale spy who does nothing but get captured so the male hero can rescue her. And when you do point out that female snipers and pilots and guerrilla fighters did exist, the overwhelming majority of people either respond with disbelief because that's not what pop culture has taught them, or they acknowledge that the female soldiers were all super interesting and they'd personally totally watch a movie or buy a game about them, but it just wouldn't be commercially viable because girls don't care about WW2 and we get yet another regurgitation of the Normandy landings instead, and FYI, there was a woman participating in the landings, but not one single story about the landings thought she was worth including in their adaption even as a one second cameo.

One of the biggest reasons I started making AGS games in the first place was exactly because I couldn't find any women in WW2 games that weren't just a token sidekick or a seductress spy or nazi dominatrix played for fan service, so making my own game from scratch felt like the only way I'd get to see a capable and non-sexualized female soldier play a big role in the story. For comparison, anyone wanting to see a heroic white guy as a WW2 soldier have an entire smörgåsbord of hundreds of games in all kinds of genres to pick from, ranging from gritty realism to complete cartoon fantasy.

For that reason, Battlefield and CoD including female avatars feels like a step in the right direction to me. Yes, women as frontline soldiers for the Brittish and the US isn't representative of real history, but at least the developers recognized that there are women who are interested in WW2 and might want to play a WW2 game with a character that looks like them, and just maybe this might pave the way for WW2 games that centers on real historical people that aren't generic american soldiers. Battlefield 5 sold over 7 million copies and made more than it's money back, and the only reason it's counted as below expectations is because the AAA game industry is broken and CEO's have ridiculous expectations on profits and growth that aren't sustainable.

[Khris]

Gamergate happened when practically everyone in the gaming press closed ranks when those accusations came to light. They were white knighting hard for the helpless damsel, and they provided most of the energy that went into that little storm. Oh, it happened. It changed the world forever.

I was just making the point that the accusations happened. And the frankly conspicuous actions of the gaming press following the accusations happened too. This last part was the start of gamergate proper.

Is it impossible that some pantyfa type sent themselves a bunch of death threats with swastikas on them, just so they can say "look how attacked we are"? Is everyone on your side good? Is it impossible that there were some Jussie Smolletts on the "good" side of gamergate? 100% real?

No one was defending gamergate

Shut up

[WHAM]

WHAM, Battlefield have had more goofy and less realistic installments in the past, such as Battlefield: Bad Company, or even more extreme, Battlefield Heroes, which was set in WW2 yet full of cartoon physics and you could give your avatar a whole bunch of historically inaccurate gear, so it's not like the franchise was permanently destined to be realistic.

Isn't that pretty much in line with my point, though? Why didn't they call BF5 one of those? Why did they market it as "immersive and realistic" if they wanted to have V-1 rockets dropping into french fields and japanese samurai sword wielding British officers and all the rest of that?

And with both Battlefield and Call of Duty: WW2, the campaign was historically accurate in the roles presented for women, there were less than a handful of female characters and they all were SOE personell or members of the resistance, it was just in the multiplayer people got to choose if they wanted to play as women, and all female avatars you see is because there are people who want to play as women.

You mean the fictional norwegian woman of BF5 who played a role that was historically accomplished by an entire squad of male norwegian soldiers? I see...

And you haven't answered my question, why is it ok to write women out of history, but not add them into historical events? Shouldn't CoD: World at War or Red Orchestra receive just as much criticism as Battlefield got for excluding women from the events where real women fought and died?

I don't think it is ok to write women out of history. I've never said so and I don't believe in doing so.
The only thing I object to is trying to represent people, within historical settings, in roles that are not historically accurate. Say: representing black SS soldiers on the german side. Or crippled women in frontline combat roles. Sure, you can do both of those, but please don't claim it to be "realistic".

Saying that Red Orchestra or World at War "wrote out" women by not representing them, when the games take place in conflicts where 99% of the active participants were male, is a bit much though. Red Orchestra 2 takes place in Stalingrad. Sure, females manned most of the anti air guns there, but were pulled back and did not actively engage in direct combat with the german ground forces, which is what the game represents. While I'm sure individual cases exist where female soldiers DID engage in frontline combat, their number is vanishingly small considering the scale of the conflict.

As for the executive not wanting his daughter to feel left out, I can relate 100%. As a woman and a history buff, I feel endless frustration at how this is seen as some impossible combination that shouldn't exist and how everyone just accepts the notion that women didn't do anything in the war. I'm sick and tired of seeing countless war movies and video games either omit women altogether or reduce them to girlfriends waving their soldier boys goodbye, brutalized victims that only exist to show how evil the enemy is, or in the best case scenario you get one token resistance girl or femme fatale spy who does nothing but get captured so the male hero can rescue her. And when you do point out that female snipers and pilots and guerrilla fighters did exist, the overwhelming majority of people either respond with disbelief because that's not what pop culture has taught them, or they acknowledge that the female soldiers were all super interesting and they'd personally totally watch a movie or buy a game about them, but it just wouldn't be commercially viable because girls don't care about WW2 and we get yet another regurgitation of the Normandy landings instead, and FYI, there was a woman participating in the landings, but not one single story about the landings thought she was worth including in their adaption even as a one second cameo.

Again I agree with you. Girls should have rolemodels in videogames and girls should hear about the real stories of the women who did great things for the war cause. They should learn of the females who ended up accidentally participating in dogfights over England while relocating planes from the factories to the airbases. They should learn of the resistance fighters. They, just like boys, should learn history.

You kind of make my point here as well. Over 1.3 million men invaded Normandy, and only one woman did. Why should that one woman be elevated from the masses onto a pedestal? Because of her gender alone? What about the man who changed the beach with a bagpipe and a sword? What about all the other million and some individual human stories? Why is this one woman more valuable and worthy in your eyes than all the others? She is no less a hero than any other, but neither is she any more so.

What Mr Söderlund said was that he "could not bring himself to tell his daughter that women weren't there" when she asked her father why she "never saw any women in war, running around and having fun in the trenches". He lied to his child because, for some reason, he cannot deal with actual history.

One of the biggest reasons I started making AGS games in the first place was exactly because I couldn't find any women in WW2 games that weren't just a token sidekick or a seductress spy or nazi dominatrix played for fan service, so making my own game from scratch felt like the only way I'd get to see a capable and non-sexualized female soldier play a big role in the story. For comparison, anyone wanting to see a heroic white guy as a WW2 soldier have an entire smörgåsbord of hundreds of games in all kinds of genres to pick from, ranging from gritty realism to complete cartoon fantasy.

That is awesome, though! I am personally pained by my biggest game project, with a female protagonist, ending up lost due to hardware failure after years of work. If people can come up with interesting female characters and want to tell their stories, I am all for it. Again, just not in cases where doing so conflicts with realism, and the creator lies about that conflict.

For that reason, Battlefield and CoD including female avatars feels like a step in the right direction to me. Yes, women as frontline soldiers for the Brittish and the US isn't representative of real history, but at least the developers recognized that there are women who are interested in WW2 and might want to play a WW2 game with a character that looks like them, and just maybe this might pave the way for WW2 games that centers on real historical people that aren't generic american soldiers. Battlefield 5 sold over 7 million copies and made more than it's money back, and the only reason it's counted as below expectations is because the AAA game industry is broken and CEO's have ridiculous expectations on profits and growth that aren't sustainable.

There is no disagreement here, either. Including female avatars is fine and welcome.
Claiming they represent historical realities in the battlefield, just like the aforementioned V-1 weapons being misused or the completely region inappropriate equipment displayed, is not welcome to me. Others are free to disagree and to purchase and enjoy the game, of course.

The free market will decide in the end. All I can do is state my opinion and decide where to invest my own money.

[Blondbraid]

There is no disagreement here, either. Including female avatars is fine and welcome.
Claiming they represent historical realities in the battlefield, just like the aforementioned V-1 weapons being misused or the completely region inappropriate equipment displayed, is not welcome to me.

If that's so, then why is all the criticism I've seen almost entirely centered around women and not that the game is too lighthearted or gritty/realistic for it's intended tone? All talk about how historically inaccurate women are sure makes it look like female avatars aren't welcome.

Isn't that pretty much in line with my point, though? Why didn't they call BF5 one of those? Why did they market it as "immersive and realistic" if they wanted to have V-1 rockets dropping into french fields and japanese samurai sword wielding British officers and all the rest of that?

Once again, I didn't see the trailer with the swordsman marketing itself to be realistic, and to me at least it was pretty clear from the start that they were trying to make the campaign realistic and the multiplayer a fun playground.

You mean the fictional norwegian woman of BF5 who played a role that was historically accomplished by an entire squad of male norwegian soldiers? I see...

Firstly, I didn't say she was real historical person, but that her role as a resistance fighter was historically possible, and similarly all the other campaigns are realistic when it comes to the race and gender of all the characters, but the german tank commander, colonial french soldier and British bank-robber are just as fictional as the Norwegian girl.

Secondly, all other games that feature the heavy water sabotage (like CoD and Enemy Front) also replace the Norwegian squad with their own original hero, the only difference is that Enemy front replaced the Norwegian men with an american dude, yet I haven't seen a single person criticize Enemy Front for that. And as for the Norwegians, I don't think any AAA game will ever make an accurate depiction of their mission because they completed it without firing a single shot and the only human they encountered was a janitor that agreed to leave them in peace, without any action or visible danger. But it's not like the Norwegian men were written out of history either, they got several movies, a TV-series and a Sabaton song dedicated to them. Meanwhile, how many war movies or video games are centered around female soldiers? I found one Russian B-movie about Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Enemy at the gates featured Rachel Weiz briefly helping Jude Law kill a german before being reduced to a hapless love interest in a love triangle.

Saying that Red Orchestra or World at War "wrote out" women by not representing them, when the games take place in conflicts where 99% of the active participants were male, is a bit much though.

You kind of make my point here as well. Over 1.3 million men invaded Normandy, and only one woman did. Why should that one woman be elevated from the masses onto a pedestal? Because of her gender alone? What about the man who changed the beach with a bagpipe and a sword? What about all the other million and some individual human stories? Why is this one woman more valuable and worthy in your eyes than all the others? She is no less a hero than any other, but neither is she any more so.

Because even if women were just a small minority, they were still there, but thanks to decades of pop culture telling people otherwise there are tons of people who legitimately think no women at all participated in the war, that all women didn't want to participate and that women are physically incapable of being soldiers. And I never said that the female journalist needed to be placed on a pedestal or painted as a hero, I just wondered why, out of all the hundreds of movies and games depicting Normandy, they couldn't have a brief 30 second cameo of her before dedicating all the rest of the work to the everyman soldiers who fought there?

Secondly, from what I've seen, the argument that it's ok to automatically write them out by default just because there were so few of them is only ever applied to women and non-white, non-straight people. Meanwhile, William Adams was a white man and one of only a handful of non-japanese people in the entirety of Japanese history to ever become a samurai, yet despite being an extreme minority he's had several books, movies, TV-series and even a big AAA-game inspired by his life, and no matter what historical era or setting, you can easily find a fictional story of it where a white man is included.

I know it's hard to explain what it feels like not being represented to white men, because when boys grow up, they get to see characters that look like them in all possible roles and all kinds of settings, but as a girl, far too often you only get one character who is the token girl, if you ever get any at all, and even stories exclusively aimed at girls still have prominent male characters in them.

I ask you to do a thought experiment and try and imagine a media landscape where male characters are treated the same way and entire genres and forms of media are considered "not for boys". Imagine that some marketing executives in the 80's had arbitrarily decided that boys don't like video games and decided to exclusively market games to girls, and all game commercials centered around girls playing games with female characters, and of the few male characters ever appearing in games, nearly all of them were Justin Bieber-like figures only meant to pander to teen girls. And virtually all games were sci-fi or fantasy games centered around princesses and of the few games that did exist in a historical setting, the developers almost exclusively focused on regency-era romances or similar stuff they thought would appeal to women. Try and imagine a world where no WW2 fps existed because nobody thought they would sell because "boys don't play games" and a AAA game focusing on a male-dominated field would be unthinkable, and the only mainstream games that actually had a wartime setting were games where you had to play as a field nurse tasked with rescuing as many injured soldiers as possible. All games in a WW2 setting would exclusively focus on the nurses doing their job and their interactions with their female colleagues, any part of the nurses lives that featured them interacting with male personell would be deemed superfluous and not included in the games, and the only men you'd ever see would be nameless soldiers who's only job was to cry and whimper whilst waiting for the nurses to rescue them.

Now imagine that one AAA WW2 nurse franchise actually did feature playable men, in that the player could choose to play as a male nurse, and sure, it'd be unhistorical and including male medics and men in historically accurate roles had been vastly preferable, but if the only way you'd ever get a chance to play as a competent male character whom looked like you and you could identify with that was set in an era you were greatly interested in was to play as a gender-swap of a female character, and game developers might only consider the possibility of including more men in historically accurate roles if this game proved successful, but could just as easily use the backlash as an excuse to never do a WW2 game with a male protagonist again, would you be just as eager to criticize it then?

[Crimson Wizard]

Meanwhile, how many war movies or video games are centered around female soldiers? I found one Russian B-movie about Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Enemy at the gates featured Rachel Weiz briefly helping Jude Law kill a german before being reduced to a hapless love interest in a love triangle.

I don't personally remember a movie about Lyudmila Pavlichenko (is it the one from 2015? I found it by googling), but most "canonical" female soldier story in Russia (or many former USSR countries perhaps) is "The Dawns Here Are Quiet" based on the novel. There's a 1972th version, and also a newer film which I did not see. It's curious that according to the novel's author his book was based on a story he once overheard when serving a war correspondent. That story happened to a squad of male soldiers, but he deliberately changed them to females because they were underrepresented in a war stories of the time.

Female soldiers are not unusual in soviet or russian war movies in general. It's hard for me to make a list right out of the head because I never memorized them by this factor. Usually they are field medics or staff officers, but there were exceptions.

PS. Oh, I don't know if that counts, but there's a classic "The Hussar Ballad" about Napoleonic Wars, the main character is a young female aristocrat who joins Hussar regiment disguised as a man (kind of Mulan-like story ). It's a comedy, but very loosely based on a real person.

[WHAM]

I'll just respond to two of Blondbraids key points here.

1) Why did so much negativity in the case of Battlefield 5 seem to be directed at the inclusion of women?

My answer: a tiny minority that got way too much attention, who actually had an issue with women being included. Their voice drowned out the far more numerous but less enthusiastic discussions of the actual issues with the games marketing and resulted in a negative image both ways. Such voices gaining so much attention is an unfortunate reality of modern society.

In conclusion: both the game developers and marketers, and the community around them, dealt with the issue poorly and communicated poorly.


2) Why aren't ware movies and games depicting the tiny minority of women involved more?

My answer: because of the target audience. I've known numerous women in my life, but only a single one among them has ever had any interest in war movies or games. The others had no interest and generally found the idea of discussing or consuming movies or games related to wartime history bland, boring and dull. They were, however, more than happy to discuss things such as royal dresses throughout history, or the marriages and related intrigue across Europe. Meanwhile, among my male friends, almost all of them enjoy such content. As movie or game makers investing large amounts of money into these products, people will want to draw the attention of their target audience. I welcome more varied looks into war and history, and I welcome the inclusion of female characters in those settings, but those will require content creators who actively create and market their work, and for content consumers to find and enjoy that content. Based on the previously mentioned demographics, I'm sure we can both see why those women's stories will not find it easy to find audience in our societies.

As we've seen, female protagonists are finding much more success in non-historical genres, such as superhero fiction or empowering human drama, because those genres are more readily consumed by broader female audiences, alongside their male counterparts. We are also seeing more games with female protagonists in various genres coming in, which is a fine trend and I hope to see it continued.

EDIT: side note
You mention toward the end a scenario about playing a male character in a female dominated genre of games. That doesn't really apply to me, at least, though I know some people who would be bothered. I am quite happy to play games with female protagonists and have no issue sympathizing with them or being immersed in their stories myself. I see what you are trying to say with your hypothetical scenario, but it doesn't quite represent reality in my experience. I'll be happy to be proven wrong here. Would be nice to find more women interested in wartime history to chat with and get more insight into events in those time periods I might have overlooked.

[Blondbraid]

Meanwhile, how many war movies or video games are centered around female soldiers? I found one Russian B-movie about Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Enemy at the gates featured Rachel Weiz briefly helping Jude Law kill a german before being reduced to a hapless love interest in a love triangle.

I don't personally remember a movie about Lyudmila Pavlichenko (is it the one from 2015? I found it by googling), but most "canonical" female soldier story in Russia (or many former USSR countries perhaps) is "The Dawns Here Are Quiet" based on the novel. There's a 1972th version, and also a newer film which I did not see. It's curious that according to the novel's author his book was based on a story he once overheard when serving a war correspondent. That story happened to a squad of male soldiers, but he deliberately changed them to females because they were underrepresented in a war stories of the time.

Female soldiers are not unusual in soviet or russian war movies in general. It's hard for me to make a list right out of the head because I never memorized them by this factor. Usually they are field medics or staff officers, but there were exceptions.

I haven't played a lot of russian videogames about war so cannot tell anything about these. I think "Metro 2033" series have a female soldier sidekick, but that's fantasy so maybe do not count.

PS. Oh, I don't know if that counts, but there's a classic "The Hussar Ballad" about Napoleonic Wars, the main character is a young female aristocrat who joins Hussar regiment disguised as a man (kind of Multan-like story ).

Thanks for the tip, I've already seen "The Hussar Ballad" and I liked it, I'll try and watch the other movie you linked once I find the time!
(Edit: I've seen the "The Dawns Here Are Quiet" now and it's a good movie save one gratuitous sauna scene, and while the rest of the movie is great it's still incredibly frustrating to have to sit through a bunch of pointless nudity in order to see a good war movie with female soldiers, and I can't imagine any mainstream war movie doing that to male soldiers.   )

However, as for Metro 2033, it's set in the post-apocalyptic future and whilst one of the books did have a female protagonist, the all the central characters in the first game were men and the only women were extras, a mother thanking you for rescuing her son, and a prostitute who only served to set up a joke where the protagonist could get robbed. Not really a great treatment of women, but it was such a small part of the game that I was able to ignore it and play the first game. However, I deliberately skipped out on the second Metro game since while there was indeed a female soldier sidekick, she was a damsel who got rescued by the male hero and later thanked him by subjecting the player to an unskippable sex scene where we see the male hero have sex with her from a first-person view.  And the post apocalyptic society in the game, despite everything else being in ruins, features a theater where women who look like perfect lingerie models dance around in bikinis, which just feels incredibly immersion breaking in addition to sexist and off-putting.

It just highlights the massive and disgusting double standard in some game developing studios, because no one would even dream of making an action game, not a porn game, an action adventure where the player has no choice but to watch the protagonist have sex with a naked man in order to proceed, and if they did it would stir massive outrage amongst all male gamers. In fact, when Final fantasy did try to introduce a male character in a sexualized costume (that was still tamer than what the women were wearing), there was such a massive backlash that they were forced to change his design. Meanwhile women are expected to grin and bear it or be labeled as puritans and get told that video games aren't for them.

WHAM: The negativity and hate wasn't by a small vocal minority, the overwhelming amount of comments were about women and they were nasty.

Also, saying WW2 stories aren't made for women because women don't care so it's not worth it is a circular argument. Plus there are women who do care, even if you don't see many of them in your day life. I've never met a single person who knows what the AGS engine is in person, yet here on the forums there's hundreds of people willing to discuss it, and the same goes for women who would like a good WW2 movie or video game with female characters. As I mentioned before, Battlefield 5 sold 7 million copies (for comparison, the entire population of Sweden during WW2 was 6 million people!) and I've met plenty of women online who've played and appreciated it.

People also used to say female superheroes wouldn't sell, because superheroes are for boys, yet both Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel made massive hits at the box office, exactly because there was a huge untapped market for that.

You also didn't answer my question on the hypothetical scenario, that if your only option for playing as a character who looked like you in a setting you were interested in was to play a gender-swap of a female character, would you still ask for it to be cut out on grounds of historical accuracy?

[WHAM]

WHAM: The negativity and hate wasn't by a small vocal minority, the overwhelming amount of comments were about women and they were nasty.

On the internet, a few hundred people can produce thousands and thousands of posts. That's still a tiny minority, and even if their number was larger or their post count higher, they'd still be in the wrong in my eyes.

Also, saying WW2 stories aren't made for women because women don't care so it's not worth it is a circular argument. Plus there are women who do care, even if you don't see many of them in your day life. I've never met a single person who knows what the AGS engine is in person, yet here on the forums there's hundreds of people willing to discuss it, and the same goes for women who would like a good WW2 movie or video game with female characters. As I mentioned before, Battlefield 5 sold 7 million copies (for comparison, the entire population of Sweden during WW2 was 6 million people!) and I've met plenty of women online who've played and appreciated it.

I know that, but the reality at this time is what it is and the big corporations producing content act based on it. I'll be happy to welcome a change to this.

People also used to say female superheroes wouldn't sell, because superheroes are for boys, yet both Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel made massive hits at the box office, exactly because there was a huge untapped market for that.

Exactly. Like I said: I hope to be proven wrong and that more women are actually interested in this stuff. I'd love to see more women in the hobby of wargaming, or populating game servers for the games I play.

You also didn't answer my question on the hypothetical scenario, that if your only option for playing as a character who looked like you in a setting you were interested in was to play a gender-swap of a female character, would you still ask for it to be cut out on grounds of historical accuracy?

My hypothetical self would answer the same as my current one, since it's the best information I have: I personally believe in historical accuracy and would not have an issue with it taking priority in design of history focused entertainment products. Your hypothetical relies in a corruption of basic human nature, however, a focus on the major event and the largest group of people involved receiving the most attention, since they and their families will make up most of the future audience as well.

Let me make a counter hypothetical of the same caliber:
Do you think that, today, more women would play more historical videogames if they represented the historically accurate roles women held during the war? More games about working in factories, worrying about bombs and sabotage? Of manning anti-air listening posts and searchlights? Of manning rear echelon kitchens, supply depots and transport companies?

These are all incredibly important and meaningful tasks, but they do not make for very good interactive entertainment products. Because history is what it is, and the human nature dictates that males want to keep females safe, the role of women tends to be far less exciting in real-world wartime history. There is a reason the entertainment industry focuses on the easily marketable, visually interesting and mentally engaging challenges that are easy to replicate through gameplay mechanics. This reality will continue to limit the visibility of women in videogames about war, due to the nature of the medium.

[Bavolis]

To add another positive post to a thread that's been pretty negative, I can share the changes I've observed in the AAA industry:

When I started working for the big companies (15ish years ago?), it was mostly guys. On my last big project released, my writing team was split right down the middle and my boss was a woman. My current boss at Eidos is also a woman. Here in Montreal, they have "incubators" (like Pixelles) that help provide mentoring and advice to women interesting in gamedev, which results in some really great people joining our teams. I've always taken issue with people posting on social media about how our industry is a horrible place for women, because it's really not true. Maybe it's just the companies I've chosen. Whatever the case, I think getting more women in there, and in positions of leadership, is the best way to counter this problem.

Every workplace has creep potential and I've only met one of them... years back. I shared what I saw with HR . Our industry is very progressive, especially in Montreal, and they do tend to take these things seriously.

Some people outside the industry assume there's some quota being filled, that we hire any women who apply just to check a box. No. I've always worked with extremely qualified people and they're almost always hardcore gamers. In fact, I've been playing catch-up to two women on my team because they've already played Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 and I am just now getting to them. It's so common now, it amazes me that people still question "girl gamers." I just assume most people under a certain age are gamers these days. My 12 year old is already talking about making games for a living and we have a hard time prying her away from the computer.

When you see diversity in game characters, it's due to the team wanting to tell stories from different perspectives and not some company mandate. It's not a marketing decision. It wouldn't surprise me if "white scruffy dude" is automatically the easier sales route, but you go with what's best for your story. I haven't worked on big multiplayer-focused games, but it seems obvious to me that giving players more options to customize is always going to be a positive thing that will impact sales. 

Social media tends to make everything look like an all-out culture war,  but in reality I've never seen that drama make its way into any of my workplaces. Obviously I can't speak for other studios and certainly can't speak for women devs, but I can say I've seen a huge improvement. So my answer, as an observer, is yes, it seems to be going in the right direction.

[WHAM]

My 12 year old is already talking about making games for a living and we have a hard time prying her away from the computer.

That there is what I believe will improve women's representation in games. More women of new generations growing up seeing women represented in the mediums they are interested in, and wanting to build up on that and to expand on that. I agree with you that we are headed in the right direction, but it will still take some time and effort to get there.

..it amazes me that people still question "girl gamers."

The reason for that can be seen pretty easily if you go on a game streaming site like Twitch, which has basically turned into a loosely game-affiliated softcore porn site thanks to a relatively small number of women abusing audiences of young males.

Social media tends to make everything look like an all-out culture war

This. A little while back there was a fairly big round of whining about the Warhammer 40 000 tabletop game, because most of the lines of miniatures did not have female models to play with. A friend of mine brought it to my attention, having seen his fellow gamers declaring that "it didn't make sense to add women" to the game. He fully agreed with that point of view and laughed the idea of adding female models off as "ridiculous". We ended up talking about the issue for a while, offline, and quickly came to the conclusion that it both made perfect sense within the story and context of the game and would be both visually interesting and helpful in gaining more players to the hobby. Sadly Games Workshop, the creators of the game, seem to have been cowed by the angry traditionalist males in their audience. The loudest voices get the most attention on social media, after all.

[Crimson Wizard]

In fact, when Final fantasy did try to introduce a male character in a sexualized costume (that was still tamer than what the women were wearing), there was such a massive backlash that they were forced to change his design. Meanwhile women are expected to grin and bear it or be labeled as puritans and get told that video games aren't for them.

Doh, it was many years ago when I first realized getting irritated by the "bikini armor" in the games, not only because that's just stupid, but also I frankly think that may be insulting to men too since this assumes that is the only thing they are interested in (or the only way they may like female characters)   

[Babar]

The women at my work got two cinema tickets each to commemorate International Women's Day.

This rightfully lead to heated argument and debate within the company.
About whether it was better to use them on Captain Marvel or Shazam.

A group of us colleagues went to watch Captain Marvel that night. It was a fun cinema movie.

[Bavolis]

This rightfully lead to heated argument and debate within the company.
About whether it was better to use them on Captain Marvel or Shazam.

Shouldn't they just go see the movie that interests them the most? It is their day, after all. With that said, I don't know why anyone would pick Shazam over Captain Marvel based on the trailers.