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This is the first time a game I've worked on has won a MAGS! Thank you to everyone who voted, but Durq and VampireWombat weren't bad either and I voted for you guys! 

As far as renaissance paintings go, that is AWESOME!
How have I never seen that painting before?

I found it on the Ugly Renaissance Babies Tumbler, it's a virtual motherload of hilariously bizarre classic art. Maybe you'll find something fun to share there? 

Mandle, the video you link just reminded me of the Nihilisa Frank pictures with nihilistic quotes plastered on Lisa Frank pictures. They are morbidly fascinating;

I vote for Galen.

Did you know the Offspring singer, Dexter Holland, has a PhD in molecular biology? Always found that tidbit interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Holland

I had no idea, though I'm not surprised. There are a great deal of celebrities out there who have high degrees in various fields. 

I mainly watched this because of the crazy awesome music video, but the song is great too;

I finally listened all the way through the interview, it was pretty funny to hear Yahtzee talk about people recognizing him by his voice.

The whole Ubisoft debacle with the DLC that turned a previously straight character gay very much feels like the result of the writers picturing a straight character as the default and forgetting that the base game provided several branching options for their sexuality and personality, and basically wanting to have their cake and eat it by saying that they want the player to choose how to develop their character but not actually spending time and effort to write different endings to accommodate those choices.

It's rather sad and ironic considering that Ubisoft has done great female characters before, such as Farah and Elika from the Prince of Persia games, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil and even in the Assassin's Creed franchise they had a great female protagonist with Aveline, and later Evie Frye as co-protagonist in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate.

As for other great female protagonists, I've already mentioned April Ryan and Kate Walker, both whom are great protagonists in great games that still hold up today, and some other good adventure game heroines are:

Fran Bow, from her titular game "Fran Bow", which mixes very dark horror with Fran's childlike and optimistic fantasy, Vella from Broken Age, who is a teenager chosen as sacrifice to a fish monster but devices a great escape plan on her own, and Anna from Valiant Hearts, whom is a WW1 nurse and chauffeur and at several points in the game not only gets to participate in some great car chases but also gets to use her medical skills in the gameplay to save several people.

When it comes to AGS games, I always liked Emily Enough and Jacqueline White from their eponymous games.

Because it's unthinkable that women can be as high or taller than men... 

Indeed, it's completely ridiculous and has nothing to do with reality.
I'm a Swede and every single time I travel abroad I feel like Gandalf visiting the Shire, and I'm not even that tall compared to several other women I know.

[did]

Like I said, the more you try to use random made up "biological facts" to justify societal laws, the more you sound like what Ali accused you of being.

This will have to be an area on which we disagree with, then. I talk about evolutionary traits affecting the decisions we make as a broader society, such as choosing not to draft women into the military, while you try to equate that to the actions of individuals in a moment of duress or other extremely heated moment. I do not think those two are comparable, and thus I don't think your relating the two has any connection to the point I was making. Laws about matters such as the military draft are drawn up with more sensibility than decisions about immediate survival in a life or death situation.

If laws are the result of sensible discussion and thinking, they are not the result of universal evolutionary impulses left over from the animal stage.
Not only are there culture where a significant amount of warriors were women, such as the Scythians, the Dahomey kingdom and modern day Israel to name a few, the biggest reason women were forbidden from being soldiers is the same reason they were forbidden from doing a huge bunch of other male-coded jobs that didn't pose a risk to the practitioner, and it was because the people in power were afraid that it would upset the social order that kept them in power, and for exactly the same reason large groups of men, such as the jews and slaves in ancient Rome and colonial America were also forbidden from bearing arms, and it wasn't because the rulers wanted to protect them. And just to drive the point home that cultural laws aren't the result of some sensible evolutionary strategy, for centuries women in Europe were prohibited from studying science and medicine at nearly all places of learning, despite it posing zero danger for them and it's objectively stupid to randomly bar 50% of the population from potentially making discoveries that could save hundreds lives, and there's no explanation other than cultural prejudices, so I see no point in discussing it further.

Sure, I will consent that nobody is forcing people to do anything here. However, among these young male viewers are numerous boys suffering of self esteem issues, bullying offline and online, and a lack of meaningful social interaction. All prime causes of why we have such high suicide rates among men.

Then the real issue is that those boys are bullied by their peers and forced to live up to unrealistic expectations from society about "being a real man" that they end up in such a vulnerable state to begin with, and shaming camgirls will not solve any of the problems of bullying and self esteem. I don't endorse selling anything to impressionable teens, but I fail to see how it's worse and more exploitative than say, clothing brands making kids buy them out of fear of being ostracized for not having the right brand.

Ah, Ubisoft. Their claim that women would be difficult to animate in their current game was valid in the way that doing so would have required them to use the same skeleton structure for the female and male models, meaning those characters would have needed to be the same height and general build for the animations to make sense. So their excuse basically boiled down to "We don't want to make a female character who is as tall as a male character". Optionally they could have made a whole new set of animations and skeletons, but I can see why that might have been prohibitively work-intensive at the point of development they were at when the statement was made.

Yeah, and the irony is that they did recycle most of the animations for Aveline in Assassin's Creed: Liberation from the male character in their previous game, both of which came out before Unity, so it's pretty much entirely down to terrible priorities and project management on Ubisoft's part. Funny how women wasn't a priority but modelling over 30 different customizable costumes the hero could wear was.

I occasionally watch zero punctuation, but only for games I've already finished - he can spoil plots sometimes.

I watch it too though recently I haven't really watched the episodes about games I haven't played, not so much due to spoilers but also because it's hard to get many of the jokes if you don't know anything about the franchise in question. Reference humor is funnier when you know the references. 

WHAM, it's not edge cases in society, I mentioned the single biggest cause of murder for women and I specifically also linked to an article about a study of a huge number of shipwrecks, and the men on those ships were not selected criminals, they were a huge number of random people whom happened to be on boats that were sinking and the pattern was very clear, nearly all of them put their own survival over that of random women. Here's the link again: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2130003/Study-sea-disasters-men-better-survival-rate-ships-down.html

Like I said, the more you try to use random made up "biological facts" to justify societal laws, the more you sound like what Ali accused you of being.

One group receiving abuse does not diminish the abuse suffered by another group. And yet there seems to only ever be discussion of why women feel excluded from the online space, while men continue to tolerate the abuse they get and remain. That seems sexist and unfortunate to me, in how the issues faced by men are belittled. However, that is not the point of this thread, and I think we can all agree on the general point that "online abuse, against anyone, is bad". (Well, some people can't, but they're a different breed of animal, and usually dealing out the harassment themselves.)

If you are so concerned about diminishing abuse of men, I want to point out that you yourself are diminishing real sexual abuse of men by saying that something that they choose to do, paying camgirls, is abuse on par with predators coercing children into sexual acts. No one is forcing them to spend money on the girls and to suggest otherwise and imply that all men always want sex and they just can't control their impulses is the exact same rhetoric that's used to dismiss male survivors of rape and sexual assault.

Look, it obviously comes down to engine performance issues:

Female characters have two dangly bits to animate whereas male characters have only one.

This is known, in profession circles, as The PvP Trade-Off.

In full:

Spoiler

The Puppies vs. Package Trade-Off.

[close]

Just like in Assassin's Creed Unity, where after getting criticism for removing playable female characters from the game, Ubisoft explained that it was because women were too hard for them to animate.

Spoiler

It turns out they were right... 

[close]

But I think there needs to be room for both realistic depictions of history and fun swashbuckling versions of history

Said it before, and I'll say it again. I agree. There is room for both and I have no issue with both existing.

Then why did you feel the need to make such a huge deal out of how wrong you thought Battlefield 5 was?

I'm pretty sure some evolutionary scientists will disagree with you here, considering how the human society has evolved. Sure, modern society has changed a lot from our hunter-gatherer days, but to claim that human evolution has entirely surpassed such basic instincs as "protecting the breeding-aged females to ensure the survival of the species" that is inherent in most mammals is a bit much.

Did you miss the woman murder statistics I mentioned and the link with the scientific study showing that the overwhelming majority of men did not in fact put random women over themselves?
The whole evolutionary science field is dodgy pseudoscience at best and there are huge disagreements among scholars (I recommend reading this article), plus tons of things people have claimed are biological have already been debunked, just as the phrenology and eugenics that were popular in the 1900's. I really don't want to go the same route Ali did and accuse you of being a fascist, but if you are kind of inviting such comparisons by casually trying to use biological justifications for societal laws and literally comparing humans to animals.

There is truth in what you are saying, but keep in mind that in sheer quantity the vast majority of online abuse is still directed at men. And still men choose to participate in these communities, despite being repeatedly called "gay" or "faggot" or "motherfucker" or "nazi" or "fascist" or whatever other colourful language you'd like to insert here, along with the same death threats, swatting attacks and more that are unfortunate side effects of online anonymity that allows people like Ali to throw around some pretty foul things without a worry in the world.

Men get more abuse due to the fact that there are more men in gaming circles, but the women who are in those spaces get far more abuse than their male peers and get horrific threats of sexual violence and sexist slurs on top of the same death threats and nazi-accusations men get, Snarky already pointed that out and he's actually working as a moderator.

Like I said, I agree for the most part, and believe that women should be free to sell their bodies if they want (hey, the 'oldest profession' and all that) just as men should be free to avail them of such services if they want. But when the primary target demographic are children, such as on Twitch, it gets shady as heck.

Then why are you blaming the streamers and not Twitch as a platform for allowing children to pay for their services or the children's parents for not teaching them better? Also, just casually comparing any woman relying on her looks in her job but not actually selling sex is hugely demeaning to them and basically encouraging harassment and lewd propositions to women just because they dress skimpy.

So... Still no one else officially participating?

Wait, what? Slasher isn't making a MAGS entry?! 
Slasher, are you alright?

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. 

I have no doubt you could make a fun and popular game out of factory work, medical personell and anti-air posts, since we've had games like Stardew Valley and The Sims become poular franchises despite being about farming and families/home decoration respectively.

However, you yourself admitted that there were women fighting in the Soviet forces, eastern partisans and resistance groups, and you could just as well make an action game or FPS about them.

But I think there needs to be room for both realistic depictions of history and fun swashbuckling versions of history, but as it is now far too many people argue women should be excluded based on "historical accuracy" but I don't see anyone seriously demanding that all games about men in WW2 needs to deal with them managing lice and dysentery or that we should make the next Battlefield about a guy toiling away in a POW camp or learning to live without legs after getting paralyzed from a stray shell to show men what real history was like.

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.

And now you've lost me, because firstly, the idea that men naturally want to protect women is 100% a cultural expectation and not some biological inevitability. Not only is the single highest cause of death in women (when you rule out disease and old age) being murdered by abusive men they were in a relationship with, but looking at statistics from shipwrecks, men have a much higher survival rate than women and the only reason most women survived the Titanic was because the captain and his officers held the male passengers back at gunpoint. It's also ignoring all the women who have been more than willing to risk their lives for their country or their family members, but have been actively prohibited from doing so by both law and a lifetime of being actively prevented from doing physical exercise or learning how to use arms.

You have no idea how many times I've seen in my own social circles how women complain of their husbands or boyfriends playing games and how they see it as "childish" or "a waste of time".
Sure, there are plenty of female gamers, but at least in the current and past generations they seem to be a minority still. Future generations may well close up the gap, though.

The biggest reason there aren't more women is that for the last decades both the community and developers have been trying to drive them away, both through in-game content like I described in my previous comment regarding the Metro 2033 sequel, but also because so many gaming communities contain trolls and creeps that take active pride in harassing women, and the majority of the other members just spend all their time and effort on insisting that they're not one of them and accuse people speaking up against is of being SJWs who want to look for a conflict instead of actively denouncing the harassers and call them out on it.

The appearance of so-called "twitch-thots" along with other camgirl services has given rise to phenomenon such as FinDom and other forms of abuse that is harmful to the viewers, which happen to be primarily young lonely men, because those happen to play a lot of videogames. (Because the majority of women tend to view gaming as a negative thing rather than as a fun hobby, oddly enough.)

I think this is very revealing. There's a really interesting article written by psychologists in the 80s called The Metaphorical Logic of Rape, which I should warn has disturbing content. But I implore anyone with an interest to read it, because it's fascinating and relevant. Saying that women are "abusing" men by being sexy on a gaming website isn't literal. Just like when we say a woman is "a knock-out" we don't literally mean she knocked us out. But an unwitting consequence of these linguistic choices is that they allow us to significantly re-configure sequences of events in reality.

- I'm not sexually attracted to this woman - this woman is DOING SOMETHING to me with her sexuality.
- I'm not choosing to watch this Twitch stream - the women running this twitch stream is ABUSING me with her sexuality.

The woman becomes the instigator, and men's actions - arousal, harassment or, more mildly, a refusal to believe in girl gamers - become much more reasonable reactions. Instead of holding Person A responsible for their actions, it seems much more reasonable to hold Person A's victim responsible. After all, the victim started it. The bad girl gamers ruined the reputation of girl gamers. The bad immigrants ruined the reputation of immigrants. The women haters and racists are no longer instigators of abuse, they're simply reacting.

You've really hit the nail on the head, the hate against Twitch camgirls but not the people paying for them and blaming men's lust on women is straight up Frollo-logic.

Also, the whole implication that men can't control themselves isn't just dangerous for women, but it's also greatly harmful to men who fall victim to sexual abuse, because it reinforces the notion that men can't be sexually abused because they always want it and that anyone sexually abusing a man is basically doing him a favor. A woman on Twitch offering a service and people choosing to pay for that service doesn't mean that she's stealing or abusing the people paying her anymore than hamburger chains are abusing hungry people.

[do]

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?

[the only way]

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?

[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.]

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.

How about this?

I just had to share this image of a crazy awesome renaissance painting I found:

I remember (I think) that there was a museum who let women go in for free or half price on that day and men had to pay the normal fee and of course there was whining and complaints. That really pissed me off. It's men's day the rest of the f#####g year so why the hell can't we let our females enjoy something just for them? And I can't understand why a man should have a higher salory than a female if they do exactly the same job. I"m all for equality

Indeed, it reminds me of a guy who was so angry at the woman-only screening of Wonder Woman so he decided to have a man-only screening of the movie Rock of Ages, and nobody stopped him or even expressed any real outrage over him doing so.

There already are tons of things women aren't allowed to do, like joining the freemasons, becoming priests in several religions, and there are a bunch of clubs that are men only, yet you non't see any of the men protesting woman discounts complaining about that.