Messages

I don't think it's just in economically deprived regions of Eastern Europe where women are pressured to play on sex appeal in order to attract an audience, even if the activity itself (sport, music, comedy, gaming, whatever) has little direct connection to sex...

If Twitch turned into a soft-porn cam site, is that because every woman who tried her hand at livestreaming really wanted to be a "Twitch-thot", or because horny dudes disproportionately gave attention to and rewarded a few who did (or who felt they had to), and drove away most of the rest with sexual (and other) harassment? So who's exploiting who? (Actually, that's not the most important question: it's agreeing that the cultural and societal forces that lead to such gendered patterns of exploitation should be identified and addressed. We call that point of view feminism.)

I think the horny dudes came in first, pestering the initial female streamers and gamers, and where demand exists, supply follows. These then feed one another, as with any supply/demand situation.
In cases where both participants are adults participating voluntarily, it's tricky to say if it's actually harmful or just a natural business transaction. When one side of the transaction is underaged and impressionable, paying tens or hundreds of dollars to get to talk to a female streamer, I'd start to lean toward the "this is probably harmful to someone" -camp.

You have no idea how many women in my own social circles are gamers and/or have a neutral to positive view of gaming. Almost 100%, in fact.

Sounds like you've had it good. I've only been lucky enough to encounter a handful of female gamers.
I'm curious, though, what's the rough age range of those friends? I my case we are talking mostly of people aged 26-40 or so.

Yes, cases of online bullying and exploitation are actually abusive - even when women do them. But you've conflated:

- Women who actually exploit people online
- Women on twitch
- And girl gamers.

You've allowed yourself to squeeze all those groups into one. You're holding all of them responsible for what a minority do, and you're justifying abuse directed towards any of them.

I'd say there is overlap and interaction between all of the groups, but I wouldn't say those groups are all the same. Not all women who are on twitch exploit people. Not all female gamers are on twitch. Not all... etc etc.
What I tried to point out was that the actions of the few were tainting the view of the whole group, when that is not fair or reasonable. Such correlations just tend to be what we human beings do. See for example: someone shoots up a school = all gun owners come under scrutiny.
It'd be a lot more fluid to have these conversations in person or voice. Typing does tend to result in condensing of the topic, and thus easily distorting of meaning.

Ha ha, what?

This has been a very useful thread for identifying elements in this community to avoid. Thanks to Ali, Snarky et al for speaking up against them <3

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 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.

This is all perfectly logical, and can be presented cooly and clearly by someone like WHAM. But it diverges from reality as much as Jack's conspiratorial mutterings. And it's much more dangerous, because it sounds so reasonable.

Fair enough, perhaps a better choise of words could work here, but you do realize that people can get addicted to social interaction? Especially if their avenues for that interaction are limited. This makes real cases of abuse, where a viewer is so invested in the person they are watching and thus easily exploited for money or other means, quite real.

Have you ever watched a video of a teenage kid on a skype call crying his eyes out, because his "Runescape e-girlfriend" told him as a joke to shave his head and now he's bald and being laughed at? That's some nasty stuff.

I'm guessing he's trying to say that female Twitch stars are exploiting horny guys by playing on sex in their livestreams.

Mostly this. 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.)

The only instance where I could see these women as being the subject of abuse are cases where they are forced to perform, which is a thing that happens in some parts of the world, too. Saw a documentary recently of cam-girls in eastern Europe, where some were forced by societal pressure or simply lack of other job opportunities to sell themselves, digitally.

"Twitch-thots" are another thing I'd imagine is quite harmful to the image of women in gaming. It makes female gamers appear vapid and money-oriented, rather than interested in the hobby of gaming. They tend to use games as a vehicle to advertise themselves for monetary gain. Meanwhile, their audience, and the male gamers in general, appear as mindless apes drooling over every sliver of bare skin displayed on screen, while sending money to these cam-girls and begging for them to be their "e-girlfriends". Plenty of cases seen already where these "Twitch-thots" are selling themselves. "Pay me 20 dollars and I'll play Overwatch with you for an hour". It often comes off as quite predatory, considering the young target audience age.

On one hand I find it quite distasteful, but on the other it's a matter of supply and demand, so I don't really know how to solve the issue. It's not my place to tell people not to enjoy titty-streamers or to stop people from streaming their bodies alongside some game footage, either.

EDIT: Fixed a poor wording

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.

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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.

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.

I've had experiences with AGS before where extremely short audio files would not play at all. Stuff that was half a second or less. In the cases where I encountered this I edited the sound files, adding some blank audio after them to push their length over 1 second. Quick and dirty fix, but it's served its purpose for me so far.

The man who got me into trying out AGS. Good to see he's still alive and kicking! Poor bastard seems to be the only thing keeping the Escapist website running.

[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.

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.

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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.

Nevermind.

I'm pretty sure this thread is headed for a lock anyway, so what the hell...

Again, I stand by my word and think that "protesters" who harm people and property, lighting fires and injuring police officers, should be suppressed to allow an actual discourse and demonstration to take place.

You're a fascist.

And I'm shocked you haven't been banned from this forum.

I am equally shocked your uncouth and slanderous arse has not been banned from this forum.
Alas, for the time being, we shall simply have to agree to disagree on matters of principle and politics.

At least I can walk away from this farce with my dignity, while you can simmer in your hateful rhethoric and buzzwords like the bitter little things you appear to be.

Have a pleasant day, everyone.

I dunno man, should we really be more civilized by the standards of a dude that thinks the Nazis did good things (they didn't, they were evil and completely incompetent), that people are just jumping on the bandwagon of "those poor Jews" and not being rightfully mortified by a systematic genocide of over six million people, and that we should murder any criminals in cold blood. And when given an opportunity to disown these statements, doubled down on them.

I hate to derail the thread further, but since I keep being attacked, I feel the need to defend myself.

"dude that thinks the Nazis did good things"
> While I do not think it lessens any of the bad things the Nazi regime did, I believe their actions promoted certain avenues of industry and science that have had positive impact on human society. See for example: advances in rocketry allowing space exploration, with both US and USSR rocket programs being based on German wartime advances and run by captured german scientists.

"the bandwagon of "those poor Jews"
> I've never questioned the existence of the holocaust. Hell, I've been to Poland and seen Auschwitz myself, I know full well what the realities were and what the impact of the systematic destruction of the Jews in Europe has been. My only issue with the subject is that people who were not part of the issue are using that particular point in history to milk it for personal gain, while forgetting many other equally meaningful manmade disasters that killed as many or more people. I wish only to promote historical accuracy and balanced perspective, rather than mythmaking.

"murder any criminals in cold blood"
> I've never said this. I have said, however, that I support the death penalty or any other useful end-solution to the worst of criminals in situations where the burden of proof is overwhelming. I do not see any issue with a 100% veritably proven serial child-rapist being cut open to harvest organs to save more valuable lvies or to educate medical students. Such extreme individuals have no worth in society and do not deserve human rights.
In cases where the amount of proof is lesser or the crime is lesser, current levels of punishment are mostly agreeable to me (although Finland has a particularly lax system of laws when it comes to many crimes, such as a child molester walking free after just 2-3 years in prison, which I find is inadequate punishment).


Once again, I remain mystified which one of these statements makes me a fascist.

The fascist doesn't like being called a fascist! That's a new one.

It is, isn't it? I'm pretty sure actual fascists and neo-nazis wear such titles with pride.
I await an apology, that is all I have left to say on this matter, and should anyone wish to further slander me, feel free to do so via Discord, email or PM so as not to further divert this thread.

WHAM: Did you read the link on Virginia Hall? She was a Brittish spy who fled across the Pyrenees on foot whilst hunted by the Gestapo and did it all with a prosthetic leg, and was so good at guerrilla warfare she got to train three battalions in how to do it. People with prosthetics did get sent behind enemy lines and into enemy territories in WW2, even if it wasn't common. The battlefield trailer takes a lot of liberties, but it's clearly not marketed as gritty and realistic. There is a tank decorated with a statue horse head, people doing crazy acrobatics and a guy with a sword on the battlefield, but somehow, it's the woman who got everyone up in arms over breaking immersion.

Nobody is questioning whether or not people did some great feats of endurance, skill and resilience during a time of war, prosthetics or not. Alas, when the head producer of BF5 went on twitter claiming that "women served as frontline troops and fighter pilots just as men did" while also professing that he felt the need to lie about such things to his daughter because "otherwise she'd feel left out from history", that raised some eyebrows. No wonder said head producer quit the company just before BF5 released. I'd imagine there was some pressure to be rid of him.

As for the trailer: that was my key issue with Battlefield 5 to begin with, though. They said "realistic and immersive" and the first trailer gave us the exact opposite. No wonder there was backlash. Add to this the same aforementioned producer claiming that he "wanted to make Battlefield more like Fortnite" because his daughter wanted to have flashy clothes in daddy's game, and... yeah. Wrong genre for that.

Also, look! The fascist is demanding civilty! That's a new one.

It's not nice to call Dualnames a fascist, Khris. Get your act together.
Truth be told, I am starting to think you are a bit confused as to what "fascist" means. Look it up sometime. It'll do you good to civilize yourself.

What I personally think, I am 300% with any diversity as long as it's not there for the sake of diversity. A badly written character is a badly written character no matter what minority it represents.
I think also we need to move on from "why isn't Batman asian/black/trans/whatever" and actually instead of trying to change a character that applies to a demographic, actually write new characters that represent and are more relatable to people.

Amen to that. Taking existing characters and twisting them to fit something new can work (see some of the weird alternative universe Batman comics), but the readers will start to feel something is off when such changes are done to serve some ulterior motive or agenda. That's when you get pushback and fans abandoning a product. We need more interesting characters, stories and settings. As long as they are well made and interesting, small details like gender or race of a character become the spice that completes a character, giving them flavour and helping them stand out. But if that identity is all the character is (Look! I wrote a transgender Mexican communist superhero! Why don't people like my creation?) then it all falls apart.

"Be excellent to each other" is what I think we should all do.

Tell that to the name-calling bigots, eh? Not a shred of civility or manners in some people.

Had to dig up an oldie to get a pic of it, but I distinctly remembered there being a blue cup in my games all the way back in 2011!

Been getting into Sunless Skies for the past couple weeks and this little piece has been stuck in my head. Thus, I share:

I recently had a nice vacation and some time to read, so I read two books.

The first one was a bit of history:
http://themilitaryreviewer.blogspot.com/2014/12/barbarossa-through-soviet-eyes-first-24.html

A collection of first hand accounts and reports and diary entries that help clarify the first day of operation Barbarossa and why the Germans had such extensive military success in the early stages of the war.

The second book was some classic horror:
https://www.amazon.com/King-Yellow-Robert-William-Chambers-ebook/dp/B00847UYWA

The collection of short stories within were a bit hit and miss to be honest. Only two of them really hit the mark with me, while the rest felt a tad too awkward and outdated to spark much emotion. It was, however, interesting to see these old takes on certain horror tropes, and seeing where the roots of some modern horror element lie.

Battlefield 5 did have the soldier's race and gender be historically accurate in the campaign, it was just in the multiplayer you could freely choose it for your avatar, and multiplayer fps by their nature aren't meant to be realistic simulations of war when people can effortlessly bunnyhop across the map and anyone can use any weapon without training. But even if you think it ruins your immersion or was a bad creative choice, do you think the developers deserve the death threats they got over the game?

Absolutely not. Harrassing people is never a solution, and I think the only real action people should have taken if they felt the devs made a mistake here, is to not buy the game.

As for the prosthetic arm: historically it makes no sense for a person with such an injury, male or female, to be running around jumping out of buildings in France. The female character here feels like an unrealistic and forced attempt to create the "ultimate cool girl" character. Fine from a marketing perspective, but unfortunate in the eyes of the players who view Battlefield as a series with roots in history or any semblance of realism.

Khris: If such is your characterization, then there must be some kind of misunderstanding or miscommunication. As before, I'll be happy to discuss, but it might be best not to hijack this threat with further unrelated chatter on the topic.

Danvzare: As with most modern issues of equality or inequality of the two genders, I think you identify the issue quite correctly. There was and is a natural trend toward a more balanced representation, but the hasty push for immediate change at the cost of other merits, such as artistic integrity, results in pushback and missteps that could have been easily avoided.