Morons of the Internet: The Know

This is the segment where I scour my favourite forums around the Internet and find some particularly interesting articles about current affairs told in the words of my favourite human beings.

In this edition we have those bloody Social Justice Warriors sticking their ugly beaks into video games again. Their agenda this time, to rewrite history.
___________________________________________________________________________
http://www.movienewsguide.com/battlefield-1-male-audience-no-female-soldiers/227830
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV58sM37wAU
___________________________________________________________________________

Oh wow. It turns out no game is excluded from the wrath of the Social Justice Warriors, who now want to be able to play as female soldiers in the front lines during World War One. They actually have evidence this time for their concerns, claiming that women did see combat during The Great War, and actually that statement is largely correct. However that statement is also incredibly misleading. You see women saw nowhere near the amount of action that men did, often being used in backstage roles such as nurses and munitions. Some women did see action in the navy, however almost zero ever saw action on the frontlines where 'Battlefield One' is set. Hopefully there will be an emphasis on the vital backstage roles women played in the story of the game, however multiplayer is set right inside the action, so for female soldiers to be present would be a strange move for developers 'DICE' to make, even if female roles in the armed forces do have my eternal gratitude. The actual number of women soldiers in the First World War is remarkably few when compared to the male dominated armies. There was a women's battalion created in Russia to help raise morale and just generally show off a bit, however only one battalion of this scheme was ever used on the frontlines. That's 1000 women maximum. But the thing is that Russia isn't even included in Battlefield 1, which means women shouldn't be featured in the game at all. Even if we ignore the fact Russian forces aren't in the game we still have a huge hyperinflation of female soldiers that is absolutely nowhere near the estimated 65 million male soldiers. If we do some Christoforge maths we discover that women made up 0.002% of the total front line soldiers, which in a 64 player multiplayer game is proportionate to 0.00128 women being depicted on the battlefield. For even a single woman to be proportionally represented on the battlefield women would need to make up 1.5% of the total front line soldiers. That's 975,000 soldiers. Can you honestly forgive a historically accurate game that inflates figures 975 times? There's another issue as well, because if you're being given free reign over customisation there's never going to be the occasional woman on the battlefield, especially as female characters have the advantage of being smaller targets on average, and this is going to make the multiplayer experience feel very unrealistic considering that the majority of players are going to be aware that women were an incredibly rare sight in the trenches. There's an incredibly fine line between allowing guns to be more reliable than their real life counterparts and just flat out lying, as many of these features lead to a better user driven experience. Making guns and parachutes more reliable than reality is an inherently plausible scenario, where as simply shoehorning women into the game because of political correctness will feel completely artificial. As a developer who wants to create a realistic historical adaptation you just can't make exceptions that are so monumentally unrealistic, especially when these exceptions alter the whole fucking premise. And then to top it all off it's male gamers who are being blamed for this apparently sexist move, because apparently the video game industry thinks that female gamers have no sense of reality. I just hate how this has to become a gender issue instead of recreating history. And like many gender issues in modern video games this outrage has now leaked into a minor scandal.

This is one of the premier gaming channels on YouTube, yet just look at how poorly done this video is. I'm not against the odd episode of 'The Know', it's often quite informative. However in this episode they think that simply stating that women should be included because of the current year is a valid argument. They claim to look at both sides of the argument, but it's clear from their comparisons with other shooters that have women in the game that this is a piece designed to echo a stupid and narrow minded attitude that all games should follow. The key difference between 'Battlefield One' and the games referenced in this video is that the ones that do feature female soldiers are all fictional. They're shooters set in the future, not a historical recreation. I'm sure you could also say it wouldn't be a stretch to add Mahatma Gandhi as a playable character, who is also irrelevant to the historical context, but it is 2016, which is now apparently a validation for rewriting history. Fuck it, if we're going down the fictional route I would love to see realistic tanks replaced with models of Stephen Hawking. Just put some caterpillar tracks on his chair and watch him go; it is 2016. If we're actually sensible we could argue that female drivers have previously raced in Formula One, so why shouldn't Formula One games have a feature where you can play as a female racing driver despite the fact that in the time period the game is simulating there isn't any female drivers racing in the sport? That's the sort of attitude this video is supporting, and it's really fucking stupid.

What I hate most about this issue is the idea social justice and equality should come before the developer's vision for their own game. As a consumer you don't have the right to start dictating what you want from a game, as that takes this art form into the territory of a popularity contest. The article in particular about this apparent travesty is written by somebody who obviously has no idea about the video game industry unless it's fucking candy crush. But you don't even need to be a serious gamer to see how stupid this argument is. Stop ignoring reality to moan about things that don't conform to your view of the world. I know history hasn't been kind to women, especially in the First World War where women in many countries still couldn't vote. That's a terrible thing, but it's the ugly truth, and this game is trying to be faithful to those ugly truths. I'm sure nobody at 'DICE' is happy with the attitudes towards women at the time, but what this game is showing is that those attitudes did exist, and how the world of today is thankfully far more inclusive. I understand that games don't have to be and often aren't incredibly realistic, but that doesn't mean you should start altering factual history in the name of social justice.