Bulletin:
EA Only Just Noticed People Who Aren’t Men Exist
In NHL12 you can customise your avatar to have a gender other than male. Not that interesting per say, if a bit dumb that it’s taken until 2011 for this to be a feature. But where this story is troublesome is the PR-powered response from the president of EA Sports, David Littman. He said the letter was “a wake-up call”.
That’s right, surprise was the reaction he had to realising that people other than men play sports games.
Oh my.
Better yet, instead of then saying there’s this whole other gender they’ve been neglecting, causing the propagation of harmful and negative stereotypes, Littman seemed far more excited to find “a growing audience” which they’d not “done anything to capture”.
via: The Globe And Mail
News, Bulletin Tags: EA, EA Sports, feminism, gender, women
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I hope this same kind of thing happens to Rockstar Games, too.
They are putting out another DLC for Red Dead Redemption and it has new multiplayer character skins – ALL male.
They’ve received a ton of shit from the not insubstantial population of females playing the game.
You’d think that since the game’s been out for over a year they’d have a better handle on their demographics… :/
NHL is a simulation of a sport where there are no professional women hockey players. If there wasn’t enough demand for EA to bother putting the feature in until now they can’t be blamed for it. As you allude to EA is recognizing this as a business move disguised as political correctness.
Moral of the story; never get a job in PR. You can never say anything right.
Hmmmmmmmmm, women in an EA game you say, that sounds jolly important.
Not to me though, just saying :P