Fifa, the video game as put together by EA Sports, has finally introduced the option to use female players.
Check out the trailer for the players, who say things like, ‘I’m not here to watch’ and ‘We’re in the game’ in a whole bunch of different languages.
Yep, it kind of makes us want to start playing football (IRL or just using our thumbs) and it’s a pretty good idea on three counts:
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At least in England, the best-performing football team is the women’s team. They’ve been finalists in the international cups twice in the past 30 years compared to the men’s team’s zero times.
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There really is no harm in encouraging women to play the sport by seeing role models in the game.
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It’s just nice to see video game characters in hugely mainstream household name games that are women with body shapes that would actually stand up in real life and have jobs that aren’t ‘street walker who gets beaten up as a point of the game’.
But some people don’t get it, with comments like:
‘This seems like a lot of time, effort and money to develop something nobody actually wanted to begin with.
‘Get out the game and make me a sandwich’
‘Is there gonna be any t-shirt throwing celebration???’
‘One thing: women playing football is one of the less sexiest things they can made.’
‘On career mode does their morale go down every month suddenly?’
‘lets hope EA haven’t gone to far an added in periods’
‘fucksake! its a mans sport… women have ruined the earth and now they are ruining fifa! For fucksake’
and ‘Who cares about Women?’
One even says ‘isn’t female football a joke anyway?’ which is pretty ironic because you might notice that ‘male football’ is in tatters right now.
From what we’ve gathered, IRL oodles of Fifa’s highest representatives have been arrested after allegedly doing loads of dodgy dealing (we’re talking bribes, kickbacks and frauds) so that the male football tournaments might take place in countries with more money than sense (and by ‘sense’ we mean ‘human rights records’, as 12 people a week die building Qatar’s stadia, and, well, in Russia, you’re not allowed to speak out against the establishment or be gay without getting into serious trouble.
The only thing dodgy about EA announcing the news about female players in the video game is that it seems to be an attempt to bury all the bad news that’s going on in Fifa’s IRL arm.
We’d be sad about the rest of the comments, but we’re guessing any gamer who’s that committed and dedicated to hating women will surely never procreate with any of them, leaving this sort of brutish ‘me gamer, you cook, look at me so strong and manly that I sit in a front room twiddling knobs all evening’ sensibility to simply die out.
Oh, and FYI, FIFA 2016 is out in September.
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Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.