On FIFA's Gender War

The internet's reaction to Women's teams being playable in FIFA 16 has been an indegestible cacophony of hottakes. Please stop.

Let's take a second, firstly, to congratulate EA Sports on a job well done. They haven't just made a historic step for the series, they've done it properly. A whole new set of likenesses and animations have been made for the women's teams, meaning they'll represent their sport as realistically as the male counterparts. With the Women's World Cup currently taking place, there was no better time to make the leap, and you'd have to take a deep dive into the 12-and-under section of Twitter to find someone that thinks their inclusion is a bad thing in of itself.

There's some critics who think things haven't gone far enough, however, and their critiques range from very valid to baffling. Polygon's Owen S. Good points out that, whilst the inclusion of 12 top female teams is great, the feature parity with the men's teams is lacking. No career mode, World Cup or Ultimate Team. All of these features will certainly make their way into the title over the next few years, drip-fed - just as they were in the men's game - but pressure from critics can only push EA to work harder on these features to give us more game for our money next year. It's a win-win.

Where Good, and where I get off this bus, is Anita Sarkeesian's assertion that the women's teams should be mixed with the men's. Whether it's women v men, or women and men in the same XI, I can't support that at all.

I think Anita's own viewpoint, as a gaming critic rather than a sports expert, creates a skewed logic. She argues that as a videogame, FIFA has the artistic licence to be daring and do it first, before the real world. It's the same argument made when The Witcher 3 didn't include many non-white people. "Who cares if it's a Slavic game, made by Slavic people and set in a Slavic land? It's a videogame, if you can put dragons in Poland, you can put black people there too!" It's an argument that is at least viable for The Witcher, but FIFA isn't fantasy. It's a licenced simulation of the real world, and that comes with all the real-world limitations.

First, there's the realistic business dealings that happen before a game is even started to consider. The legal implications of FIFA licencing are colossal. You know how sometimes licenced cars can't be shown damaged in racing games? Imagine that, applied to a contact sport with 22 individuals, two teams and a league all being represented for the masses. It's not a matter of simply waving a wand to set up a friendly match between women and men in FIFA.

I also don't think it's helpful to the feminist cause to allow women v men matches. If you talk to fans of women's football, you'll realise the most common criticisms of the women's game all stem from it being endlessly compared to the elite men's game. Saying that the overwhelming majority of women's professionals aren't as good as male professionals might be true - there are reports of women's national teams being beaten by professional men's U18 sides a-plenty. But it's not the point. The women that play professional football shouldn't have to be compared to the men. They're playing their own sport, in their own leagues. Analysis that focuses a comparison on something entirely outside of the women's game results in absolutely no insight.

Allowing women to play men in FIFA would force this ugly critique into the limelight. Why give creedence to such an invalid argument? Why promote a gender war that cannot possibly advance the quality or reputation of the women's game? There's no way to fairly do it without ignoring the reality which the game explicitly aims to simulate.

You'd be forcing EA to make explicit comparisons in their player statistics too, as anyone that's seen a FIFA team select screen will know. What good would it do to see the women's teams lounging on one-and-a-half stars, mixed in with Real Madrid and Bayern? Segregating them would allow the women's teams their own scale of statistics, where a woman's team can be rated equally highly as Bayern in their own league. This is a better promotion of quality in women's football, and would be a far more encouraging way to get more girls into the sport. Give women their own space to improve on their own merits.