Sports Video Games and Women: Where are we now?
Looking back at my work from a year ago and where sports video games have come since then
Hi! Welcome back to Sports Untold. This week we’re getting all retrospective but before, please subscribe if you enjoy my content! Subscribing is 100% and ensures that you get every issue of Sports Untold direct to your inbox!
So I think we can agree that 2020 was…a pretty bad year. But one of the things that took the edge off it for me was getting the opportunity to work with the wonderful Lindsay Gibbs and write a handful of articles for her newsletter, Power Plays.
My trio of articles, which are linked throughout this piece, all looked at the ways were are represented, or not, in various sports games as well as in the wider world of esports.
So today, we’re going to look at where those games are in 2021 and if anything has changed.
Football Manager
The game: Football Manager is a long-running soccer management series developed by Sports Interactive. In each annual instalment of the game, you take control of teams and guide them through their seasons. The game can become incredibly technical, allowing you to control everything from scouting to training to designing your set pieces.
I investigated Football Manager last year after they announced for International Women’s Day 2020 that they would be stepping into to sponsor the women’s soccer podcast ‘The Offside Rule: WSL Edition’, after the podcast announced that they would be suspending operations due to a lack of funding. This is in spite of the fact that women’s soccer is not in Football Manager in any capacity.
After speaking with representatives from Sports Interactive, I was told that the ‘seven-figure’ cost of adding women to the game was too prohibitive and that they had sponsored the podcast to help grow the women’s game so that in the future, the cost of adding women to the game would be more justifiable. If you’ve read enough of my work, or my original article on the topic, you’ll know that I did not respond positively to this.
One year on
Football Manager 21 came out in November 2020. Unsurprisingly, women’s soccer had not been added to the game.
I believe we are still many years away from seeing women’s soccer in Football Manager. Despite where the women’s game is at (and honestly, where it already was when I wrote my original article), Sports Interactive refuse to budge on the issue.
What next? See above - put women in the fucking game.
NBA 2K
The game: NBA 2K is by far the most popular basketball video game out there. It offers both the opportunity to control a team and a single player. It has dominated the basketball market for years and is likely to do so for years to come.
I looked into NBA 2K to investigate how they had let WNBA players down in NBA 2K20. While WNBA players and teams had been added, there was no option to create your own WNBA player and the franchise mode, which lets you control an entire team, was limited to a single season with a number of in-game restrictions (such as no true trade mechanic).
One year on
While NBA 2K21 released with the WNBA in the exact same place as the previous game, that all changed with the next-gen patch. Once the game was launched for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, full parity was brought to the WNBA. There was now a career mode, franchises weren’t locked to a single season. They had truly brought the WNBA to 2K.
A few problems remain, namely under the surface. In my original article for Lindsay, I pointed out that Visual Concepts, the dev studio behind the game, had opted to give all players a dunk rating of 25, the lowest possible value it can be. This meant that the 6-8 Liz Cambage and 5-5 Leilani Mitchell are both equally bad at dunking (despite that the fact Cambage has literally dunked at the Olympics). This problem remains in the latest game. There is exactly one player with dunking above 25 - Jonquel Jones…and her’s is at 30.
The other problem I would like to point out, and this one has been around for a while, is Maya Moore. Moore is listed as the best player for the Minnesota Lynx in the game, with a 93 overall rating. As all WNBA fans will know, Moore has not played in a WNBA game since 2018 as she focuses on criminal justice reform. Her inclusion as an active member of a WNBA roster is not only inaccurate, but inadvertently serves to undermine the reason she does not currently play professional basketball.
What next? Aside from possibly more attention to detail when it comes to rosters, I think the biggest thing that the series needs to do is invest in content creation for the WNBA side of things. If you search for WNBA 2K on YouTube, you get a lot of one-off videos from male content creators. Very few of these videos are especially flattering, or even nice, to the WNBA, with a lot using ‘female’ in the title or being downright mockeries of the mode. Investing in content from fans of the league, women, hell even players, could go a long way to helping the mode thrive in the future.
Esports
My third and final article for Lindsay looked at the world of esports, and the struggle that women face in the industry.
One year on
Overall, nothing major has changed for the place we were at in that article. Esports suddenly hasn’t become super open to women. But let me run you down some of the big relevant events, and catch you up on where people I spoke to in the article are now:
-The Overwatch League officially has no women rostered to any team at the time of writing. The sole woman, Geguri, was cut by Shanghai Dragons during significant overhauls for the team.
-Xandie, the Overwatch Contenders manager I spoke, is still a manager for the Raspberry Racers.
-After graduating, Jennifer ‘FancyTuna’ Frank returned to Miami of Ohio to become their varsity esports head coach.
What next? The objective remains the same from my last piece - that is to say, the industry needs to become more open and welcoming to women. Organisations need to be more willing to recognise the talent that women have, and create an environment that is safe for those, and any, women. Unfortunately, this would require a major culture shift away from the toxic, gatekeeping attitudes prevalent in the industry right now.
The rest
And now a quick round up of the games I didn’t cover last year:
-EA’s series of UFC games continues to be one of the best examples of gender parity, with an equal career mode for both male and female fighters
-However, EA is still dropping the ball when it comes to FIFA, where women’s soccer is still only available via a handful of international squads
-EA’s NHL games allow you to make a female avatar, but there is no real distinct women’s hockey
TLDR
Last year, I had the privilege of writing a series of articles exploring how sports video games represented women in those sports. And in the year or so since those articles, there have been changes.
NBA 2K now offers full parity to both the NBA and WNBA, for example.
However, the landscape largely remains the same. Sports Interactive, the company Football Manager, have seemingly discontinued their efforts to ‘support’ the ‘development’ of women’s soccer, and look no closer to implemented the women’s side of the sport into their game. Esports remains hostile to women, with women in the industry still having to start on the back foot.
Overall, I think we can take solace in the changes that have been made, while still fighting for the changes yet to come.
We’ll get there eventually. We just can’t stop fighting for it.