Is this what America spends its time thinking about nowadays? I mean seriously, think of the advantage female soldiers get in terms of smaller hitboxes! The humanity!!

I can understand some unease with killing female soldiers considering how many cultures reinforce the notion of protecting women, but then, women are on the battlefield. And women are dying alongside men. Call of Duty is hardly a bastion of reality, but this seems like a reasonable addition, especially considering the many female gamers who enjoy First Person Shooters.

So, while I anticipated this causing an issue with some people, I think they'll get used to it once the game actually comes out.

@geraltitude: Okay, how about this one:

In your first example the girlfriend takes punches from her boyfriend and in the second one, two guys fighting each other equally. Of course I'm not gonna react the same way because the two situations are very different. Not every man has an athletic build and not every woman is a delicate flower either, not to mention the individual's intent to fight. If I see a person getting harmed by another and the beating is one sided, I will react the same way no matter what their respective gender is, because I think that's the right thing to do.

Now imagine yourself walking down the street and seeing a woman punch her boyfriend in the face - would you react the same way to one man beating another man?

Looks like I'm not one those people who are brought up to be extraordinarily defensive of women. I just want to understand things, man. Sorry for harassing you.

How is this an issue now? There have been female avatars in shooters before and nobody seemed to have a problem...

@alexandersheen: I posted a video about this and most people walk away. Women even think he had it coming for cheating or other bullshit. But this is what you become and get when you grew up in a world that treats women special and shows every fucking day how evil men and especially white men are.

And I totally agree it does not matter if its a women or a men the result will be the same. Stop teaching children being nice to women but teach your children to be nice to people. No matter their gender, race or sexuality.

First off, fuck IGN, because they're IGN. I'm surprised they didn't make a top 10 list out of this topic somehow.

@hunter5024 You know, I'm glad you brought this up, because there seems to be this weird hardwired notion that women shouldn't be hurt, which by extension implies that women shouldn't fight their own battles, but instead have men do it for them. The following video contains spoilers for Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2, which I've been playing the past couple days, and should be avoided if you've not reached the episode "The Two Ominous Stars." However, I feel it's important to the discussion at hand.

The main thrust of the episode is that a village protector, Mamiya, has decides to take the fight to local bandits, emboldened by Kenshiro retrieving an amulet worn by her slain younger brother, and ends up both proving her mettle and, unfortunately, serving as emotional fodder for Kenshiro. Skip to around 13 minutes in the video, because that's what I'm going to be talking about. This is a scene just before the final push through the bandit camp, in which Rei tells Mamiya to stay home and let Kenshiro and him finish off the bandits because she's a woman. Now this ignores the fact that Mamiya lost her brother in the previous part, in which it is also shown that she lost her parents, and has taken to being this village's protector. Anyway, In response, she tells Rei that she gave up on the whole being a woman thing and instead concerns herself with the safety of the village.

Rather than take her impassioned and, given the circumstances, perfectly sensible explanation to heart, uses his Nanto Suichoken arts to rip off her top. He's not doing this to get a peek; actually quite the opposite. When Mamiya covers her chest, Rei uses that against her, using the logic that, were she not concerned with womanly things, being topless wouldn't bother her. Rei ends what I'm assuming is supposed to be his moment of chivalry by telling her she should focus on her own happiness before dismissively draping his sister's veil over his head, apologizing for its dirtiness and promising her a clean one when he gets back. She is left topless until Kenshiro gives her a towel and explains Rei's motivations to the seething Mamiya.

While there's no doubt that Rei, who at this point believes his sister to be murdered, believes his view to be noble, sympathetic and just, what we have here is Rei effectively looking down on Mamiya, seeing her as some sort of treasure to be guarded as opposed to a living, feeling person. The way the scene is presented, Rei's view is supposed to be thought of as noble as opposed to hilariously selfish. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why we are a long way from true equality; women aren't seen in most societies as individuals capable of their own decision making and problem solving, but as some sort of resource that should be guarded while the big, strong men and never made to fight their own battles. It has festered into the historical limiting of women to domestic roles and fueled centuries of well-intentioned (and less well-intentioned in many cases) oppression. It is the notion that rests at the very core of the thought that a woman's place is in the home, and the driving force that impedes women's liberation movements the world over to this day.

Then there's the misandrist angle of this. By hiding women from combat for so long, the US government has put forth the implied position that a man's life is not as valuable as that of a woman. Society tends not to rage en masse while our sons come home in thousands of bags, but the concept of our daughters joining them is a stupidly huge national debate, because we hold women's lives at a premium over men's. The reality is that every single life is of value, and putting one higher than the other is fucking disgusting. Then of course we have the equally disgusting habit of denying sympathy to male victims of sexual assault. Sorry, but it's not "forcible sodomy," it's fucking rape, and men who are victimized by this already humiliating crime are again victimized by a society that refuses them any emotional support out of the pig-headed belief that rape only happens to the fragile, vulnerable womenfolk. Male victims of domestic violence are also marginalized in such a way.

Up to a point, I've no anger toward guys who view women in this way. As you yourself say, it's what you've grown up to believe. However, there was a time in the American southeast in which the enslavement of Africans was not only acceptable, but the natural order of things. That never made it right, and neither does tradition make the possessive over-protection of women acceptable. It's one of the hurdles we need to overcome before women can truly concern themselves only with their happiness.

@alexandersheen said:

Yeah fair enough - not everyone is wired like this but I know for myself that I am. Obviously in any case of extreme abuse, male or female, I'd hope most of would hope in. I didn't mean to set up my example so one-sided. It could have been a guy hitting his boyfriend or a guy and girl fighting, sure. All my life I was constantly told "you *never* raise your hand to a woman" etc so on and however my brain wants to process sexual equality I can't help that I'm just more sensitive to that kind of violence. Consider the awful treatment of women around the world in so-called developing nations, it's hard to feel "bad" about that kind of sensitivity. And either way it has nothing to do with the physiology for me, like I said, it's "just" social brainwashing. I don't really care one way or the other about women in CoD, and I doubt that in this game it would bother me to shoot women considering how arcadey the whole affair is, but, in some other games, it does.

I was playing GTAIV years ago and did a mission for..uh, Dwayne I think. I was supposed to deal with some guy his girlfriend or exgirlfriend was seeing now. I went to the spot but when I took out my piece he bolted, and she ran with him. When he stopped for a second to hop on a bike I took the shot - and missed, just barely. But the bullet hit Dwayne's exgirlfriend in the throat and she bled out and died on the spot. For a number of reasons, this moment stayed with me.

stupid

stupid

Man, imagine if World of Warcraft was the same way.

I'm not comfortable with the idea of killing anyone, but in a video game? I'll kill -everything- regardless of gender/race/age/scales/tentacles/etc if it allows me. It's kind of the whole point in video games to me, not necessarily to kill everything, but to experience things I can't/won't in real life.

@yukoasho: I'd just like to be clear that I totally don't believe women should be kept out of the military, and as I said before, I'm also glad that they were included in this game. Watching that scene, I thought it was pretty gross for all of the same reasons as you, and I agree with pretty much everything you said. So if anyone thought that what I was trying to say was that women are some precious commodity that ought to be protected while the big strong men are sent off to die, that's not how I view women at all. And also I'd like to say that in a ton of circumstances, I have no problem with this, I'll kick Nina Williams ass in Tekken all day long, delight in taking down any of the female bosses in Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy or whatever, hell I even killed my own wife in Fable, because I was role playing a vile human being, and everything was such a caricature in that game that relating it to real life is almost comical.

Call of Duty is a little different though, it's set in the real modern world, so its easier to relate to real life. And everything about that game is such a power fantasy, the whole thing is designed to make you feel like a badass, and the idea of someone feeling like a badass because they just stabbed a woman in the face is what's unsettling to me. It really does just feel like a bullying thing, for reasons I've already explained.

Really though, I don't want to blow how uncomfortable it makes me out of proportion. It barely bothers me when it happens. I just wanted to be honest about how it made me feel because a lot of people were acting like the dudes in the video were some sensationalist idiots, and I felt like the subject warranted some discussion beyond that, even if it made me come across like some "ignorant sexist."

@yukoasho: As I've said earlier, I don't think at this point it's merely just a social or cultural thing, or you would've seen a wide variance in gender relations across the world throughout history. I do think as our species pulled itself out of the state of nature and into civilization, to some level the prioritization of the safety of women was an evolutionary advantage over groups who lacked it, due to the difference of value between men and women when it comes to reproduction. If it were merely social, the meme (protect the women) would spread to some areas and not to others, instead it's appeared in every extant culture or society, even those that had absolutely no connection to others. It's not that the human species were always concerned with the protection of women, it was that those early human civilizations that prioritized that meme selected out those human civilizations that didn't (in much the same way that stable, river-based city civilizations have selected out nomadic civilizations). To some level we are hard-wired to be more concerned with women in danger than men. But....

With all this said, we're above nature now. Science has allowed us to deal with diseases, infant mortality, wounds and maladies that would have eliminated entire population centers a thousand years before (or ten thousand years before). There's no reason to prioritize women's safety due to their reproductive value over that of men, and no reason to prioritize men being placed in danger ahead of women. It wasn't that morals changed humans or western civilization to any major degree, it was that science allowed us to rise above our environment and allowed us to be more than just another animal doing whatever it takes to survive. In an environment where just about everything can and would kill you, it made some degree of sense to protect women to the expense of men, if you wanted your society to maintain into the next generation. We're risen above that environment. Thank you science.

Be married for a few years & you'll have no issue with this whatsoever.

No, your over thinking things. The reason why women were(and could still be) barred from units like infantry is that most physically cannot do it. The cost efficiency of screening, training, and yielding in certain combat MOS is simply not worth it. A small amount of women CAN do it. But simply not enough where the "juice is worth the squeeze." Men, as a pool, have an astronomically higher chance of succeeding in certain combat MOS's than women. I think its pointless to even get into the the ancillary issues(some which have merit/many which don't)as to why women would be barred from such an arena.

Personally? I could care less. As long as women have to meet the same standards as men for these jobs; I have no issue for them doing so. Obviously, your not going to get a whole lot. But that really shouldn't matter(from a principle standpoint). Some would argue that you will have to screen through WAY more potential candidates for women vs men. That probably is 100 percent true. But you can mitigate some of that with stringent pre-testing so that female hopefuls are dead serious of doing said MOS. Even before actual screening/training would start. That would weed out a lot of the "female empowerment" types who are doing it to make a statement. Honestly, I don't see it changing much of anything in combat infantry units with how few of women that would actually be there.

Now, if that means socially engineering or lowering standards so X amount of women can get into these positions? Thats fucking stupid. Unfortunately, the military is already playing with the idea of separate training pipelines for women. More than likely that would lead to separate combat MOS for women in branches like the infantry.

Gears 3 and Judgement had female characters in MP. I didn't hear anyone making a fuss about being able to chainsaw the fuck out of them in that game?

I'm not over thinking things, the structure of 'protect the women, send the men out to die' has existed for thousands of years before anything you could describe as a military ever existed. Without being rude, you're under-thinking things by looking at this purely in the scope of modern volunteer armies and recruitment standards, neither of which are applicable for 99% of human history. If it were merely social engineering you would find some cultures in which the meme was true and ones where the meme had not reached or had not been adopted. Instead you find the prioritization of female security in every culture that exists to modern day, which suggests that those who didn't absorb the meme were selected out by those who did. It has nothing to do with recruitment standards, since for thousands upon thousands of years, the only recruit standard was 'are you a man? then you go to war'. I'm proposing that the meme of female security and male disposability was not originally a moral decision, it was a survival one.

With all that said, of course I'm fine with a purely meritocratic, gender-neutral military derived purely from volunteers meeting the highest standards possible. But only because we live in such an environment where such a military would not spell the end of our people. Take me back 5000 years, when life spans were short, infant mortality was huge, and populations could barely replace themselves... and it would seem not only logical, but moral, to prevent the most important people in terms of reproduction (women and children) from facing danger and almost certain death, in favor of less important reproductive agents (men). In fact, I would argue that the reason you see such incredible sexual dimorphism in our species is because this meme has existed before we were even capable of complex language or reason. Through science (I believe tracking haplogroups but don't ask me too much) we've estimated that about 40% of men who have ever lived have reproduced, compared to about 80% of women who have ever lived, stretching back into prehistory. The males of our species that reproduced were the biggest and strongest, the best hunters, the best fighters, the ones who survived both the environment and rivals. For women, it was who was capable of giving birth to children, you don't hear a lot about 'child-bearing hips' nowadays, because science has made natural birth optional rather than mandatory, but it was incredibly important for thousands and thousands of years. If it were merely semi-modern, found in history societies deciding women were unfit to fight, you would not see the massive sexual dimorphism of our species.

That might be historically accurate but in my experience it's all about sneak fucks and heavy sleepers.

@brodehouse: I was only speaking from a modern context as to why I was responding to his statement that " By hiding women from combat for so long, the US government has put forth the implied position that a man's life is not as valuable as that of a woman."

For some reason you took that as addressing you. I wasn't addressing evolutionary sexual dimorphism because I wasn't arguing that point...

Also when you bring up recruitment standards for men in ancient armies. Its important to note that many of those armies had drastically different standards. A Roman Legionnare most certainly had very high standards. In contrast to perhaps a "peasant" or barbarian force....

(And if you want to talk about Romans, it depends if you're talking about Republic or Empire era. Republic era Roman armies were mostly farmers grabbed off of their Italian allies and mercenaries. It was as the Republic started falling apart that standing armies became a thing, temporarily)

Women being left out of video games - Sexist

Women being killed in video games - Sexist

Women being hurt in video games - Sexist

So how come this wasn't an issue when Gears 3 came out? Multiples time I have chainsawed/ gibbed / tagged and other horrible to things to people playing as Anya or Sam.

The exposure to a new ideas and integrating it into our thinking is hard. We should have patience for people to get up to speed on ideas, but if people still can't work their way around to the idea that people are people; with equal rights no matter what their gender, sexual orientation, color, creed, etc; than that is when we should lose patience. I get it, we are what you have seen until we learn different. But, part of being an adult...I should hope most of us here are adults...is learning that 'the World' is bigger than some of the narrow points of view.

It is about time CoD has female rendered characters in the game. There have been examples of female online avatars in many games for DECADES. And, don't believe the lies companies create about 'hit boxes', memory limitations, animation, or any other reason why women characters were not available - it was/is bullshit.

It had nothing to with hit boxes, memory limitations, or animation. This is about if you have a female character - they somehow had to have less attributes or more or be different in their minds. The old saw of game play where the male character carries more, but the female is faster is still being dragged around by these developers. The concept that a female characters would have a smaller hit box because "OF COURSE" a female character could never be 5' 11" like the men in the game is still being dragged around by these developers. That concept that if you put a female characters in the game the animation MUST show an exaggerated sway to the hips was being dragged around by developers.

The culture was "We can't we can't we can't!"; but the reality was "We think we need to do crazy things to do it right... because we are dopes."

That was brought up in the video, apparently Gears is cartoony and Call of Duty isnt...

Anyway, This is stupid. I've been playing a lot of Saints Row 2 recently (humble bundle) And it's kind of refreshing to see the gangs consisting of both sexes, same with cops etc. and it occured to me how most games dont do that and I guess now I know why. (some guys cant handle it apparently)

@monkeyking1969: Okay... conversely, if they make the genders absolutely identical in all visual and gameplay elements, they'll receive criticism that they're just taking a woman and turning her into a man... thereby stating that the only way for a woman to be 'acceptable' in games is for her to act like and for all intents and purposes, be a man.

There ain't no winning.

Also, that people have equal rights does not mean that we've all gone stupid and can't notice patterns. Women are biologically different from men, it has absolutely nothing to do with rights or morals, it's just a simple fact. Women generally trending to less developed upper bodies, shorter heights, less developed shoulders has absolutely no moral value applied to it, it's just how our species developed.

@yukoasho: To Mamiya's credit (spoilers)she goes along with Rei and Kenshiro anyway(spoiler).

Being that Planetside and Planetside 2 have always been my go-to shooters, I don't understand why shooting women is a military scenario is something that would make someone uncomfortable.

Oh, she ends up kicking a fair amount of ass before Fang King kidnaps her, thus making it less a case against the authors and more against Rei's own attitudes. Looking back at that scene, Kenshiro's general lack of protest and his explanation for Rei's actions suggest that, while perhaps a sympathetic character, Rei perhaps isn't thinking things through the whole way, or in a way that people should aspire to. There's also another excellent part early on with the Shin/Yuria arc, in which Yuria is denied the right to determine her own path in life due to Shin's idea that a woman can simply be taken like any other prize. Eventaully, depression takes its toll, combined with guilt over Shin's mad quest for power in some weird attempt to impress her, leading up to her killing herself in the hopes of making Shin stop his murderous rampage.

And that, in the end, is the root of the problem. No one can deny a woman's value in the reproductive cycle, but so much of this debate reduces women to essentially baby factories, without any thought as to her own desires, talents, merits or intelligence. And yes, for many women, starting a family is a great source of happiness. But that should be the woman's choice, not the choice of men who see no value in a woman's choosing another path.

@brodehouse - To be fair, military life does a pretty damned good job of desexualizing people. Something about wearing a shit-ton of armor, with pouches for ammo and weapon belts and helmets and the like, that kinda erases the sexual appeal of anyone. I'm reminded of a guy on another forum I frequent, who developed a fetish for long hair from his time in basic training. Basically, women in the military don't wear makeup, and while they're not made to shave their hair (BTW, women in the military should TOTALLY be made to shave their hair), they're made to wear in buns or otherwise hide it in such a way as to be unattractive to the guys. The guy basically told me that this one time during gas mask drills, the ladies were made to lower their hair, and suddenly he realized "Holy shit, women!"

While not the military, I've also come across female cops that you wouldn't know were female until they opened their mouth. Uniforms, contrary to the porn industry's depictions, do not make for sexy time.

Honestly, in a setting like Call of Duty, I'd expect/demand nothing less than women being made completely sexless by the massive amounts of armor and weapons that make up the modern military uniform. You gotta be pretty badass to wanna run headlong into gunfire regardless of gender.

Feeling uncomfortable about killing?

Sounds like a normal reaction to me.

Spec Ops: The Line kinda drove this point home last year. War is a horrible and terrifying experience - you can't really call your game realistic until you can convince the player that it does feel uncomfortable to be in that situation. I don't mind a Call of Duty game that asks us to consider this sort of thing we (the internet in general) have been crying out for a major change to the franchise for years, maybe we've got it this time.

Armies across the world wrestle with the same controversies, and are often very reluctant to put women in front line combat roles as a result, despite the fact that women are just as competent and devoted to their country and their mission as the men serving alongside them are.

I really don't see the issue.

I also think that it is completely ridiculous to feel comfortable taking a billion virtual human lives only because they happened to have penises.

I suspect it didn't feel like much of an issue in Gears 3 because everything about the presentation (the models, the characters, the story, etc) was fantasy and on the borderline of cartoonish. For whatever reason some people are disturbed by Ghosts because they are striving for a level of realism.

It is all irrational where trying to make sense of it is futile. If it bothers them that is their thing to detail with where they need to sort it out not us.

To be fair I get where your coming from, but Call of Duty's grip on realism is pretty shaky at best (The characters and story are as cartoonish than Gears 3) the models are more realistic in presentation, but death in COD is not even close to the realistic portrayal to the injuries sustained in modern warfare. You just get a little slash of blood and your character falls down. It's always been akin to death in an action movie, and they're been plenty of examples where women have been killed in those and nobody made a fuss.

That would of been fine if this was a private conversation in the staff office, but a public video of one of the largest video game websites is going to drum up discussion, and It's odd as people who supposed have have a passion and play a lot of video games, why it's now, with this game they've decided this is too much, especially with the more recent examples of women in video games (The deaths in Tomb Raider and the Last of Us really stick out to me.)

@extomar: LOL, COD's realism went bye bye a long while ago. If Rainbow Six was putting women in its multiplayer years ago, there is little or no excuse why that would be an issue in COD...

I mean you can drop a nuclear bomb as a killstreak....

Honestly, I see no reason why they can't put clowns or werewolves in it. Actually, it may give me more incentive to play it if they did....

@artelinarose said:

What if you did feel uncomfortable killing penis people, but it's happened so often that you don't even care anymore?

Who fucking cares, seriously

Who cares about this dumb stuff ?!?!?! FINN IS DEAD

D':

I'm happy to kill. Give me aborted hell babies in Dante's Inferno, faceless soldiers with lady bits in COD, or cute puppies in whatever game lets me kill them.

Killing a video game dog is way worse than killing a video game lady. That pathetic "yelp" sound they always make makes me want to cry.