THIS IS THE PINNACLE OF EQUALITY IN GAMING SON

Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings (1999!)

When I think of equality in video games and any media, I like to think of a world where no one gives a shit or bats an eye that some one has some sort of genitalia between their legs. I like to think of a world where if you want to do something you just prove you can and off you go.

I really loved this game when I was younger, I played the shit out of it. I only recently started playing the HD edition on steam and it still holds up as one of the best resource focused RTS's of all time. Lately over the past year though there has been a lot of people going on about how there is not enough diversity in games an I just wanted to make a post giving Ensemble studios some credit for representing everyone in a game from 1999.

Now over the large amount of time I have been putting into this game playing the AI, drinking beer, and watching old TNT's on my second monitor I realized something kind of amazing about this game and how it subtly empowers women. Women can be miners, lumberjacks, farmers, hunters, gathers, masons, and builders. you could have a situation where all men are gathering berries and all women are mining gold and at not one point ever does anyone bat an eye about that. Now maybe in some weird fiction way you could claim that the threat of the annihilation of your entire race by another has caused these civilizations to throw all stereotypes and prejudices out the window out of sheer desperation to survive, but I like to think this game exists in some weird alternate reality where everyone worked together to survive and everyone was viewed as entirely equal just because that's the right thing to do.

...I mean except for the other civilizations who need to be burned to the ground, I do always feel bad watching my army burn farms and kill villagers but hey, that's the way it goes sometimes.

I'm not going to make this post long but I did just want to call out Ensemble for taking the time to just do the right thing without any fuss about it one way or another. It's not some grand sweeping thing like a transgendered female jewish lead in some AAA blockbuster but I think it really portrays societies where everyone is equal and in some plain and small way that means a lot to me.

So cudo's on them I guess.

but why couldn't it have been Age of Empires: The Age of Queens?

You spelled pinnacle incorrectly.

@korwin: Thank you, it has been edited.

I would give them a pass on something like that just because the single player story mode revolved around historical events with actual kings that existed, I think there maybe was a queen or two in number 3 though!

Age of mythology had the same thing. Except there where no female dwarfs if i recall. So i guess that's where equality in gaming truly died.

@bicycle_repairman: It's true you don't see many dwarf women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for dwarf men. And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no dwarf women, and that dwarves just spring out of holes in the ground!

Age of Royalty, sons/daughters

When I was a kid I used to sort my villagers by giving women "feminine" roles (herb gathering, farming) and men "masculine" roles (mining, hunting).

I'm...I'm the problem with society ;_;

@onlykris: I sent out the ladies to go and kill boars because they stabbed the crap out of them.

@nictel: Ah the march to and battle of Helm's Deep. The only added part of the movies I actually enjoyed. Humorous to mention that quote in this thread, though, considering Peter Jackson had to literally make up a female character from scratch for the Hobbit films because there isn't a single female character in the entire book and the three female characters in Lord of the Rings each have like a paragraph dedicated to them.

So you start the game with 2 women and 1 man huh? Clearly this decision was made to enable the fantasies of straight males. Disgusting.

Imagine how frustrating the game would be if you had two different types of workers that could only each do certain tasks because of some arbitrary designation. THAT would have truly highlighted the harm of gender inequality. THAT would have been the way to achieve progress. But clearly, Ensemble are a bunch of misogynists, so they didn't do that.

Also, they should have given each worker a chance of being colourblind, with a higher likelihood amongst the men, which adds a danger of those people picking poisonous berries.

I should probably design games.

Nice, now do this for the rest of the units in the game

EDIT: oh, Italians, that explains everything!

Well that's pretty much how it went. Only when sheer survivalism was no longer our life goal did things start transmuting into the form things are now, where gender ROLES are in this massive state of flux and fluidity. The fact that the two sexes were doing different forms of work doesn't really say anything about equality, nor should it. Different context entirely.