hansari said:
1) How do you think this reflects developers? I don't think they are sexist, but do you think they don't believe women are integral in war? Is it possible that not a single member working on Modern Warfare walked up to his teammates and said, "maybe we should throw in some more female npc's..."?
Women are integral in warfare in that they have long played crucial roles on the home front, be it from the mundane tasks of simply keeping a household in working order, or more recently in world war 2 producing the vast majority of the armaments used to wage war. It has only been in recent memory that women have played any significant role in the military anyway. Yes, one can point to any number of historical anecdotes about some important thing women did in a war, but by and large warfare and it's associated activities have been the domain of men - women at best have had the unenviable task of trying to piece the armies back together. Even today, in most armies women are denied direct combat roles. In the US, one of the most liberal nations in this sense, women are only allowed in two jobs that have combat implied in the job description - military police and combat aviator (helicopter and the like). While the Israeli army also has women serving often in direct combat roles, this is the direct result of the utter lack of a frontline in most modern warfare.
As a result, do I think women are integral in war? Absolutely not, unless the war becomes large scale enough that a nations young male populace becomes insufficient to wage the battle. If you expand the question to "are women integral to a nation at war", the answer becomes an obvious yes - because at the end of the day the only thing that allows most men to march to their inevitable deaths is the idea that their homes are not actively falling into ruin and may continue to stand should the fight well.
hansari said:
2) How do you think this reflects us gamers? This is something we have all noticed at one time or another, but is the fact that we don't make a big deal about it signify that we, in a way, agree with it? That its appropriate for women to serve in the two present roles I listed? Would the presences of more female soldiers fighting by your side change the gameplay positively, negatively, or not at all?
This has no reflection on gamers, because games are, in this example, simply reflecting societial notions regarding gender roles in warfare. When it comes to the suitability of women for combat, I have to disctinct and directly contradictary notions about the subject.
In the strictest sense, women are perfectly capable of serving a useful role in direct warfare. While they are, on average, smaller, weaker and slower than men, they still remain physically capable of performing most combat tasks to a similar degree as men.
That said, there are a host of perfectly GOOD reasons why womeon are currently denied a role in direct military conflict if a nation can prevent it. First, you have the obvious problem that women are, on average, smaller, slower and weaker than men. Unfortunately, this is critically important as any infantry (i'm going to say man because there is no gender neutral version of the word) man is required to carry a full combat load (it starts at about 60 lbs for the US) for twelve or more hours, and they are still expected to be able to regularly sprint over short distances or jog for longer distances. Unlike what movies show, if combat actually does degerate into close combat, there are five key factors for success. The first three are phsicial - in the average close combat situation the victor will be the larger, faster and stronger party. This is the precise reason why women police officers are so often forced to rely on their weapon in a situation where a man might resort to a baton or other less lethal implement - being smaller, slower and weaker puts you at a tremendous disadvantage in close combat. The other two have little to do with gender - the first is psychological - one must be willing and able to kill up close and be prepared for a great deal of suffering in return. Then you have simple weight in numbers. So, while women are capable of being nearly (or in some cases equally) as well suited for the role, by introducing women to the mix you will have one of two outcomes. Either, you resort to a double standard (the route the US Army currently goes for it's PT testing. When I was 18 for example, I was expected to run the 2-mile in 14:56 whereas a woman of the same age had more than 18 minutes to accomplish the same. And while I was expected to produce at least 42 pushups a woman only needed to produce 13. The only equality was found in the sit-up event), or you keep the current standard that appears to be discriminatory towards women. For whatever reason (social pre-conceptions or whatever) women in the military in my experience were largely incapable of meeting a physical standard that is designed to challenge a male.
The second problem is one of logistics - simply put, women have stricter hygene requirements than a male does. If this requirement is not met, the result is a startilingly high incidence rate of unpleasant conditions that reduce potential performance. It is not uncommon for a male infantry soldier to go weeks without anything but a pint or two of water a day to provide any potential hygene upkeep. A soldier in such a condition can not even expect to be kept in decent supply of toilet paper, much less hope to get a regular supply of the more specialized personal hygene equipment associated with women. At the end of the day, food, ammunition and fuel trumps all else when it comes to the supply line, and it is already difficult to keep those stocked. This is hardly a damning issue, but it comes back to a previous point - the inevitable result is the introduction of a special standard for women specifically because this is a problem that will, without a doubt, occur.
The third problem is one of incidence of injury. Simply put, women are, thanks to interesting design choices in the pelvis area, significantly more prone to stress fractures or other similar injury to the lower body. Even in the relatively low impact experience of basic training lead to more than 1/3 of the female component of my basic training company recieving an injury that adversely affected their training. Of the five people discharged from the army for injury out of a company of 170 or so, four of them were female. This is even more shocking when you realize less than 40 people in the company were female. In Airborne school, only one out of the ten women in my group managed to reach the end. Of those that failed, 4 left due to injury to the lower extremities (the rest failed at a physical standard somewhere along the way, or in the case of one, refused to jump).
The problem, at the end of the day, is simply that women
apparently have enough that is different about them that either you would keep a fairly exclusionary set of physical criteria or you would enact a second standard for women. My own experience tells me there is little that breeds discontent in a unit faster than unequal treatment by the chain of command.
3)
How do you think this affects our appearance to outsiders? To the arguments that other people make that video games aren't really a serious medium like books/television/films can be?
hansari said:
4) How do you think this affects our appearance to women? There is already discussions on an absence of female protagonists, but does the absence of women merely appearing present in certain situations turn-off potential female gamers? Have any of you women reading this feel it makes a difference?
It doesn't. This standard has been in existance long before any of our respective nations were founded. It matters not if this changes in the near future or if the standard is based on mostly irrational argument - right now few militaries I am aware of ever directly send womeon to the frontlines. Of those nations that do, most do so in an auxillary role where their experience with combat is kept at a disance - helicopter pilots, medics and MP's. Video games in this case, while generally simply catering to a young male audience, are simply reflecting reality. That it may turn off female gamers is more or less a non issue. Until the day the SAS or us Army SF allows a women into the fold, the fact that video games set in the modern era fail to place them in such a role is trivial.
hansari said:
5) What are your expectations of this trend changing. Do you expect to see things differently in Modern Warfare 2?
There has been a general trend towards allowing women to serve in combat roles for the past several decades. The growing rate of asymetric warfare occurance has lead to the realization that in modern warfare there may never again be a distinct frontline where you fight toe to to with an enemy. Since women cannot be shielded from combat as they have been in the past, the argument has shifted - do you bite the bullet and let them in regardless, giving them equal access to training and whatnot, or do you exclude them entirely? Women have made significant strides in my lifetime, and currently there are only a handful of jobs that still refuse enlistment based on gender - infantry (including mechanized/motorized infantry such as the cavalry scout), artillery, and armor. In spite of this, women currently hold jobs that place them "outside the wire" with regularity. Transportation remains a high priority target of any enemy, and women make up a signifcant portion of our transportation units. MP's often provide security for convoys, and one can find plenty of women in such a role. Human Intelligence Collectors are regularly lumped into small units and sent into the field together to collect information from a variety of unsavory sources. The women in these positions are placed at equal risk and the military holds them in the same regard as a male. Women have regularly served in direct combat in the recent Wars of the US, with only one incident that anyone even noticed (Jessica Lynch).
hansari said:
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*I understand that women only make up about 15% of our current US armed forces...but looking at video games, it seems to reflect that percentage as being less that 2%...
Just keep in mind, of that 15%, they are generally placed in roles like, military intelligence (non collection entity), medical or logisitcs. Only a tiny fraction of tghem are in jobs like MP and combat aviation. Out of the hundreds of MP's I met during my service, only a half dozen were women. And I never met a single woman who flies any combat helicopter (The AH series), and only knew of one personally that flew any helicopter (in her case, a blackhawk).
