Upon the release of EA Sports’ NHL17 on Tuesday, the public was reminded, once again, that despite ever-growing numbers of women and girl gamers, video games remain a traditionally male-oriented market. This is especially true on the sports side of things, where the overwhelming majority of leagues, teams and players depicted are male and seemingly marketed to men.
Although upwards of 50 percent of video gamers identify as women, there are very few opportunities for women and girls to see themselves or women athletes depicted. EA Sports, however, has made several stabs at it over the past decade, which started with a letter from a fan.
In 2011, 13-year-old Lexie Peters, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., wrote to EA Sports COO Peter Moore to express her displeasure with the company’s popular NHL game –– namely, that she couldn’t play as a woman. While Peters had her pick of any NHL player and customizable male avatars, it was not conducive to what she wanted to do: re-create her U-14 girls’ team in the game.
Although Peters was sure nothing would come of her letter, much did. The request eventually made its way down from Moore’s desk to that of Sean Ramjagsingh, the game’s main developer, and Peters herself became the first playable female character in the series, to great fanfare.
Representation matters, even in video games.
Long before Peters wrote that letter, U.S. Olympian and NWHL player Hilary Knight was projecting herself onto NHL ice by way of EA Sports’s games.
“My brothers and I would fight over the computer so my mom would take our video game away,” Knight told Excelle Sports, dropping into a mimic of children’s voices. “‘No, it’s my turn to play NHL!’ ‘No, it’s my turn!’” she joked.
“Once [NHL] allowed you to start making your own players, my brothers and I, we made ourselves,” Knight said. “It’s something when you’re growing up: you want to be in the NHL, you want to be in the Olympics, you want to be the best at your sport. And when you can kind of facilitate it in a video game world, that’s super cool. It’s like you’ve made it.”
If she had been able to actually play as herself? Even cooler.
EA Sports went further the following year, and debuted NHL 13 with Hayley Wickenheiser and Angela Ruggiero as playable ‘Legends’: a way for fans to take the ice as non-active players, such as Mario Lemieux or Wayne Gretzky.
Since then, EA’s FIFA brand has featured the women’s national soccer teams as playable options, and its PGA Tour golf videogame includes women golfers for players to select as their onscreen avatar. NHL includes a customization feature that lets players play as themselves, which EA Sports’ NHL game developer Sean Ramjagsingh cited as a substitute for the inclusion of real-life professional women hockey players, with different sexes, skin tones, hairstyles and weights available.
“[We’ve been focused on] adding in more options to allow people, male or female to see themselves in the game,” Ramjasingh told Excelle Sports.
But there are no women players pre-programmed into the game, no Legends in the style of Wickenheiser and Ruggiero, and certainly no women’s teams to play as or against. Adding international teams, as FIFA 16 did, was impossible due to difficulty negotiating with international sports governing bodies, much to the disappointment of Knight.
“It would be better for the national teams [to be featured in the game] just because of where we stand in the stability of the leagues,” Knight told Excelle Sports. “You’ve got the NWHL going on Year Two. You’ve got the C-dub, which has been around for longer and both of them are rival leagues, dueling it out, but I think the main focus still is every four years, is USA versus Canada.
“But I think any way’s a good way to start,” Knight laughed a little. “We’ve got to start somewhere.”
Knight isn’t the only one under that impression. Every year fans tweet at her asking if she will be on the cover: one even included a mock-up of a cover with her on it.
In June, some fans urged EA to add the two North American women’s hockey leagues into the game, the NWHL and the CWHL. While the NWHL has been around for only one season the CWHL has been part of the women’s hockey landscape for nearly a decade, taking over after the collapse of the first (Canadian-based) NWHL.
As EA’s NHL brand routinely adds new leagues to its repertoire (it currently features 11 men’s leagues) to mollify and drive consumer purchases, it’s business as usual to receive addition requests from eager fans.
“When we talk about leagues specifically, we get requests for different leagues, male leagues, female leagues, all the time,” Ramjagsingh said. “We’ll do a lot of research to understand the work around one adding each one of the leagues into the game. Our goal is to reach as many fans as possible, or appease as many fans as possible.”
This year, NHL added the East Coast Hockey League, a process that Ramjagsingh described in exhausting detail, from start to finish. First, he said, EA researches all its options and after making a decision, signs a deal with the league. The process moves on from there, getting references on all its arenas, home and away uniforms for each team, center ice logos, recording audio of player names, plays or moves, scanning as many players as possible in EA’s traveling scanning rink, and finally building the players’ heads from there.
EA also works with professional scouts to assess and rate players, which Ramjagsingh saw as perhaps the largest challenge to the potential project. Ramjagsingh noted that women players might receive two ratings: one relative to men and one to women.
“That’s what we talk about when adding female players,” Ramjagsingh said. “We’d have to make this decision. Do they only play against female players, and so when they do, they can be rated a 99 or a high-90s player? If they were to play against males the ratings would be slightly different relative to the male players themselves. For us, the relative rating is the most important conversation to have around there.”
Start to finish, it would take approximately a year to add the two leagues to EA’s NHL game, meaning fans of the women’s leagues certainly won’t see them incorporated before NHL 18, if then.
At the moment the prognosis remains murky as to whether or not adding women’s leagues to the game would broaden EA’s purchasing base, but the evidence so far supports it. Not only was FIFA 16 EA’s first game to include women’s teams, but it sang it from the tops of mountains, featuring U.S. women’s national team player Alex Morgan on the cover alongside UFC Barcelona’s Lionel Messi. FIFA 16 was the best-selling game of the year; Forbes called it “the benchmark for sports games.” Soccer is the world’s most prolific sport and is always popular, but 2015 showed a fervor for EA’s FIFA never seen before. Could Hayley Wickenheiser or Natalie Spooner staring down the camera pump up EA sales? Why not try and see?
When EA added Peters to the game, it became an enormous story, as it did when Wickenheiser and Ruggiero were added to Legends mode, garnering EA more publicity than before, reaching new markets and likely boosting sales. For a company that wants to continually grow its user base, continuing this trend should be a no-brainer.
“I think, following the success of FIFA [when we added women’s teams], we need to better understand from our fans themselves and how many female fans are playing our game and how many are not playing it because we don’t have female leagues in the game,” Ramjagsingh said in response to this line of questioning. “That would all be part of the assessment we do for every league we put in the game, just understanding how much it’s going to move the needle for us. Does it take us to new markets or new consumers of the game? All of those factor into the business case for what we add to the game.”
Not only were sales through the roof, ratings of the game itself were as well, which is a strong argument for adding the NWHL and CWHL to NHL 18 or 19. The business side of things may hold the most sway with EA, but the bigger picture says the positive impact it would have on young girls — such as the aforementioned Lexie Peters — and the athletes already in the thick of it, would make it worthwhile in and of itself.
“I think it would do a lot for the visibility of our sport and would attract more fans,” Knight said. “It would get the visibility up, get the interest going, and also, potentially for [EA Sports], capitalize on the upcoming Winter Olympic market.
“I think there’s a handful of opportunities and a positive impact on these opportunities they could have, not just for EA sports or the NHL [game], but also for the individual,” Knight added. “Those training day in and day out and trying to grow the game as well.”
from Hairstylez http://cityhairstyle.xyz/one-year-out-ea-sports-needs-to-add-womens-teams-to-nhl-18-excelle-sports/
