Until recently, women’s teams in sports video games were relatively hard to come by, with the most popular sports game franchises not including any female representation. highest-earning sports game, FIFA, starting with FIFA 16. Since then, women’s teams have become a more common occurrence in sports game franchises, allowing girls and women to finally enjoy these games with better representation.
Representation in entertainment, including video games, is incredibly important. NHL 12 introduced its first female character in the NHL video game series, after a 14 year old female fan penned a letter to EA Sports, asking why there weren’t any female characters in the game. Despite this, it’s been another ten years since this occurred before EA announced the addition of International Ice Hockey Federation women's teams to the beloved game franchise, finally adding playable women’s teams starting with NHL 22. The ten-year gap between these two changes to the NHL game franchise demonstrates how slowly progress is being made when it comes to improving women’s representation in sports video games.
Despite the success and widespread popularity of WNBA, it wasn’t until the release of NBA Live 18 that female basketball players and teams were added to the popular NBA gaming franchise. UFC games were slightly ahead of the curve, adding eight women as playable characters in 2014’s UFC, and expanding this to forty-five women in the 2016 sequel, UFC 2. Last year's UFC 4 made history with a woman as the UFC game's top-ranked fighter, bantamweight Amanda Nunes. As EA Sports continues to dominate the sports video gaming market, the onus falls on the company to improve diversity and representation in its games, moving away from the male-dominated games of its past.
Game Developers Face Backlash For Adding Women's Teams
The addition of women as playable characters and women’s teams to sports video game franchises has not been without its obstacles. When FIFA 16’s inclusion of women's teams was announced, the game and its developers were met with vitriol online, as noted by The Last of Us aim to elevate women by making women the protagonists, the focus of the storytelling, rather than ing or non-playable characters.
While it is clear there is still a lot of work to be done regarding women’s representation in gaming, it’s good to see women and women's teams finally being added to successful long-running sports game franchises. Sports game developers, including EA Sports and 2K Sports, are slowly but proactively working to address the gender gap in their games; an important and much-needed step in the right direction. This deep-seated issue can't and won’t be resolved overnight, as evidenced by the backlash against last year's tweet from E3, but it's promising to see women are finally getting the representation they deserve, and it is long overdue.
