Response: Geoff Ramsey on the Battlefield V controversy

The Achievement Hunter group generally just talk about video games, movies, the travel they deal with, and the content they produce. But on Off Topic #133 they decided to talk about guns, religion, controversy surrounding internet outrage over Ellie in The Last of Us being a lesbian and later on gender options (relating to Battlefield V and its controversy).

In Geoff’s own words, he says about his daughter Millie, “She says, ‘If I can’t play as a girl, I don’t want to play (the video game).’ And you know, I can understand that.”

Well hold on a second Geoff. Does that mean you’ve felt somewhere down the line, “Oh, I really love this game and I’m excited to play it. Oh, wait, I can't play as a guy? Well, I’m not interested then.” Has that thought ever really gone through your mind? Or does this only apply to women wanting to play women?

And listen, I understand where Millie is coming from as well. She wants to be pandered to. Don’t we all, at the end of the day. The issue I have with it is based off of previous comments Geoff has made about Millie, I have the feeling this might be ideologically or politically motivated. In a previous Off Topic podcast, Geoff talked about how he spoke on a ‘women in gaming’ panel at a convention, and how unsure he was about being qualified to speak on it, and how humbled he was by the experience. As if his penis made him unqualified to understand, or to speak for women (in video games), despite having a daughter, two long marriages with women and a lifelong career in video game content.

And he’s previously talked about bringing Millie to the Million Women's March that was formed as a political campaign against President Donald Trump. It’s pretty clear where both lie on the political spectrum, left-leaning to say the least. Now, that’s not to say I discount their opinion or think less of it; I consider myself left-leaning. In 2016 I registered as a Democrat to vote for Bernie Sanders, I have nothing but respect for people’s right to have a differing opinion. The only issue I bring up is this.

It’s obvious Rooster Teeth is left-leaning, I can see that purely through the things that they like on Twitter, without catching the not-so-subtle hints made on camera. And that’s fine. The issue I have is when a company like this feels it necessary to have an unbalanced conversation in the realm of politics. Nobody on either side wants to hear five people espouse the same opinion with virtually no one there to challenge what they think. It’s not even really their fault, they’re just sharing what they think.

The problem is that if someone like Joel Heyman went on his own Rooster Teeth show and started doing the same thing, basically saying things that the political left disagrees with, I guarantee you he would be pulled into HR or his bosses office and have a talking to. The only problem I have with this behavior is it’s not reciprocal. Rooster Teeth doesn’t allow a right-wing voice to do the same thing on their platform, so it seems a lot like favoritism. It seems like taking a side. And it seems like Rooster Teeth has no problem with that at all. And the sad part is a vast majority of their industry is the same way. They are very obviously in a political bubble, and they almost view their audience’s criticism of this as something they expect and resent.

As someone who finds themselves in the middle politically, it really distracts from the point of the content, and at the end of the day it could be remedied with two simple solutions: either drop the subjects entirely, because you know the panel is one-sided, or allow dissenting voices to make their case or be on the panel in the first place. Don’t let one side say something and then gloss over it because you’re afraid of a real, heated argument on camera, either let that person speak their peace or drop it entirely. Stop playing favorites, basically. If you were all right-wing and constantly shitting on abortion and immigration, you would feel how I feel right now, assuming that you aren’t the type of person to ignore people you’d otherwise like just because of their politics.

So this brings me to my next point. Geoff goes fully off the rails with the Battlefield V situation. For a quick summary, Battlefield V has an open-ended option to play as a female soldier on any side of the conflict, in any role combat or otherwise. Some players have made the complaint that this is not historically accurate, as it’s a WWII game and generally that type of genre tries to stay historical.

Geoff actually makes the point that “Those people, they don’t want a historical game. There’s a million historical games, there’s a new historical game every year. That’s a guise for the fact that they don’t want a woman protagonist. It’s not because they want it to be historically accurate. They don’t give a fuck about it being historically accurate. Nothing about those games is historically accurate… you know what’s not historically accurate? Respawning. Who cares? It’s a video game.”

Here’s the first thing wrong with that: Why do you hesitate to say that you can speak for ‘women in gaming’ of all subjects, but you instantly get to speak for every person on the internet that doesn’t like Battlefield V? As someone who stopped playing Battlefield after its fourth installment, my main point of contention with the game was its insistence to make it less and less realistic and less historically accurate, along with maps not being as good as the third installment and plenty of other issues.

To discount my opinion, based purely off of your assumption that everyone on the internet is actually lying and just has a secret agenda to exclude women from video games is really intellectually dishonest and dismissive of actual issues in the game. Let’s not even get into the fact that the game allows you to paint your uniform any color you want and run around with a hot pink gun. Meanwhile you’re depicting the most brutal and bloody war ever fought by the human race, that got so desperate that women were finally allowed to take small parts in the war because it was so dire. The theme around the game simply does not match the historical period they’ve decided to make their game about; they did the same type of thing with Battlefield 1 and I didn’t get that game for the same reason.

You’ve already accepted the concept of a girl refusing to play a game because there are no playable girls in it, so I understand where you’re coming from. You don’t think a historically accurate game is inclusive enough for people like your daughter Millie. She could live her entire life ignoring every game that doesn’t have a playable female protagonist, but I don’t think her life would be better for it, if she really does enjoy video games. And only buying or supporting games with a female option is just as close-minded as you accuse the ‘historically accurate’ crowd of being. Not only do I think you’re wrong, but you are verifiably a hypocrite.

And one of the more important points about games depicting a significant historical event like WWII historically accurately, is so the people playing it get an understanding that this was a real event, with real people, who died for their loved ones. And despite the fact that it is a fictitious retelling of the event, any time you sacrifice an otherwise simple historical fact just to sell a few more copies to people who are ideologically motivated, you whitewash the history of the human race. You start to erase reality, you depict things a little more equal than they really were, and you risk misinforming every person that touches your product. People like to talk about how dumb our culture has become and how little people really know about history and politics and whatnot, and it’s because of stuff like this.

“It’s just a video game, who cares?”

You might care if you’re suddenly surrounded by a generation of people who think their were just as many women on the battlefield in WWII as there were men. Because that begins to diminish all of the social movements that fought for equal rights for women, and blacks, and gays and whoever else needed them. If there was a sims game set in the 1920’s and there was a system for players to vote for town mayor, don’t you think it’d be a little disrespective to depict a woman sim voting? Doesn’t it distract from the experience for failing to hit a simple historical fact, and diminish the entire women’s suffrage movement? It pretends it never needed to happen, and that our society was better than it really was.

It’d be like if the Germans made a game about World War II and refused to acknowledge Hitler, the Nazi symbol, the Holocaust or anything else, and depicted a heroic German Reich taking over Poland, France and the Soviet Union. Not only is that inaccurate and insulting to the German people, as if they don’t have the moral courage to stand up to their crimes, it’s insulting to the Polish, Russian, and Jewish populations, to pretend the atrocities that did happen, didn’t happen because “it’s just a video game, bro”.

Here’s my direct response to that type of thinking. If it’s just a video game, then you can make up something new. Be creative. Earn your paycheck. Depict a war that never happened. Make your own world. Don’t piggyback off of history and expect to get off scot-free while skirting over the most important details. Because a lot of real people that lost a lot of real loved ones care, they care a lot about historical accuracy, and the historians themselves that try to tell people about these events, they care about what really happened. Because it happened to real human beings. It happened less than a hundred years ago, basically a blink of an eye in the history of the human race. The idea that it could never happen again is wishful thinking. And if we raise a generation of people that don’t understand the real struggle that our grandfathers and grandmothers went through, we’re doomed to repeat it. That means showing the backwards thinking of the SS as they genocided black people, and jews, and gays and gypsies. What kind of black person would want to play as the SS? How does it even make remotely any sense, on one hand they throw them into ovens for their skin color but you allow them to fight on the same side ‘to make it more inclusive’? Who wants to make the Nazi army more inclusive? What purpose does that serve other than to sell copies?

Geoff goes on, though. “If you want a historically accurate game, I played one called World War 2 Online, you spawn, run 45 minutes to get into a town, get shot once and die, spawn 15 minutes later and do it all over again. Historically accurate sucks. History sucks. That’s why it’s in the past. History is the worst.” Two other people on the podcast mention that history repeats itself over and over. The irony is really too much. Another mentions how good the current time is, with Amazon and whatnot. This only further reinforces my point that we shouldn’t whitewash history if we don’t want to repeat it, and this complaining about people disliking the whitewash of history is completely un-self aware. A few minutes later Geoff remarks about how you wouldn’t want to be in Germany before WWII, in relation to a different conversation. The sheer lack of ability to connect those two topics in his brain really tells you where he’s coming from; he knows the historical facts of the matter, and skirts around them.

The sad part is a whole generation of people playing Battlefield V will never see any of that, reflected in even small details like the war mostly being fought by men. That will be thrown out the window for people like Millie. There’s a growing trend of events like World War II not being taught in schools because the teachers don’t know how to teach it. Historical ignorance is a real problem in our society, to hear it get dismissed flippantly to paint a narrative that all gamers are sexist 'complainers' is quite self-serving to the type of person Geoff is trying to be. The type of person that appears to shy away from a ‘woman in gaming’ panel, but can’t wait to get on a podcast to brag about it afterward, and brag about supporting ‘gender diverse’ games like the new female only Wolfenstein. That’s the only way he convinced Millie to play the new Wolfenstein games, because eventually maybe she can play as a chick in a sequel. It really shows you how petty this issue really is to them, and how quick they are to drop their dollars in support of something they ideologically agree with.

But hey, you know what? Buy what you want. Play what you want. Just don’t call me sexist because I pointed out historical reality, and refuse to purchase something that cares more about ‘being inclusive’ than accurately depicting reality. Don't paint me as the same type of person that lies about what major or minor they had in college just to sound smarter. The fact is that specific situation was singled out to dismiss every person who thought the game should be more historically accurate, and paint them as the same type of person that lies about it to get their point across. That's called strawmanning, it's a logical fallacy.