Soccer, Women, and Video Games

I am a footie fan – a soccer fan, for my fellow Americans. One of the things that I love so much about international football that we don’t get for any sport here in the States is the off-field drama (and unabashed eye candy).

So I was very excited to stumble across a news release for a new free soccer video game that lets you not just play the game itself but also engage in off-the-pitch shenanigans.

The best part, the one that convinced me that I needed to find and download this – work and school be damned – is at the very end of that news release:

The player avatars can be female. So we could be seeing some top-flight co-ed teams. And best of all, the women don’t seem to be enhanced for male viewers.

(I wonder how Natasha Kai would function on a co-ed team?)

Considering the relative dearth of non-sexualized women available in most video games, and the sexualization of even the male players in most countries, this is quite a step.

Now, all they need to add is the ability to live the life of a footballer’s wife/girlfriend or an obsessed fan, and the video game would carry all of the complexities of the real thing.