Christmas Wish 2020: Please Put Women's Baseball in OOTP!

[MaeNekoChan]

So as a female fan of baseball and OOTP, I think the lack of women players and leagues is a HUGE problem for the game. I don't understand how so much work has been put into making historical and international leagues in this game, but no women as far as I know are in the game or are even able to be created? I think the Dev team should really make this a priority asap on future OOTP projects. Women's baseball is and has always been a thing and frankly the reason why it is so stigmatized and relatively unknown in the US in particular is due to the lack of representation in media; even when women's leagues or individual players are represented, they are often portrayed as a novelty which both discourages women from playing and works against the normalization of women's baseball. (There was also a good episode this week of Fangraphs's Effectively Wild podcast that talked more about these issues and current developments that I think everyone would enjoy listening to )

Honestly as a woman it's so incredibly frustrating to see the blatant sexism that still gets thrown around in public, let alone the material inequality between men and women's baseball. I think OOTP really owes it to girls everywhere to be on the cutting edge of fixing this narrative and the problem of representation; not only is this a major social issue that OOTP can help fix, they likewise would be tapping into a gaming market which has otherwise been ignored. Looking through this site's archives, I know this has been a question that's been posed for at least a decade on these forums now and I really think it's time for the Devs to listen and deliver on this. It's important socially and to many gamers of all genders personally who play this game.

Some requests:

1) Make women's historical and/or custom leagues playable

2) Allow for co-ed leagues with ciswomen, transfeminine, and non-binary players represented. While we love our male players obviously, I think OOTP should allow for representation for players of all gender identities.

Thank you for reading and I hope fellow gamers on here will support this request

Edit: Thanks for the positive feedback we've received so far! I'd just like to link to a post later in the thread that I made which hopefully will begin to address some questions and concerns about representing women's stats, performance, scouting scale, &c. in-game based on the work Luisa Gauci and others have begun doing with Driveline Baseball! I hope Devs especially will take a look at this and reach out to consult accordingly ^_^

[mytreds]

(Grabs popcorn)

[sdw1000]

Ummm....no. Get out of here with your identity politics. Merry Christmas.

[BIG17EASY]

Originally Posted by MaeNekoChan

Some requests:

1) Make women's historical and/or custom leagues playable

2) Allow for co-ed leagues with ciswomen, transfeminine, and non-binary players represented. While we love our male players obviously, I think OOTP should allow for representation for players of all gender identities.

Thank you for reading and I hope fellow gamers on here will support this request

I'm all for including diversity of all sorts in the game. I'm not a programmer, but it seems that it shouldn't be too hard to have an option for fictional leagues to choose male, female, etc. for league makeup.

However, two points about your requests quoted above. For historical women's leagues, there needs to be oodles of data available to build those leagues from. We're lucky that more than 100 years of MLB data exists, which allows those historical leagues and rosters to be created in OOTP. To my knowledge, the required data (outside of team names and player names) does not exist for the few women's leagues that existed.

And for your second request, I'm not sure how OOTP would represent those people. Players in OOTP are essentially a name, a face (if FaceGen is on), a height, weight, hometown and school. The rest is baseball-related info. So I'm curious how you'd have OOTP represent a transgender person when you can't necessarily tell gender from the info currently provided? Does the game add a gender column in the player bio?

[Johnny Case]

My Christmas wish:

NOT!

[Déjà Bru]

I thanked the OP for her post, especially this sentiment: "While we love our male players obviously, I think OOTP should allow for representation for players of all gender identities."

But then I removed it when I went back to the subtle but definite association of this game and its developers to "blatant sexism."

The developers' three aims with this game, if I had to name them, have been 1) fun, 2) realism, and 3) making money. I am sorry, but women's baseball has not been prominent enough to further those last two goals.

I would venture to say that, based on those criteria, women's baseball has simply not been important enough to be a priority. Perhaps the developers will consider incorporating a women's league as an option in the Custom League function. Frankly, I cannot think of a women's league that would serve as a base for a standard or historical game.

My political liberal side often wars with my social conservative side but here, the latter has won out. I find myself resentful of people who would unwind historical reality and condemn as "-ist" (insert your peeve in front of those letters) people who have not bent over backwards to cater to their favorite modern cause.

The OP's association of OOTPB with "blatant sexism" is foolish and reprehensible. All the developers did was to reflect reality and they did a very good job of it.

[BirdWatcher]

My Christmas hope, my request to all of you, in the spirt of this season, is to show kindness and understanding, to respond constructively and respectfully to perspectives here that you don't share.

When someone who is new to the forums, someone who self-reports a personal characteristic that almost surely puts them in a position to see life a bit differently than most of us might, I ask of you, with all sincerity and respect, to respond with respect and thoughtfulness. (Much as BIG17EASY did.)

You don't need to share their perspective, and you have every right to even hold it in contempt if you must (for my part, admittedly, I share the hopes of the OP, but I have long been aware that my world view is likely in the minority around here), but please remember that there are respectful ways to voice your disagreement. And that another option entirely is to heed that age old advice your mom probably gave you along the way: if you don't have anything nice to say, perhaps just say nothing at all.

[CBeisbol]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

All the developers did was to reflect reality and they did a very good job of it.

The reality is that women have played and play baseball. Period

One can create whatever fantasy league one can imagine, as long as it's only men who play.

As I've said before, the sexism isn't on the part of the developers, necessarily, but on the part of baseball as a whole and society

[CBeisbol]

Originally Posted by sdw1000

Ummm....no. Get out of here with your identity politics. Merry Christmas.

Wow.
Typical of a certain type of person to be like this.

I can only imagine this person's reaction if all the characters in the game were...not men.

[Déjà Bru]

Agree with BW, of course, and CB's reply to me. There could be a place in OOTPB for female players and management, certainly, but only in largely a fictional setting. I honestly cannot think of any real women's leagues on which to base a game. (The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from "A League of Their Own?") But to associate OOTPB and OOTPD with sexism because they have avoided indulging with revisionism is nonsense.

[CBeisbol]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

Agree with BW, of course, and CB's reply to me. There could be a place in OOTPB for female players and management, certainly, but only in largely a fictional setting.

:whispers: every single universe, league, team, player, coach, etc ever played in OOTP has been fictional

[CBeisbol]

Dudes playing OOTP

Let me tell you this thing that happened in my 130 year old league with teams in Tuvalu and Nauru in which World War 2 never occurs. Also, your league with women is too fake. Also this is not sexist

[rudel.dietrich]

I agree, it is time for female players, coaches and front offices people to be added.

And it would hardly be cutting edge. Football Manager added female pronouns and staff many years ago and it got the typical misogynistic pushback but the developers did it anyways.
Now it is just another part of the game.

FIFA added women’s national teams many versions ago. It is only a matter of time before they add leagues like the women’s FA Super League, women’s Bundesliga and the new NWSL.

NBA 2K last year added the WNBA. And for the current version greatly expanded that. Now you can be the GM of a WNBA team or use the MYplayer mode to create a women’s player and be a rookie drafted into the WNBA and play out your career.

I think OOTP has grown to where it is now time.

And this stuff matters. I have a young daughter and son. My daughter gets to see people like her represented in video games which are an important part of her life. It may sound like a small thing but it’s not. I can see how it affects her.
And my son also sees women in games and is going to grow up in a world where he sees women as equals in every field of life.
We teach him this anyways, but it is nice when media that he consumes reinforces this.

[MaeNekoChan]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

I thanked the OP for her post, especially this sentiment: "While we love our male players obviously, I think OOTP should allow for representation for players of all gender identities."

But then I removed it when I went back to the subtle but definite association of this game and its developers to "blatant sexism."

The developers' three aims with this game, if I had to name them, have been 1) fun, 2) realism, and 3) making money. I am sorry, but women's baseball has not been prominent enough to further those last two goals.

I would venture to say that, based on those criteria, women's baseball has simply not been important enough to be a priority. Perhaps the developers will consider incorporating a women's league as an option in the Custom League function. Frankly, I cannot think of a women's league that would serve as a base for a standard or historical game.

My political liberal side often wars with my social conservative side but here, the latter has won out. I find myself resentful of people who would unwind historical reality and condemn as "-ist" (insert your peeve in front of those letters) people who have not bent over backwards to cater to their favorite modern cause.

The OP's association of OOTPB with "blatant sexism" is foolish and reprehensible. All the developers did was to reflect reality and they did a very good job of it.

Just want to clear this up, I NEVER called OOTP or its Devs sexist. That's not at all constructive and definitely not what my feelings are AT ALL about this game!

What I said was "as a woman it's so incredibly frustrating to see the blatant sexism that still gets thrown around in public" i.e. referring to real life instances of people demeaning or barring young girls and women from playing baseball. There are actually several examples of this in the articles and podcast I mentioned which served as the most immediate inspiration for that sentence.

[CBeisbol]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

But to associate OOTPB and OOTPD with sexism because they have avoided indulging with revisionism is nonsense.

Ok, for the sake of argument, let us say that it is revisionism.

Isn't it also revisionist to:
Ignore WW2
Ignore the 1994 strike
Ignore the 2020 pandemic
Ignore any player death or injury
Etc

Why is OOTP ok with that revisionism?
Why are you ok with that revisionism?
But not with this other revisionism?

[MaeNekoChan]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

The developers' three aims with this game, if I had to name them, have been 1) fun, 2) realism, and 3) making money. I am sorry, but women's baseball has not been prominent enough to further those last two goals.

I would venture to say that, based on those criteria, women's baseball has simply not been important enough to be a priority. Perhaps the developers will consider incorporating a women's league as an option in the Custom League function. Frankly, I cannot think of a women's league that would serve as a base for a standard or historical game.

My political liberal side often wars with my social conservative side but here, the latter has won out. I find myself resentful of people who would unwind historical reality and condemn as "-ist" (insert your peeve in front of those letters) people who have not bent over backwards to cater to their favorite modern cause.

To this point, I'm not really sure how you're concluding this?

1) Women in OOTP would be more fun for me and many others on this forum. You can simply google search it and find several threads going back to at least 2011 of gamers on here asking for this. And while I am TOTALLY not an expert on the state of the women's game, my understanding from other writers who have commented on it is that it actually plays differently than the current MLB meta, with pitchers going deeper into games, less 3-true outcomes for hitters, i.e. it's literally the version of baseball that a sizable chunk of the MLB fanbase laments that we no longer have

2) Women in OOTP would be realistic, as there are many professional and amateur leagues both in America and especially abroad. Even if that was not the case though, you can still allow them to be represented in purely custom leagues which themselves are not meant to be 'realistic' if by that term you mean 'historically actual'

3) I propose that putting women and other gender minorities in the game would 1) make OOTP a more accessible and welcoming game which would lead more people to buy it and 2) would allow OOTP to specifically market their game to new groups of people who might otherwise not have heard of OOTP (but been baseball fans) or not have been interested in it due to its male exclusiveness

So I would say across the board the facts are on my side and the only one that's even disputable is the last one, but even then I specifically qualified that I think there is social value that OOTP can lay claim to if they do this. OOTP has exposed tons of people to the more in-depth parts of baseball, why not lead the way in increasing awareness of women's baseball?

Anyway thank you for raising your concerns, hopefully these two posts have addressed them and you can join me in calling for women and others to be in OOTP

[MaeNekoChan]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

There could be a place in OOTPB for female players and management, certainly, but only in largely a fictional setting. I honestly cannot think of any real women's leagues on which to base a game. (The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from "A League of Their Own?")

Oh, well what about the Women's World Baseball Cup? The game already represents the men's Cup in-game, so that seems like a natural addition ^_^

[MaeNekoChan]

Originally Posted by rudel.dietrich

I agree, it is time for female players, coaches and front offices people to be added.

And it would hardly be cutting edge. Football Manager added female pronouns and staff many years ago and it for the typical misogynistic pushback but the developers did it anyways.
Now it is just another part of the game.

FIFA added women’s national teams many versions ago. It is only a matter of time before they add leagues like the women’s premier league, women’s Bundesliga and the new NWSL.

NBA 2K last year added the WNBA. And for the current version greatly expanded that. Now you can be the GM of a WNBA team or use the MYplayer mode to create a women’s player and be a rookie drafted into the WNBA and play out your carrer.

I think OOTP has grown to where it is now time.

And this stuff matters. I have a young daughter and son. My daughter gets to see people like her represented in video games which are an important part of her life. It may sound like a small thing but it’s not. I can see how it affects her.
And my son also sees women in games and is going to grow up in a world where he sees women as equals in every field of life.
We teach him this anyways, but it is nice when media that he consumes reinforces this.

I really appreciate this contribution, you said this all better than I could have

As you said, media representation reinforces our ideas about the world and what is 'normal' or 'possible'. There are so many amazing people doing the ground work for making female and others' inclusion in baseball a reality, but this, I hope, can help move the needle in its own right ^_^

[MaeNekoChan]

Originally Posted by sdw1000

Ummm....no. Get out of here with your identity politics. Merry Christmas.

The irony here being that advocating for a status quo of no women in-game against concrete reality is actually an exercise in identity politics. Sorry, woman's baseball exists, facts don't care about your feelings

[Déjà Bru]

Originally Posted by MaeNekoChan

Just want to clear this up, I NEVER called OOTP or its Devs sexist. That's not at all constructive and definitely not what my feelings are AT ALL about this game!

What I said was "as a woman it's so incredibly frustrating to see the blatant sexism that still gets thrown around in public" i.e. referring to real life instances of people demeaning or barring young girls and women from playing baseball. There are actually several examples of this in the articles and podcast I mentioned which served as the most immediate inspiration for that sentence.

This time, I did thank you.