After not being arround so many gaming topics, I feel it is important to write a few things about #BFV and everything going on.

First of all: It is OK that you are amongst those that don't want to play as a woman in #BFV. Surprise: You don't have to - you can chose. Now you can argue that it is breaking your immersion if women are running arround on the Battlefield, so this remains an issue for you. In the end, this is WW2 and so on and forth. Yeah, ok. You know what? That's fine. It may be a tad bit weird that all the weird stuff happening all the time is ok and the only real dealbreaker is a female character. But ok. Whatever. Let's accept the fact that apparently you are a fucking serious guy (or girl) who has no issue with someone taking a bullet into the head without dying, a shitload of menus, crosshairs, repairing a tank with a blowtorch and whatsover, but sees everything falling apart because there is a woman shooting you from 75 meters. But anyway - let's just leave it here, shall we?

Sadly, a lot of people are taking this matters a lot further. Spam about "SJWs", "Libtards", "Soybeans" and whatever is everywhere. And this is not OK, it's not freedom of speech or whatever, but it is talk of the alt-right. (Or Nazis. Let's call them what they are: Fascists and Nazis.) The narrative pushed arround goes about like this: Evil stupid forces (possibly marketing people) are forcing weak-but-generally-not-that-bad-and-kinda-okay devs into building playable female characters into BF5 multiplayer as these evil forces have a massive crazy evil plan to enforce some sort of horrible world where all gamers can play BF5 as a woman thus rendering history meaningless and destroying everything. Got it? (In case you do not get this: Congrats, you are not a total idiotic dumbass.) I will not go into the entire "What does it mean when the far-right starts talking about "evil forces in the background plotting evil things" thing. (Hint: They normally end up with Jews and last time they actually succeded in doing this, a few million Jews were murdered.) But let's just focus on the obvious here: This theory is bullshit. And if you support this, because "They are on our side!", you are siding with Nazis. You are supporting this. You are spreading this. You are ensuring that this way of thinking, those buzzwords and everything attached is spreading. In the end, you are enabling Nazis.

Then, there is the amazing tale of an evil EA producer calling people "stupid" or "uneducated", because they do not like this horrible twisting of history for evil purposes and plans. Surprise: This never happened. An EA Producer simply said the most basic thing ever: "You don't like that players have this choice? That's fine. We accept this. Don't buy it." The absolute horror! How could he? What a monster! I mean: Let's cut the sarcasm. Every day you have a choice if you want to support something by buying it or leaving it.The decision to make a stand for a creative decision from DICE and EA is a good thing. You might not like the decision, but that is life. Now here is another important thing: The fact that the people opposed to this decision are making stuff up and outright lying tells us a lot about them. It is not about truth or authenticity or historical accuracy or anything, but it is about pushing an agenda with all means necessary. Does this sound good to you or like the side you want to be on?

Now some days ago those people seemed to have a field day. Videos and articles appeard all stating stuff similar to this: "BF5 is failing! Preorders are 85% below #BLOPS4!" Sounds bad, right? RIGHT?! Now all the people totally about honesty (apart when it suits them to make up stuff), historical accuracy and whatever had the proof that #BFV is a failure. But - as usual - they are wrong: We don't know any of these numbers for sure. Why? Because it was said by an analyst. This is fancy-pancy talk for "guy who uses incomplete data to make assumptions that help investors to make decisions." Basically this particular analyst took a look at GameStop preorder data (not exact numbers, but preorder chart positions!) and made a sort-of educated guess.

Now this is kind of a small ammount of data. It is not conclusive. It does not take into account any other retailer, Amazon, digital preorders and whatever. That's kinda bad, is it? It gets worse: BLOPS4 had a beta which required you to preorder. BF5 didn't. And preorders have been proven to have only a very low impact on actual success, as games nowadays are live services. So basically the big headlines and whatever could be boild down to: "Some guy made a somewhat educated guess with incomplete data comparing two titles in different positions and talking about stuff that are not that important." Now there is just a tiny small issue: You don't read all this stuff in articles and videos reporting about this. Why? Clickbait, comments, discussions and in the end advertising money.

Now here is the real deal: By not reporting about this in order to make some addition advertising cash, publications and youtubers are ensuring that a somewhat non-story is used by rightwing-activists and mysoginists (and whoever else is fighting BF5 actively by spamming buzzwords and lies) to validate their fairy tale. And this stuff is seen and by this, it influences people who do not know about all of this. And suddenly you get people who have no clue, but they say "BF5 dfailed because women in multiplayer! And we don't want this!" It's crazy and dangerous and sad and - while stupid - an actual problem.

Looking at people storming GamesCom to get their hands on, the anticipation for the Beta and whatsoever shows that this is just a small portion of the gaming world. But it's nontheless dangerous. If you want to do something about this, maybe just respond to one person pushing this narrative and tell them that they are wrong. This can already help.

Thanks for reading.

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