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Vital Information for Your Everyday Life

EA Adds Female Player Avatars to NHL12 On Request From Female Fan

by Susana Polo | 10:24 am, September 12th, 2011


The perennial EA Games title NHL (this year’s is NHL 12) comes out tomorrow, and this year’s edition contains one big new feature: the ability to create female player avatars. According to the Globe and Mail, the number of women playing hockey in Canada alone has grown from 5,000 in 1990 to 100,000 today, but it wasn’t the growing demographic that changed EA’s mind on the issue: it was a letter from Lexi Peters, a 14-year-old female fan of the series and a four-year veteran of the ice herself.

From G&M:

She wrote: “It is unfair to women and girl hockey players around the world, many of them who play and enjoy your game. I have created a character of myself, except I have to be represented by a male and that’s not fun.”

For those who have never tried the game, players can choose everything from their team and players to who controls the puck. They can also create characters of their own, picking hair and eye colours and other details. Those characters were all men.

“My younger brother got to create a character that looked just like him. I had never been able to experience that,” says Lexi…

She and a teammate spent hours creating a whole custom hockey team, modeling the players after their own all-girls team, the Purple Eagles. The best they could do was give the characters long “hockey” hair.

Lexi was disappointed to get a letter back from EA, simply telling her that the changes were out of their hands: the NHL itself would have to ask them to ad female characters in order to get that level of customization into the game. Unbeknownst to Lexi, however, the letter had reached the desk of of EA Sports’ president, and from there it had been forwarded to David Littman, the NHL’s lead producer of licensed NHL videogames.

“Lexi’s letter was a wake-up call,” Mr. Littman told the Globe and Mail. “Here’s a growing audience playing our NHL game and we hadn’t done anything to capture them.”

Mr. Littman then did some stick handling of his own: finding the budget to build her into the game, as well as getting permission from the NHL and EA’s legal department.

By way of making her troubles doubly worthwhile, EA even made sure that the default female avatar was in Lexi’s own likeness. Lexi says she’s looking forward to the game, and hopes that now she might get a little less flack from the hockey playing guys in her school who think girls’ hockey isn’t as cool.

(via Kotaku.)

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  • Francesca M

    Good on them.

  • http://taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com/ Taste_is_Sweet

    Now that is a video game story that’s actually inspiring. Way to go, guys.

  • Life Lessons

    YAY!!!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Clare-Harry-Duncan/1378359716 Clare Harry Duncan

    “EA even made sure that the default female avatar was in Lexi’s own likeness”
    Thats actually incredible cool of them

  • http://twitter.com/smoke_tetsu Smoke Tetsu

    I wish other companies would do the same thing.. usually they make excuses like “it’s too much work”. Like with splash damage and brink and tripwire with killing floor.

  • Anonymous
  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mauricio-Ariel-Portnoy/100000503515035 Mauricio Ariel Portnoy

    now if ea could do a game of field hockey with the Argentinian women’s field hockey team in it (you know for those of us who can’t play or watch ice hockey no mater the gender because of the tropic weather i and the rest the Argentinian people live)

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_PKJA7M66KQCE4P4OQ6HWX7TEUY rmisch

    Just the other day I had complained about this!   I spend hours on that game only to see ‘my pro’ lugging around with a mullet (closest I can get to long hair).  It felt SO weird.  Thank you Lexi for doing something that one of us ladies should have done a long time ago!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_7G4SWUX2MCWWXLMYNN347JMIZY Frodo Baggins

    They’ll probably replace her with a buxom redhead with eye shadow in the sequel, though.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Gorillazfan Emily Hill

    I think I’ll pick up this game now never really liked it cause it was nothing but guys

  • Axel Weaver

    Wow. Can’t believe I just heard of this. Glad to know sexism is finally fading away.

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