Assassin's Creed III and Women

This isn't going to be a long post but just a sort of mini rant based on something I stumbled upon yesterday. Earlier in the week I saw a handful of gaming posts that had something to do with Assassin's Creed III and women but I filtered it out. ACIII looks like a super cool game but that's not really something I'm a big fan of. Either way, I finally settled down and read a Forbes article about it and was rather surprised.

They discussed a bit of why a woman lead wouldn't jive with this game. In particular, creative director Alex Hutchinson said:

“In this period it’s been a bit of a pain. The history of the American Revolution is the history of men. There are a few people, like John Adams’ wife. They tried very hard in the TV series to not make it look like a bunch of dudes, but it really is a bunch of dudes.”

Just this would have been irksome enough but then the Forbes author added on:

"Of course, this applies to essentially all of history up until the very recent past. History is largely the story of a bunch of dudes, though this is hardly the point."

Okay, what? I can almost expect that developers aren't going to think outside the box. I have come to mostly accept that they will add in all sorts of unrealistic elements to a history (league of assassins spanning the globe and time periods, hello) but not allow women to take a leading role (you can be a woman assassin in multiplayer). This is expected even though it's a cop out. However, to see the Forbes writer suggest that women have played only a small role in "all of history" is incredible.

For some reason I thought Forbes was a smart people publication written by other smart people. Anyway, this barely has to do with games but I thought I'd point it out. Of course history we get in schools is full of men - who do you think is selecting topics to write about for the textbooks?! You'd think with women being, you know, half the population that they would obviously have a large contribution to the world around them.  I guess people who accept their history classes as the complete history of everything worth knowing just assume women sat around doing nothing for centuries like they were supposed to and only started becoming autonomous lately.

It's just so incredible. Without any thoughts otherwise, both these men completely accept what they've been taught over the years. Sure, the things that do get taught are highly factual but what they leave out is telling. Gosh, I hope sometime people with different mindsets and life experiences will be given the chance to create triple A games. We need to see truly different stories told and dispersed to the gamer masses.