Since its debut in 1993 (innocuously titled FIFA International Soccer), the FIFA video game series has become an institution; its appearance on end-of-year best seller lists as reliable as death and taxes.

This year, EA announced the biggest change to FIFA since its inception. In a series expected to be improved annually through small technical increments, the announcement that women’s teams would be playable in FIFA 16 arrived with a surprisingly progressive thud. It has been talked about ever since.

“We made the announcement months ago, yet at at Gamescom, it was still one of the first topics brought up,” says FIFA 16 producer Nick Channon. “And that to me is really important. That’s how big it is.

“It’s still resonating as being very very important – as it should be. Because it is.”

Getting There

The decision to introduce women into The Beautiful (Digital) Game was made “three or four years ago.” EA’s series has always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the game on which it’s based, and the increasing awareness of women’s football in the public consciousness made the call a no-brainer. “We pride ourselves on being the most authentic football game in the world,” says Channon. “The groundswell of women’s football in the last four or five years has become strong. And ultimately we felt that if we want to be truly authentic, women need to be part of our game.”

This increasing popularity reached a remarkable peak recently with this year’s Women’s World Cup, which saw 25.4 million viewers tune into the USA vs. Japan final in America alone, alongside unprecedented media interest worldwide.

“Women are playing a big part in football right now,” says Channon. “The growth in the support, the popularity of the sport, the quality of the football. [The World Cup] was a phenomenal tournament. The entertainment value in the games was outstanding. And that needs to be part of our game.”

But not right away. FIFA’s engine circa 2011-2012 could build men’s bodies, but women were an unknown quantity. To see what a female character might look like running on the then-current technology, a prototype was pulled together where a woman’s head was modelled on top of a man’s body. Predictably, it didn’t look “quite right.”

“The character that was running around the screen,” says Channon, “while it kind of looked like a woman because it had a female head, it didn’t really look convincing. It looked masculine and that wasn’t good enough. We realised if we were going to scale that player model with the technology we had, it was too linear. We scaled limbs too uniformly, and we couldn’t make a good version of the female form.”

The team decided that if they were going to create player models with more realistic female proportions, the FIFA engine would need an overhaul. From 2012 onward, designers worked behind the scenes through three further increments of FIFA to change proportions across all character models specifically for FIFA 16. “This year, we’ve got better body types for men as well,” explains Channon. “So it’s been something we’ve had to do to get women in the game properly, but it’s had a knock on effect for the men.”

Channon stresses that women in FIFA have been built from the ground up across every feature. EA has adjusted its ratings system in the female category (“we wanted the game to feel different and feel more authentic to women’s football, so an 80 rated female player is different to an 80 rated male player”) while new animations, run cycles and walk cycles have been added to make female movement look authentic.

As it has historically done with the men’s teams, EA has tried to make the women’s teams’ digital counterparts as realistic as possible in the smaller details. New physics allowing for realistic movement of longer hair have been implemented (“we had to do quite a bit of work to optimise our engine to allow it to still run at 60 FPS to get that simulation in”), and players across the globe had their heads scanned and modelled into the game.

“We had a day where EA came in,” says Steph Catley – who graces the cover of FIFA 16 in Australia, alongside Lionel Messi, and currently plays for the Portland Thorns. “They just took a whole lot of photos of different angles of our faces… it was all a very new and interesting process and amazing to be part of.”

Women’s Football: A Snapshot

Catley is well positioned to comment on the state of the women’s game at present. The bright, friendly 21-year-old Australian made 32 appearances for the Matildas during the World Cup, began her professional career in 2012 and has been playing football since she was a little girl. She agrees with Channon that the sport has enjoyed an increase in popularity in recent years, and sees it reflected in the burgeoning interest in it on her home turf.

“When I started playing football at 6 and 7 there wasn’t a girls’ team at my club, so I played with the boys until I was about 13, and I don’t think that happens these days.” On a senior level in Australia, Catley explains, there are now women’s teams for every club. “It’s getting so much bigger and we’re getting more supporters for the Australian national team, and the women’s leagues are growing. There’s so much more recognition.”

It’s the higher standards of play, Catley says, that is encouraging newfound attention. “What it takes to play at the top level now is getting harder and harder. You have to be so much better, so much more technical to play at the top. I think the demand has got so much greater for women in football these days – the standard’s just growing and growing, and it’s attracting people who just love football in general to come and watch.”

Catley agrees that the grandeur of the World Cup – and that incredible final – marked a milestone in the women’s sport, though in the same breath mentions the lack of mainstream coverage it usually receives. “I mean it’s funny. We’re [in Vancouver] and in the World Cup but it’s almost hard to grasp how big it is when you’re there. You see the crowds but you’re so focused on your games and your role and everything. You go about a routine, you’re training and playing and recovering. But I was getting tons of messages from my family and mum saying how big it was, saying it was all over the news and it had blown up. In Australia we don’t really get in the mainstream media, or the news, so it was amazing to hear it was blowing up back home and we had that support.”

There is now a bigger job at hand than attracting viewers to any tournament with the words “world” and “cup” in it: keeping them attracted. Considering the lack of consistent broadcast or online interest in women’s football outside of the big clashes, this isn’t necessarily going to be easy.

“The key to keep the ball rolling is to stay in the public eye,” says Catley. “So making sure that all the leagues around the world have some sort of telecast or live stream that people can watch, because there are so many people out there that are interested but there just isn’t that access to watch games and to watch their favourite players who might be playing in Germany or the United States. There needs to be constant streams. It’s so important for us to have the women’s league on some sort of stream.”

There are other thorns in the side of women’s football. A week after my interview with Catley, the Matildas withdrew from a USA training camp in a highly publicised dispute with Football Federation Australia over improved pay and work conditions. According to the team, their list of demands was a pay rise from their low contractual salary of $21,000 per year, further contract flexibility allowing them to retain Matildas deals while pursuing other contracts overseas, and travel conditions on par with their male counterparts, the Socceroos. As of writing, no agreement with the FFA has been made, although chief executive David Gallop is hopeful “a resolution will be made this week.”

Pay and condition disputes for women’s football teams – and indeed, women’s sports teams in general – are far from uncommon (in an article for the Guardian, Paula Cocozza remembers Chelsea’s women resorting to an “illicit bucket collection outside the Stamford Bridge” in the early 2000s). But historically such strikes can affect real change – just look at Billie Jean King’s efforts to bring about equality in tennis in the 1970s.

“Everyone wants to do what they love, this is much more than that,” said Matilda’s midfielder Alannah Kennedy on social media. “We’re not asking for equal pay to the men, we’re being realistic about it, asking for professional conditions to allow us to perform at our highest capability. WE stand together, with the future of the game and teams best interest at heart”.

Looking Ahead

In the wake of the highly publicised caterwauling of a small minority (“unfortunately in the world we live in there’s some negativity with everything you do,” says Channon) it’s clear the decision to include women in FIFA 16 holds real importance to the future of the women’s game, too. Both Channon and Catley are emphatic that FIFA 16 could speak to upcoming generations of female football players.

“For me personally I’m very proud to say that I was one of the producers on the team that was part of bringing women to FIFA,” says Channon. “I have two girls myself, and they both actively, competitively play football. And they are really excited – I’m not putting women in the game for my daughters, of course – but they’re really excited to see it.”

Catley, who grew up playing the FIFA series with her brother when she wasn’t playing actual football (“I’d prefer to be on the same team as him otherwise it could get pretty heated at times”), sees constant accessibility as the biggest benefit.

“I definitely think FIFA 16 is going to help with exposure. Because it’s always going to be there. People are going to continue to play it for hours on end, it’s not just like a game once a month on the TV or something like that. It’s always accessible.”

“When my brother started playing FIFA he learned so much about football from it. He knows about so many players from it. I think having women in the game will create awareness of some of the best players in the world and allow little girls to walk past it in the shops and be able to relate to it. And then play as their favourite players and give them some big dreams and aspirations for their future.”

Originally Published on IGN 23rd September, view original article.