Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings (1999!)
When I think of equality in video games and any media, I like to think of a world where no one gives a shit or bats an eye that some one has some sort of genitalia between their legs. I like to think of a world where if you want to do something you just prove you can and off you go.
I really loved this game when I was younger, I played the shit out of it. I only recently started playing the HD edition on steam and it still holds up as one of the best resource focused RTS's of all time. Lately over the past year though there has been a lot of people going on about how there is not enough diversity in games an I just wanted to make a post giving Ensemble studios some credit for representing everyone in a game from 1999.
Now over the large amount of time I have been putting into this game playing the AI, drinking beer, and watching old TNT's on my second monitor I realized something kind of amazing about this game and how it subtly empowers women. Women can be miners, lumberjacks, farmers, hunters, gathers, masons, and builders. you could have a situation where all men are gathering berries and all women are mining gold and at not one point ever does anyone bat an eye about that. Now maybe in some weird fiction way you could claim that the threat of the annihilation of your entire race by another has caused these civilizations to throw all stereotypes and prejudices out the window out of sheer desperation to survive, but I like to think this game exists in some weird alternate reality where everyone worked together to survive and everyone was viewed as entirely equal just because that's the right thing to do.
...I mean except for the other civilizations who need to be burned to the ground, I do always feel bad watching my army burn farms and kill villagers but hey, that's the way it goes sometimes.
I'm not going to make this post long but I did just want to call out Ensemble for taking the time to just do the right thing without any fuss about it one way or another. It's not some grand sweeping thing like a transgendered female jewish lead in some AAA blockbuster but I think it really portrays societies where everyone is equal and in some plain and small way that means a lot to me.
So cudo's on them I guess.
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