AFL Evolution will include Australia’s female football stars

In a spectacular move forward for gender equality, AFL Evolution (by developer Wicked Witch) has confirmed the inclusion of the AFLW (Australian Football League Women’s) in the upcoming game.

Setting itself up as the game that wants to help you live out your football-playing dreams, AFL Evolution needed to include the women’s league in order to achieve this dream from every gamers perspective. Whilst the inclusion of AFLW stars was hinted at in their recent trailer (found below), it was still unclear as to exactly what that meant, until now.

The inclusion of our footballing female stars within the game was made clear with the release of the updated version of the game’s demo. A demo that is currently available to play on Steam and contains a picture of AFLW star Moana Hope (top of page), who plays for Collingwood.

This is a fantastic move for AFL Evolution with the AFLW seeing great success across Australia at the moment. I’m personally excited to see the inclusion of women in a game I know many female gamers would love to play.

Go to any oval on a weekend and you’ll likely see kids playing footy, its the great Australian pastime after all. Look at those kids and you’ll definitely see a mix of both boys and girls. It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago these young women had no real female footy idols to admire, and were even told they couldn’t grow up to play competitive football. With so many generations of young women being told they can’t, it’s wonderful to finally hear you can! Because honestly we always could. This is why it becomes extremely important to include the women’s league in the upcoming AFL Evolution, not just to promote inclusiveness in gaming but to show our younger female gamers that there is no limit to  your dreams.

Sadly it seems not everyone is happy about the inclusion of the AFLW stars in the upcoming game. In typical angry gamer style, forums and Facebook walls across the internet have been swamped with negative comments, ready to pull on the already tenuous rope the battle of the sexes have been playing tug of war with for what seems like a millennia. There are a bunch of men who clearly feel their masculinity has been threatened by the AFLW inclusion, who have been posting comments such as “anything to keep the feminists happy” and “that’s it game ruined, I wont be buying it now. I hope you’re prepared for the drastic lose of sales you’ve just given yourselves!”, just to name a few.

Comments like these are half the reason why it has taken this long to see the inclusion of women in predominantly male dominated sports and why it will continue to take even longer to see the inclusion of these talented female teams and stars in sporting games. AFL Evolution releases May 5th and I personally cant wait to finally play an AFL game that includes female football stars with my god daughters!