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You might scratch your head at some of the arguments that Jeffery cuts down, but look no further than Ruffian Games' eyebrow-raising justification for excluding women in Crackdown 2 or Splash Damage's reasons for doing the same in Brink. We've still got a long way to go in regards to gender equality.
2) Nobody wants it
This one is tricky, as Johnny Internet thinks he is speaking for all fans of his choosen series when he says that gender choice isn't that big of a deal.
But we have no surefire way to prove he is wrong. This is because the people who want this feature are usually disgusted by those who hang out in his forum, and they won't be there to speak up in opposition. Considering this sort of comment is either directly preceded or followed by a joke about how women should “stay in the kitchen,” it's no wonder why.
Let me just put it this way: If no one wants this choice and no one cares, why does this argument arise every single time a game releases without the feature?
Of course, the meat of this claim is that not enough people care to make it worth the development time and effort to do it. While statistically this might be semi-accurate for some titles (depending on what percentage of female gamers play shooters these days), it's a shallow argument because we don't know by how much that feature (or other such considerations) would boost the number of women playing these games until developers actually take the plunge.
Girls already play shooters in enough numbers to be a recognizable minority. So that should be enough of a reason to cater to the needs of this demographic in order to promote its growth. This is not even considering guys who would like to use female characters in their games, which I personally have noticed is no small matter, either.
1) The game’s budget/memory resources couldn't handle it
This is the elephant in the room regarding actual, reasonable discussion about the problem. It takes the number-one slot because it is both the biggest roadblock to such gender equality being common place and also the most lame, annoying, cop-out excuse.
Like it or not, a female option requires a near doubling of art and animation resources for the average create-a-character system, and by God, shooter developers haven't ever had to do that kind of work before! I mean, with all of the time they take making systems to model every last detail of the trees sway in the wind, how could they find the time to notice that women exist?
Oh, but what if they did add in women? If their resources are finite, then that means that they would have to provide men with fewer options. That would be so terrible! Obviously, men having 100 percent of everything and women having zero is the best out of all the possible combinations you could come up with.
We might even see the game's graphics suffer somehow! We wouldn't want to have to cut into the budget for animating grass or lose that newspaper that's blowing in the wind on that desert town map! Won't someone please think of the realism?
I know, developers. Programming games is hard. I mean, all of that coding must really get to you, and you’re on such strict deadlines. It's got to be a chore just trying to cram every last thing you want into your shiny new game and get it out the door on time. Developers may even consider getting rid of female characters to be a difficult and disappointing decision. They certainly claim it is such a decision every time they do it. But it's never enough of an issue to make them bother to work on putting it in in a sequel or downloadable content.
Still, when you are planning a game and want to maximize development time, maybe you can consider this: Out of all the features you could cut, maybe you shouldn't drop the one thing that is usually the only proof at all that you care that half of the human population is female. Chances are that this half is sick of your man-centric game's rah-rah, chest-thumping horseshit. Let’s try taking a step forward every once in a while instead of stigmatizing the entire genre as a cesspool of excess testosterone made by macho pricks.
And after taking all of those lazy and frustrating excuses to task, I bring this show-stopper evidence to the table as a special bonus for you all: Halo: Reach gives players this option.
This is coming from the developer who is responsible for the currently popular systems in console shooters' online matchmaking, one of the best level creators in console gaming, and hands down the best replay-saving and file-sharing systems in console shooters. These games exist in the form they take today thanks in no small part to Bungie being damn serious about their fan base.
I think Bungie knows what they are doing and put resources into providing players with female characters in Reach because they knew it would be worth the investment. You other developers use Bungie's ideas rather often anyway, why not take this idea too and see how it works out?
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