Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is an Indie first-person slasher that has obvious historical themes but has fictional characters and a fictional plot. Given that there is no need for the “historical accuracy” of an all-male battlefield, a fan asked the developers on the game's forums if they could add some female characters, saying, “what would the developers have to lose if they added a female option for each class?”
A fairly reasonable request for either an assurance that female characters would be added or an explanation as to why not. Here's what the team lead, “Tiberrius” on the forums, had to say:
This is a tough one, I actually think that adding female characters to a game like this would make it appeal less to females. Which at first sounds strange, but from my experience of the general maturity level of the internet and the unfortunately male dominated FPS market… I don't think that it would add to the experience for women or men given the actions that would likely occur.
Hopefully that helps you understand why we decided not to go that route… I am totally fine with women fighting, but its the fact that it would probably overall harm the way the community would play the game that has me concerned.
I honestly have no idea what could be meant by “the actions that would likely occur”, but it seems like he's basically saying that female players won't want to deal with the consequences that will occur if female characters exist in this male-dominated FPS market. Chivalry has an online multiplayer focus, so I'm guessing he's talking about sexist abuse, and the idea that having female representations will encourage this kind of behaviour.
While it's great that “Tibberius” wants to discourage this “harm [to] the way the community would play the game”, I really don't think that preventing female players from playing characters of their own gender even if they might quite like to is the answer. It's basically trying to solve a problem for women by pretending that women don't exist. There aren't even any female peasants in the game; when you burn down a little peasant hut only men run out screaming, so either the women are being left to die or this is an alternate universe filled only with homosexual males.
If you really want to laugh/cry, go read some of the responses from other players, like the suggestion that women can't be there because they need to be at home creating the next generation of soldiers (we are no more than soldier-creating machines, after all). Even when “Tiberrius” gets around to coming back to the conversation, he doesn't answer any of the issues raised beyond just saying that he was “widely misunderstood” and that it is “not about protecting the female gamers”. Does he explain what it is about? No, I think he'd just quite like the whole thing to go away:
There is such a catch 22 around this subject that its is very difficult to discuss.
