#programmer excuses

The Assassin’s Creed franchise has been called out in recent years for their lack of female characters After being criticized about the lack of female characters, a one programmer, Alex Amancio, claimed that creating women would significantly increase the amount of work and time to create the game; however, since these claims programmers from other companies have actually expressed how simple it would be to program female characters (Mulkerin). The use of disprovable excuses to provide reason for not including women in games emphasizes that programmers know that they should be including female characters and that they just do not think it is important to have women included in games. Another company facing questions was Nintendo after the trailer for "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" was released. This was due to observations of their character Link who displayed a more androgynous appearance which gave fans hope that there would be a female version of Link that they could play as. Nintendo denied this, claiming that making Link female would upset the gender balance between the three main characters, even though with two males and one female the game is not actually balanced equally (Mulkerin). This restriction of the main playable character’s gender implies that Nintendo believes that males are easier for people of any gender to relate to. While a character’s gender may not be very important to some people, many others feel that it is essential to have a character that is similar to them in aspects like gender and race.