Tomodachi Chan
Before we get into this, I guess it should be obvious that I state my political beliefs. I hate the party system, and all it represents. I want it gone. Not just one side, but both. I am an independent, and have no desire to place myself with a party. So, please, for all that is good in life, do not accuse me of being ultra right, or left.
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| My usual political leanings. |
Nintendo has been catching some political troubles because of a bug in one of their games. It wouldn’t be a problem to fix it, if the bug also was causing marriages between the same sexes. In most cases, this wasn’t what was really happening, but nobody was willing to do a quick scan of Japanese culture to recognize it. We end up with angrily written articles yelling at Nintendo for fixing a bug.
The company that created Mario, Zelda, Wii Sports, and so much more is going through a hard time. For the fourth year in a row, they have had negative profits. This would be disastrous for most companies, but Nintendo has learned to play things well even when losing. They have over 10 billion dollars in the bank, and can handle the slight losses hitting them. Still, this has meant changing things for the company.
To help rebuild momentum, Nintendo has begun releasing Japanese games in more abundance. I don’t mean games made by Japanese companies, I mean games that only make sense within a Japanese cultural audience. The biggest flagship game for this has been Tomodachi Life, a game about living in a bizarre world run by drugs and Miis.
This Friday I will be talking about the NFC game the company intends to release. It will be like Skylanders, or Disney Infinity, only starring Nintendo characters. There will be dolls that have saved info on them. It looks like a fun game, and was announced at an investors meeting in Japan.
As you can guess, Tomodachi Life has a great deal of strangeness about it. The best comparison is to say it is a Mii version of Animal Crossing. You go through life, trying to improve things, hang out with friends, and have insane dreams. There was an entire Nintendo Direct about it.
Even after 30 minutes of watching that video, I still don’t know what the game is entirely about. That is half the selling point, it is odd, fun, and would never have been released in the states when Nintendo was doing well. I honestly don’t know if I even want to play it, or just watch it slowly make people eat grass like gazelles.
The problem arrives when the game announces marriages at random. You are living your life, and suddenly you are married to another Mii on a NEWS show. It’s entire point is to shock you, and make you laugh. As it turns out, some players in Japan figured out a great way to prank the game right back by dressing female Mii’s as men. So, suddenly the next announcement of marriage can look like two guys.
There was also a bug that was destroying saved games that also did weird things with marriages. In other words, what the US saw was a game with gay marriages, and zero context. As far as I can find, no right wing NEWS channel, website, or paper said anything about it. It wasn’t a problem until Nintendo made a patch for the bug.
In a country where major companies like Konami, and Namco are not meeting their sales numbers, Nintendo had people angry at them for a quirky game. The anger was that the game no longer allowed same sex marriages. There was a petition, and ultimately Nintendo decided to not let the marriages happen.
Nintendo never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of 'Tomodachi Life'. The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation. We hope that all of our fans will see that 'Tomodachi Life' was intended to be a whimsical and quirky game, and that we were absolutely not trying to provide social commentary.
The ability for same-sex relationships to occur in the game was not part of the original game that launched in Japan, and that game is made up of the same code that was used to localize it for other regions outside of Japan.
We have heard and thoughtfully considered all the responses. We will continue to listen and think about the feedback. We're using this as an opportunity to better understand our consumers and their expectations of us at all levels of the organization. We have been looking to broaden our approach to development whenever possible as we put all our energy into continuing to develop fun games that will surprise and delight players.
In other words, there wasn’t much the company could do to fix the problem. It is especially obvious that they do not really know what to do. It’s a game about giant heads rising in the morning. There was never any intention to talk about real things in a political world.
There have been a lot of responses. Most of them are quite angry at Nintendo for not making a patch that would allow same sex marriages.
A sentiment as simple as bigotry deserves a condemnation that is just as straightforward. And, indeed, Nintendo is being justly chastised for its exclusionary choice by the games press and social media at large.
She also says that obviously fans were using the bug to create the marriages, and Occam’s Razor says that the company must be full of hate.
From a business and commercial perspective, purely in numbers and market logic, this may be the correct decision for Nintendo. In the far more important area of representing fully inclusive, modern attitudes, we'd suggest that this remains a disappointing aspect of the game. It's a political and rights issue that Nintendo is avoiding, which will be a decision for which it'll likely draw its share of criticism.
They talked about it a great deal over the matter, and even closed the comments when talking about the game. This was not an easy decision by Nintendo Life I am sure, and they made sure to explain why the comments were closed.
I find it harder to understand why Nintendo wouldn’t just push ahead with it anyway. Not only would it be the, you know, moral thing to do, and align better with the game’s promise to model your own life in a playful world, but Nintendo already mentioned their excuse to any criticism in their response. If Tomodachi Life is such a “whimsical and quirky game,” then they could just say that anyone trying to take the game’s same-sex marriage features as a serious statement on a prominent social issue is reading too much into it.
It's almost immediately apparent that the game was created not as a simulation of life or social interaction as much as it is meant to be a comedy sandbox: "She married him?" Marriage is an option not because the characters are meant to be living realistic simulated lives, but because it's another opening for a punchline. It's more banal but no more real than this "news story" from the Japanese version of the game which stuck my Mii's head on the body of a deer.
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Tomodachi Life is dumb but it's clearly supposed to be dumb, in other words: It's a lowest common denominator comedy generator as a game, not a serious simulation. It is a vague approximation -- a gesture toward a thing that isn't even really there. These aren't really your friends, and they aren't really living lives. It's not even really a game; it's a toy. It's a virtual anthill as Chuck Lorre might envision one, by way of Japan.
The author also says that being gay is a political problem and that Nintendo is trying to hide from it.
Honestly, you should read his article just because he describes the game better than anyone else. He has conflicting emotions on the matter, the entire game is about random things happening to get you to laugh, and he can’t marry his husband in this game. It is shocking, and awkward.
The problem arrives when we first see the bug, and the joke. It’s an entirely Japanese joke that is being seen from people who have no context at all. Explaining that context will likely make you feel awkward.
The Japanese created 4Chan. All of it, including the insane parts. Add to it an acceptance, and social stigma for everything and you have some pretty bizarre jokes. For every Cat needing a cheeseburger, you have rickrolls. Then you have straight up perversion like Pedobear. You also have tons of insider jokes that are hard to explain even if you get it.
Within Japan, talking about sexuality, or anything you enjoy has a two level conversation. You can find plenty of fans of manga, videogames, or movies in shops. But getting the same people to admit they do this would be difficult. Otaku, which we use all the time is another term for pervert in Japan.
The basic views of enjoying something, but not admitting it happen all the time. This is likely one of the reasons why 4Chan chooses such humour, it can be enjoyed and hated at the same time.
It doesn’t help that a style of clothing in Japan is to be as adrogynous as possible. Known as Visual Kei, you would be hard pressed to figure out how is male, and who is female. In fact, people will specifically promote themselves as not their own sex as a way of artistic expression. Guys like Gackt will specifically wear their hair, and clothes so that you simply can’t tell he is a 40 year old man.
There are completely straight males that wear masks, and put on skirts to become Sailor Moon. In fact, this is an entire style that is catching on throughout all of Asia. Women even promote how great it would be to date men who can become women. This is promoted in comics, and tv shows all of the time.
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| Three of these Sailors are guys. |
Now that you have this constantly happening, so some guys decided to take girls in games, and make them into men. Thus we find men getting married to ‘men’. It makes the same amount of sense as a Gangnam style if you don’t realize Gangnam street is the Hollywood boulevard of Korea.
The thing is, everyone should already know these things. I got most of my links from well known websites. Cracked for example had a piece on Japanese culture. It also has a piece about not jumping to conclusions about Japan. My sister reads manga all the time where figuring out the male and female characters has become a game. Groups like Anonymous have made headline news.
Claiming that we shouldn’t be able to get the joke is somehow not working when the same sites that talk about the Tomodachi Life conflict, also report news from Japan. It’s not as if the country is lost in time, and barely contacts the west. Heck, those can be whole articles, and even journalistic jobs. Also, the ability to dress a girl up as a guy hasn’t been fixed in the game. Just saying.
The clearest answer is that those who are writing about the subject, can only see the same sex marriage issue with one context. Without looking at the other contexts of the game, it would be lost on what was actually going on. Nintendo made a game that has a similar style of humor to websites like 4Chan -sans pedobear thank goodness. They wouldn’t usually release a game like this in the US, but because things got drastic they did. A bug let dudes get married to other dudes, while other people were making joke Miis. It ended up not making sense in the US. In fact, people wrote scathing articles about how foolish Nintendo was for deciding to not keep the bug, or making a patch that allowed dudes to marry other dudes. In other words, the US did not get the joke. Nintendo is left trying to figure out how to satiate people who should have caught on by now.
While researching this article, I asked a friend what he thought about it. He lives in Taiwan, and loves to cosplay. He has a ton of knowledge about being asian, and asian humor. He possibly is Dolan. I told him what the article was about, and his first response was.
they got angry over the issue for real? wow, that sounds just funny
In other words, the joke keeps going while we stand around being laughed at.
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