Reminder: Video Games are Fun
If you like to label yourself as a “gamer” chances are that in the last seven days you’ve been outraged about something that’s happened in the world of video games.
Perhaps a game you were looking forward to was reviewed poorly. Maybe something was cut out of the English language version. Perhaps a female character was imprisoned (again), or your favourite RPG didn’t allow you to have an in-game same-sex relationship. This probably resulted in you or someone you know writing something acidic on some website news story or slamming someone on social media.
The overwhelming desire for this iPhone-obsessed world to remain staunchly politically correct is having a detrimental effect on video games. Many of the online “wars” break out because of senseless confusion over which side of the argument is more politically correct; for example women should be allowed to wear what they want verses what that woman is wearing in that game is sexist. This barbaric approach to discussion only leads to more confusion in the gaming world and at the end of the day, a publisher is damned if they do something, damned more if they don’t.
A recent example of this that springs to mind is Nintendo’s handling of the localisation of Fire Emblem: Fates. One of the many changes made in the Western version of the game was to modify a mini-game that had players to “pet” the face of certain characters to earn more “affection” points. The localised version does away with the “petting” portion (except in certain circumstances, such as waking a character up) while retaining the bonuses otherwise attainable.
When tabloid publication Kotaku announced this modification it caused quite a bit of upset. A portion of fans of the genre and series were frustrated that so-called “social justice warriors” were “getting their way” by making Nintendo’s localisation team — Treehouse — act too politically correct. Of course, that’s just another way of saying “it’s more politically correct to accept and appreciate Japanese culture for what it is, even if it could be deemed offensive to the West than to force our politically correct assumptions into the game”. Nintendo, for their part, explained the change was indeed due to the different standards set amongst differing cultures. And why shouldn’t they? Games that feature these sorts of mini games have been banned or deemed “inappropriate” in the West in the past, so why wouldn’t you err on the side of caution?
A politically correct act to satisfy a politically correct argument of a previous outrage campaign.
Regardless of the circumstances, impact or outcome of that isolated case this culture of “rage until it changes” just creates bad blood in our industry. Most of it seems to be fuelled by media outlets like the tabloid mentioned earlier in an attempt to muster easy website clicks, though it can’t be denied that maybe it was fans of video games themselves who originally lit the match.
As the internet became more popular as the years rolled on, critics became less relevant. Why wait a month to read a game review in a magazine when you can just write one yourself in half the time? Why bother loading a website for gaming news from some journalist who couldn’t care less about the industry when you can just head to the source and read the press release yourself? Why watch someone go to E3 when you can stream the announcements from your living room?
In order to keep money flowing through the press, more and more opinionated articles popped up. They did sneaky things like made readers sign into the comments section with Facebook, which allowed everyone on that social network to read what you’ve just written spurring more debate and ultimately more visits to their articles.
Eventually, everyone in your entire social circle seemed to have an opinion about everything. When it comes to video games, if you’re defending the medium on Monday from the people who say games like Call of Duty leads to violence, by Friday you’re writing angry posts on some Disney Infinity fan site about some costume that’s left out of the game.
The sad thing is that none of this constant bickering over every little event that ever happens in video games is enjoyable. It’s harmful, leads to bullying and devalues the entire industry.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spYW0gutg38&w=420&h=315]
There is hope in the knowledge that it wasn’t always this way. Prior to the Wii/PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 generation there was stirring optimism in gaming. The gamer community would be excited about new consoles, not plastering some idiot analyst’s predictions that it “won’t be very good” all over their MySpace. A publisher could release new IP without being slandered as “childish” or receiving poor review scores because it was different, too simple or not realistic enough. When a game came out that had a female lead character, we wouldn’t march online and write pages of crap about how progressive that game was, or how outraged we were because the character looked a certain way. We’d just play the damn game and enjoy it.
If we keep up the crusade to be overly politically correct, we’ll remove the ability for games to be fun. Will we live in a world where Mario has to shake hands to defeat Bowser because his back-story involves being bullied at a young age? Will Link run around Hyrule with a feather duster instead of a sword because the Moblin’s represent an indigenous race and killing them would be frowned upon? Will FPS titles cease to exist because of some literal interpretation of gun laws?
You simply can’t please anyone and far too often the loudest complaints are the least informed and spur on the most damaging effects. Sure, their hearts may be in the right place but the outcome of this constant attack on video games — which was once the domain of mainstream media and is now spewing daily from the industry’s biggest fans — could end in absolute demolition of everything we enjoy about games.
As gamers, we owe the medium the benefit of the doubt at the very least. An epic RPG that spans hundreds of hours, has days of voice acted cutscenes, gorgeous graphics and state-of-the-art online capabilities probably isn’t homophobic because it doesn’t allow gay marriage. Perhaps the developers weren’t building their multi-million dollar project around a dating sim. A fighting game that features attractive women wearing bikinis probably isn’t a result of the developers hating women, perhaps they merely liked the premise that happened to test most favourably with customer focus groups. When a princess gets kidnapped, are the developers actually trying to teach boys that women are helpless? Perhaps it’s simply a great way to motivate the main character to get out of bed and save the world.
There’s already a loud group of idiots making connections between video games and absolute negativity. As it’s been since the 1970’s, the media has this department covered. Where they drop the ball, paid lobby groups pick up the slack and continue their hate campaigns. As people who have decided that we enjoy sitting down and playing video games, spend thousands of dollars on doing so and commit time out of our lives to wrap ourselves in everything video gaming has to offer, we owe it to ourselves not to buy into this crap, not to comment on stupid negative articles regardless of how annoying their opinions seem. By trying to fight back with more politically correct viewpoints, as noble as that seems, it only fuels the fire and causes more grief to the industry.
Let’s not kill video games by a million paper cuts. Let’s not ruin our favourite franchises because of petty morally questionable squabbles. We need to fight back by laying down arms and watching the nay-sayers dissipate so they can perhaps make changes in places that are far more important. Constantly attacking will probably prevail in the end, but the industry as we know it will no longer exist. Games will be too safe and frankly boring. Creativity will be stifled for fear of offending one single person on the Internet.
The gaming industry is not perfect. There is a lot of room for improvement. But this is an industry founded on the pillars of fun, enjoyment, creativity and progressive thinking. Focusing on these positive elements is the path towards more diversification and absolute change that will stick, rather than quick fixes to shut up a group of angry Facebook users. Sure, it’ll take longer. It’ll be harder. But it’ll be permanent.
