Jimquisition: Tomodachi Strife

[Aardvaarkman]

You didn't consider me! is as bad. It' business the way i see it by being as stupid. I'm born Serbian and therefor I'm limited in great many was, internationally based on whole lot of lies and you don't see me shaming people. And that's real life, not some damn game.

What do you mean by "shaming people"? When I think of "shaming," I think of punishments such as people being forced to stand on a street corner wearing a sign saying "I AM A THIEF" or something. Which is not what is happening here.

What people are doing is saying that "Nintendo should be ashamed" - which is an entirely different thing. This is just people using their right to free speech to speak out against Nintendo. That is not the same as shaming - and is not even remotely the same as a business refusing to serve somebody just because they don't like their race/gender/religion, etc.

Saying that people speaking out about this is the same as direct discrimination is a classic false equivalency. Especially as nobody is saying that heterosexual relationships should be removed from the games, which is what the real bigots are doing - but in real life.

 

[Eve Charm]

Given that in many countries gay marriage isn't legal it's no surprise that Nintendo didn't want to include it in a game that they wanted to sell all over the world.

And EA wasn't trying to sell the Sims to everyone in the world and their mom? Yet it still has gay marriage. They sometimes get censored for including it (like Ridiculous Russia giving it an A/O rating), but they show some backbone and just continue making money off non-bigots.

Well if you want to look at the sims, it's been around since 2000 and had 2 main series and like 50 expansions before somewhere in 3 same sex marriage got added. This is Nintendo's second of this game, if anything it'll get added way earlier then it did in the sims series.

It's been included since Vanilla Sims 2 at least. I know that for a fact, it was my introduction to the series and I remember that game mostly because it was one of the first games to include gay relationships without making them a horrible misrepresentation and/or a joke.

Ah well much earlier then I thought. Sim's relationships are still pretty much a joke on their own as a whole tho >.<

 

[Draconalis]

Fewer than 1% of Japanese people are Christian.

That doesn't change the fact that they adopted the stances from the west, which predominately Christian.

Before they opened their borders to the west in Meiji era, Japan did not have a religion that shunned homosexuality, thus they didn't.

 

[xPixelatedx]

While I agree they shouldn't have said anything, They are entierly right. It is a political and social thing, which is exactly why they didn't want anything to do with it.

If Nintendo included gay marriage in that or any other of their games, they would get just as much if not more crap for that decision as they are for having patched it out. Do you know why that is when so many other games have tried to tackle homosexuality for the sake of being inclusive? Well, those games also weren't made by the industry's equivalent of Disney. Nintendo, like Disney, wants to keep an 'all ages' image, that's also why they ban all religious images and themes in their games. It's not because they think religion is bad, it's because religion is surrounded by politics and social debacles. The point I'm trying to make is sadly, for many people in the 1st world, "for all ages" stillalso means the exclusion of gay marriage. Maybe you should fight the good fight over here instead because even Disney won't touch this with a 10ft pole. Don't get me wrong, I know Disney likes gay people, but you know what? We'll probably not see a Disney animated movie about a homosexual couple in our lifetimes. Even in America, a (now) largely homosexual accepting place, we try and keep homosexuality and other such things out of the "for all ages" entertainment. That's an ongoing political and social battle (yes, Nintendo was right about that) that seemingly has no end yet in sight. If we can't even fix that over here, how in the WORLD do you or anyone else expect to force a company in a largely homophobic culture (like japan) to etch the way for us?

While I agree with the overall message and I would like to see homosexual characters in Nintendo games one day, I think it's completely absurd to try and bully Nintendo into fighting for gay rights in children's entertainment when we can't even come close to winning that battle over here. It's also absurd to try and smear Nintendo for saying this fight is one of politics when it's one of the bigger political hot-buttons over here in the west and everyone knows it.

 

[bdcjacko]

Look, I'm all for gay marriage is games and real life. Just as long as we don't have gay divorce.

What about gay annulments?

Look, if they= gays get married, I just think they should have to put up with that mistake for life.

 

[tstorm823]

On the subject of boycotting things, I'm pretty sure at this point that I just can't bring myself to click another featured piece on the Escapist until they make one titled "We're Sorry That Our Coverage of Tomodachi Was So Terrible."

We've now had 2 news stories, a featured article, and a full Jimquisition entry claiming factually incorrect things about this game. They didn't patch out homosexuality, they patched out the game breaking.

And no, Jim, they weren't saying they excluded homosexual relationships to avoid social commentary. They were saying that they didn't exclude homosexual relationships to make social commentary. Plenty of people have made reasonable arguements that it was a stupid response to pretend that the exclusion of homosexuality isn't social commentary. You could have done that too. Instead you're pretending they were saying they didn't include homosexuality because that would be social commentary, and that didn't happen at all.

So basically, you took the trainwreck of lies going around this website and added another car to the pile. Congratulations

 

[Robert Marrs]

People sure do love to complain. Its a smart business decision glitch or no and I won't condemn them for it. I seriously doubt Nintendo has any sort of agenda beyond making the most money they can. Simply put there are a lot of parents out there who would not buy their kids a game if it had same sex relationships in it. Many of those parents probably are not even bigots they just don't feel like trying to explain to a 6 year old why two guys or two girls are getting married. If it was just a glitch though that was fixed its even more of a non-issue. There isn't really a history of gay bashing in Japan that I am aware of so they don't feel the need to be all double plus good, politically correct and inclusive about everything that ever has been or will be released. The people that live there don't feel the need to throw a hissy fit every time their certain demographic gets omitted from something. No just leave it to us over here in the western world to tell Nintendo how bigoted they are for fixing an unintended glitch in a children's game.

TLDR; Life isn't fair. Build a bridge and get over it.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

You're being simplistic here. You're assuming that just because their game shipped with a bug (bugs are in all games, I might add) that means they're not competent and professional.

What would be LESS competent and professional, keeping a bug because people like the idea, or fixing the bug?

I never said anything was wrong with fixing a bug. I said that Nintendo's software skills seem pretty much rubbish to begin with. A way to be more professional would be to not write such awful code in the first place.

And no, "every game has bugs" is not an excuse - few games has bugs as cripplingly bad as this one is described. And no modern systems other than Nintendo's have such endemic file saving, data transfer and corruption problems as Nintendo's handhelds.

 

[kickyourass]

Honestly I feel that if Nintendo had just stuck with the "It was a side effect of a glitch that literally broke the game, it's too big to just patch in" stance, this episode wouldn't have been needed. Sure some people would have still been a bit stupid about it, but then they would've just been stupid, they wouldn't have had a valid point, now people have legitimate reason to say "The hell Nintendo?" and it's because Nintendo chose the worst possible defense for their actions. Honestly so many problems would be averted in this day and age if people just thought for 3 minutes before opening their mouths.

 

[Eve Charm]

You can have relationships in the game, and until Nintendo edited it out, these relationships could be same-sex. Citing bugs that affected the larger game - it wasn't supposed to be there in the first place - Nintendo patched gay marriage out of the Japanese version of Tomodachi Life. Nintendo [of] America made it quite that it had no intention of putting it back in for the game's western release. Since, shockingly, some gamers are actually gay and actually like being represented in games that put personalization first, a Miiquality petition was enacted to try to get Nintendo to change its mind. So far, so mildly controversial. And then Nintendo, itself, made things stupidly controversial."

You the player, could never have a same-sex relationship. So I really don't know how you can claim Jim is right. And setting one of the mii's as the incorrect gender to have one was never patched ((how could it be really)) so that would be wrong to.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

A bug that only appears when the 3ds takes data wirelessly from the wii or somehow from the ds version of the old game. It's not the save feature in battlefield 4 or anything in Aliens CM for starters.

Other developers also being incompetent is not proof of Nintendo's competence.

 

[Sticky]

You're being simplistic here. You're assuming that just because their game shipped with a bug (bugs are in all games, I might add) that means they're not competent and professional.

What would be LESS competent and professional, keeping a bug because people like the idea, or fixing the bug?

I never said anything was wrong with fixing a bug. I said that Nintendo's software skills seem pretty much rubbish to begin with. A way to be more professional would be to not write such awful code in the first place.

I genuinely can't tell if you, anonymous person on the internet. Are being serious here.

It sounds like you're blowing a couple of bugs out of proportion because you have one of the worst cases of confirmation bias I've ever seen.

And no, "every game has bugs" is not an excuse - few games has bugs as cripplingly bad as this one is described. And no modern systems other than Nintendo's have such endemic file saving, data transfer and corruption problems as Nintendo's handhelds.

Like this, did you ever play the N-Gage?

Or say, any of Ubisoft's handheld titles last generation?

You have no right to say that Nintendo is even a quarter of the incompetence of your average development team if you haven't. Those are some masterpieces in bad software design. Nintendo is pretty good considering that most of their games don't have a patch cycle unless strictly required.

A bug that only appears when the 3ds takes data wirelessly from the wii or somehow from the ds version of the old game. It's not the save feature in battlefield 4 or anything in Aliens CM for starters.

Other developers also being incompetent is not proof of Nintendo's competence.

You did say that "few games have bugs this crippingly bad"

When we can look at the industry

and see that's not true.

And also see that MANY games have bugs FAR WORSE than an instability when an odd Mii transfer was done in an unexpected way.

 

[Eve Charm]

A bug that only appears when the 3ds takes data wirelessly from the wii or somehow from the ds version of the old game. It's not the save feature in battlefield 4 or anything in Aliens CM for starters.

Other developers also being incompetent is not proof of Nintendo's competence.

True but your setting the bar too high nowadays for a game to come out and not be full of game breaking bugs. At least nintendo's team bug came from gathering data from old, out of date technology. Least they aren't trying to lock their games behind drm or online only then screwing the online part at launch. I believe every major company has been guilty of this in the last 3 years.

 

[Callate]

Well... it's like this.

Tomodachi Life is rated "E" for "Mild Fantasy Violence, Comic Mischief".

Billy's mom gets Tomodachi Life for Billy.

Billy plays Tomodachi Life.

Billy shows his mom that he can make boys kiss in Tomodachi life;

Billy's mom takes his 3DS back to the store.

...

Now, it may well be that Billy's mom is a close-minded cultural throwback. It may well be that twenty years from now, every state in the United States will fully recognize gay marriage. I would personally be quite glad to see this. Trends seem to indicate that younger people are far more accepting of homosexuality than their elders, even among many communities one would tend to think less tolerant of such things, such as Evangelical Christians. It's quite entirely possible, and even likely, that fear and discomfort with having a gay friend, neighbor, teacher, etc. will one day be hard to contemplate.

We aren't there yet. As tempting as it is to believe that your particular pool is a microcosm of the greater world, as much as the Internet encourages us to believe that through the ease with which we find "our own", there are still a lot of people who cheer things like that doofus on Duck Dynasty.

I'm not saying that Sterling isn't right that Nintendo handled this badly. Or that saying "we're not going to engage in social commentary" isn't taking a kind of stance. Or even that, maybe, it wouldn't be a good thing overall to see gay marriage in Tomodachi Life.

But, don't suggest that it would be without consequence. Don't do it. It's not true. What goes for M-rated Skyrim's audience in a game full of shades-of-gray and bloodletting or even The Sims' "anything goes as you make videogame characters have threesomes with tv celebrities and aliens" atmosphere does not necessarily hold true for a family-friendly E-rated Nintendo game on the hardware they've worked the hardest (hello 2DS) to make child-friendly.

Having gay marriage in TL might well be the right thing to do. But it would cost them. Suggesting it would be a freebie is putting a thumb on the scale.

 

[Silvershock]

Oh yes Nintendo is horrible because as a Japanese company, it applies Japanese cultural norms to a game.

Ah, the Nintendo white-knighting continues. I'm rather tired of this particular line, so let's deal with it. They are not just a Japanese company. In fact, I believe the response that annoyed everyone came from Nintendo of America, which is most definitely not a Japanese company. They work in a global marketplace, same as anyone else, and the game is being localised for NA release, which is why gamers from NA and Europe asked them to make the change.

Are you still following along, or do you need help?

 

[Aardvaarkman]

And only having a select set of characters in the game would still be exclusionist, by the logic if "not including something is exclusionist"

But nobody except you is using that logic.

The logic others are using is that characters already in the game are being artificially excluded from certain actions.

Someone would have to go in there and change every static instance of "her" to "his", and "her" to "him" for instance, or at least variabalize the script.

WHAT!?

Those pronouns have nothing to do with straight or gay. The characters already have genders, so this would already be accounted for. Gay marriage doesn't change any of those things.

Adoptions don't exist in straight marriages?

Not in the game they don't. In the game, the female gets pregnant as far as I know. There is no option for adoption. However, if you were to implement gay marriage with children, you have to make new assets, or at the very least write script that explains what happened off screen. Either way, it costs time and money.

So, who said that they had to allow adoption or gay couples with children? If the only option for children is reproduction, then that's consistent across gay and straight marriage.

It's weird that they wouldn't include it though, as gays aren't the only ones that would want to adopt. It's also weird if you can't have children without marriage. So, that's pretty dumb, but once again, not the issue that's being discussed here.

 

[tstorm823]

Wow, been through the entire thread, and I find it hilarious, in the cynical sort of way, that all the people accusing Jim of being misinformed if not knowingly lying are themselves, misinformed, as I've yet to see any of these people actually explain what happened correctly.

I will agree that some people accusing Jim of being misinformed are themselves misinformed, but you are in the same way misinformed.

They didn't patch out gay relationships, at all, ever, not even a little bit.

They patched out an error that broke the game. Not one that broke the game by making people gay, it just broke the game. I'm not entirely sure how people think one observes gay characters in the glitch when the glitch apparently "corrupted the save data and prevented people from progressing." You can't tell if the Miis are gay if your save is corrupted and you can't do anything.

What happened was they patched out a terrible, game breaking glitch. Then, unrelated, Japanese players started crossdressing characters to make it seem like they had gay Miis. Then, a Japanese site reported on these two seperate events in the same article. Finally, an english speaking person misinterpretted the artcle while translating it thinking that the glitch was what caused the gay marriage screenshots.

The glitch didn't cause gay characters. The glitch was completely unrelated. The homosexual options in the game, meaning crossdress a character to pretend or have nothing, have not changed at all since the games release. Not even a little bit.

Read http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/05/nintendo-on-gay-marriage-and-tomodachi-life

So, yes, Jim is misinformed here.