We here at MeltedJoystick have refrained from participating in the low-brown mudslinging that made up the lion’s share of the Gamergate controversy that blew up last year between the gaming community and radical fringe liberals. Unfortunately, ignoring the issue has not caused it to go away, and the ongoing pressure from the radical left has started to bear fruit.
Last month, Tecmo-Koei, the publisher that is home to Team Ninja – the developer behind the fanservicey modern ‘Ninja Gaiden’ games and the ‘Dead or Alive’ fighting franchise – announced that they will not be localizing “Dead or Alive Xtreme 3” for the Western market. Their reasoning? They have been observing the Western gaming media and decided that not releasing the game – featuring busty women in bikinis playing games/sports on the beach – outside of Asia would be preferable to dealing with the negativity and bile the game would draw from the biggest Western gaming news and opinion outlets.
What’s worse, though, is that the “DoAX3” announcement wasn’t alone. November 2015 featured a rash of censorship announcements from Japan, ranging from the removal of the Breast Size Slider from the North American version of “Xenoblade Chronicles X” to de-sexualizing changes to a number of animations in “Street Fighter 5.” And all of these changes come in 2015, over a decade after Western otaku felt like they ‘won’ a long and hard-fought battle to get un-Bowdlerized versions of Japanese media brought to their own regions.
What is going on here? Is not the progressive liberal agenda designed around inclusion and removing the stigmatization from people with different sexualities? How is it ‘inclusive’ to exclude things that a large demographic would consider sexually titillating while aggressively lobbying for more inclusion of LGBT content for a demographic that makes up less than 5% of the world population, to say nothing of the percentage of gamers?
Now, by virtue of their increasing militarism, that last paragraph would likely be interpreted as an attack by the fringe group that is pushing this agenda so heavily. But it is not an attack. It is a simple statement of facts. I do not care if a LGBT person or a woman wants to make a videogame featuring issues important to them – I would applaud their initiative while simultaneously standing unsurprised by the community’s utter lack of interest in said game. (I look forward to ignoring the angry Tweets when the MJ robot posts this article on Twitter.)
I am bothered, though, by the fact that the biggest of the big gaming media outlets – and I am referring specifically to Gawker Media’s Kotaku, here – have been aggressively targeting games for NOT including LGBT/Feminist issues and using this lack of dedicated content as a basis for negative criticism. This all started a few years ago when the Chief Editor position changed hands and Kotaku began aggressively hiring female and other ‘diverse’ writers (of course, when I applied, they never even responded) who naturally had agendas they wanted to push. Pushing agendas via the media is par for the course – it’s what we expect. I do it all the time with my struggle against the defamation and watering-down of RPGs… but when writing for a media outlet that covers a specific hobby, it is generally considered good form to stick with pushing agendas that directly relate to said hobby, rather than pulling-in incredibly divisive outside topics like religion, politics, and political correctness.
Perhaps the saddest thing about this recent rash of Bowdlerization is the fact that at least some of the people pushing the fringe liberal agenda didn’t foresee the negative backlash they themselves were creating. Both Jim Sterling (of The Jimquisition) and Moviebob Chipman (of… Youtube, I guess) proclaimed the fairly run-of-the-mill sexuality portrayed in games like “Dead or Alive Xtreme 3” to be “not sexy” and “gross” and “monster boobs on teenagers,” yet held (or rather still hold) the belief that the inclusion of more diversity in videogames will “not cause developers to take away your massive tit parade.” One of the key ironies in these comments from Sterling is that he recently outed himself as a “pansexual,” meaning he should find EVERYTHING titillating, yet the fact that he can attack “boob games” makes him an enormous hypocrite. Youtuber, Vae Victis, deconstructed these guys’ apologetics in a great video:
I first started cautioning against the overzealous push by the social justice crowd back in 2013 when Vanillaware’s “Dragon’s Crown” started to take heat from Kotaku’s Jason Schreier over the design of the Sorceress character. Despite the fact that Vanillaware’s George Kamitani is essentially a Japanese Boris Vallejo, creating semi-erotic high fantasy art for all of his company’s games, Schreier felt the need to insult him and his work. Then, when Kamitani snappily retorted in a way that implied he thought Schreier was gay and could not appreciate the curvaceousness of the Sorceress, the whole situation turned even uglier, as documented by Kinja user, HokutoAndy. I still maintain the stance that my worst fear for the final outcome of the social justice attack on gamers is that companies like Vanillaware, who are known for their gorgeous and unique art, will either stop localizing their games or censor them to the same degree that Konami and Upper Deck censored “Yu-Gi-Oh!” card art during their partnership.
To sum up the entire situation, the shoe is now on the other foot, but these so-called Social Justice Warriors are not wearing it gracefully. Instead of using their positions within the gaming media to promote the diversity that they want to see, they are using them as a platform from which to attack everything that represents (or ‘triggers’) the status quo that repressed them for so long. As is so often the case in such situations of turnabout, the repressed now stand as the repressors, using bullying tactics – which they claim to strongly oppose – in order to force a fringe agenda upon a hobby that is, itself, a fringe.
Gamers are ultimately the least deserving group of people for the fringe left to choose as targets. Historically, the fringe group known as ‘gamers’ has consisted of socially awkward nerds who have already faced bullying by the status quo. Gamers – be they of the video or tabletop variety – exist because other hobbies/activities/socializing were/are not a good fit for the membership. Yet in recent years, not only have we had to endure the Mainstreamification of gaming, where groups such as Dudebros, who normally would have bullied gamers, have hijacked the hobby for their own desires, but now we must endure social justice bullying as well. Is there any wonder why Gamergate got so ugly so fast? Gamers are being attacked from all sides, when we really just want to be left alone to enjoy our hobby, boobs and all.
