Jimquisition: Tomodachi Strife

[Demonchaser27]

Dear Jim, maybe you should inform yourself before making such a video and calling out Nintendo on something that they didn't do.

Just checked again and, yeah, unless I'm missing or misunderstanding something, this is how the whole thing went:

- Nintendo releases the game with the gay marriage thing
- The devs patch it away because it wasn't intentional
- The press starts going on about Nintendo being against homosexuality
- Nintendo responds, saying "this isn't what we were trying to say. We were just fixing a glitch"

Basically, the fault lies with whoever moron thought that patching gay relationship out of the game was necessary

No, this is what actually happened.
-Nintendo releases the game without gay marriage at all
-A bug was found when you transferring your Mii and the bug could prevent you from any progress in the game and it could literally damage your 3DS
-the bug was fixed
-a Japanese article about people crossdressing their Mii's as the opposite gender to "emulate" same sex marriage was written
-some incompetent western site mistranslated the bug report and the crossdressing article into one article making it seem like the bug was same sex marriage and Nintendo patched it out (not true, you can still crossdress)
-every other western gaming news site takes that article as 100% true and without any fact checking repost it
-people which actually understanding of Japanese and people who like to check for facts point that out, but obviously people would rather hate Nintendo than read real facts

Sounds like typical American media to me. We're so screwed here.

 

[Dragonbums]

As he does when he can't write episode based on facts he reinterprets someone's words and then writes about that.

Nintendo didn't make social commentary. Just because they didn't include it does not it make it social commentary. They just didn't program it in.

You don't know much about programming, do you? You have to code the process of marriage in it's most basic form or you're going to take up a lot of space recoding marriage after marriage after marriage. First you program just one marriage function and then then extra code is written to block the event triggers in situations or settings that you don't want. The event triggers have to be present in each human character because the player could be any gender. Either they wrote code to deactivate the triggers depending on which player character gender is chosen OR they wrote code to deny access to same-gender trigger options (or wrote the inverse as a code that only allows access to opposite-gender trigger options).

So they didn't just "not program [homosexuality] in"... they had to actively program homosexuality out.

At best your solution would result in every character being bisexual which fixes nothing as my gay characters could still marry the opposite gender and my strait characters could marry the same gender. Also adding in homosexuality would require additional checks for not just for gender but orientation in partners.

Yeah, every character would be bisexual in practice. As in, you could any gender you want. The role-playing would then be up to you. The checks would be added for exclusionary reasons.

...and then it suddenly occurred to me to wonder if this game is interactive...
*some checking later*
Well, it's not, it's entirely just... a... um... screensaver? A screensaver with adjustable initial parameters. Okay, I see it now. I was under the assumption that this was a game we were talking about.

Okay... so the designers had two choices:

Add an entirely new input choice and data set that controls which gender your Mii would try to couple with
...or...
Add a hidden value that restricted trigger events between all couplings except for one

Yeah, with those two choices I can see which one was the easier one.

So AI is controlling who your Mii is trying to hook up with? I assumed you were controlling your little avatar, so the whole idea of having checks for orientation didn't make any sense at all. If you're not controlling your character, then does having your sprite get married actually matter to the gamer? This style of game doesn't appeal to me in general, so I don't get it. Are there any Nintendo fans out there that can tell us if having in game relationships is something that would make or break Tomodachi Life for you?

If I'm not mistaken you have no control over who your Mii's partner up with. The only control you have is how you customize them, and what they eat....that's about it.

Everything else is up to game code chance.

 

[Fappy]

I mean- where the fuck were these people when you couldn't have gay marriage in FE:Awakening? Seriously.

To be fair I was pretty sad you couldn't have gay marriage in FE. But I also kind of understand when you consider how the latter part of that game plays out.

Spoiler: Minor FE: Awakening Spoiler

I suppose the most logical compromise is to make one or two (maybe more) of the characters be gay and/or bi and they can only have biological future children if they were with a partner of the opposite sex. It would also make sense considering an entire army of bisexuals would do awful things to my suspension of disbelief. After all, these are characters with their own lives/stories, not just the player's toys. That was one of the many things that made me hate DA2 >.>

 

[Kaendris]

I'm going to imagine this was done early on because my. fucking. God.

Goddammit Jim. You got the info of the bug wrong, you got the nature of the statement wrong, you got everything fucking wrong.

First off, the bug in question only came about due to a sex glitch within the Mii's during transfer that assigned whatever sex to whatever Mii. Due to this fact the game began to internally conflict and prevented player progression, corrupted save files, crashed the game, and in worst case scenarios actually damaged the 3DS software itself.

The gay coupling players saw in screenshots were not a result of the bug. It was a result of Japanese players dressing up their "female" characters as male character and having them romance each other.

Nature of the full bug at IGN (of all fucking places to get things right.) http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/05/nintendo-on-gay-marriage-and-tomodachi-life

Secondly this game is about a year old. It came out in early 2013. Early 2013 for a Japanese only audience. You want to know what's illegal in Japan? Gay marriage. Guess what dude, Nintendo is not a political crusader machine. Gay relationships in 2014 is only normal in first world countries like the United States and Great Britain. In many other parts of the world it fucking isn't normal and is often frowned upon, illegal, or met with a death sentence. Japan just happens to be one of those countries. So why would Nintendo- who are not- mind you- a political crusader company by any stretch of the word- implement a system in a game meant only for Japanese players that is illegal in Japan? Seriously. Ask yourself that. Why would they?
Let's also keep in mind as well that by the time Nintendo decided to port this game over to English, the game was well done and over with, the original dev team is off doing other projects, and nobody inside our outside of Japan gave a shit anymore?

Third, the message Nintendo sent to Miiquality wasn't fucking stupid. Did you not watch the video? The man was extremely realistic about the outcome of his video. He even stated that there is a high chance they wouldn't put it in this game, but they would put it in future games. And that's what Nintendo said. They specifically said that if the feedback is positive enough they will put them in future installments to Miiquality.

But that doesn't mean fucking anything. Because once again the whole world revolves around us. Did you even mention the legality of gay marriage in Japan? No. You didn't.
Japan never got a feature that we didn't. Their game doesn't have gay marriage in it and our game doesn't have gay marriage in it.
The only thing stupid here is the willingness-despite having all the evidence right in front of you telling the full story- you still decided to perpetrate the misinformation and misunderstanding that occurred throughout this fucking disaster.

To reiterate:

Nintendo did not patch out the bug because it contained gay marriage. They patched it out because it corrupted saves files, prevented player progression, caused the game to crash, and did actual harm to the 3DS system. This was a result of an error through Mii transfers from the Wii/DS systems where a random sex was designated (or absent) from the Mii's and it confused the games coding and caused it to fail.

Read the link. Read the IGN link. It explains fucking everything.

You sir, have succinctly surmised my feelings on the matter. I rather like Jim's outlooks. At least 70% of the time anyway. The other 30% I feel he is just repeating the same points over again and applying them to a new representation piece. I suppose that is how critics and journalist work. The hell do I really know?

I will add, that from a sociological, or heck, even cultural psychological standpoint, this is a pretty decent example of ethnocentrism at work. Made all the more interesting because 15 years ago, we were little different in our view of homosexuality. Yet now that progress has been made, we judge all cultures by our new found "morals". In the process eliminating their time to grow, and our own chance to aid.

It is much easier to show others the correctness of your cause through application and care, than screaming at them until they relent from exhaustion. Yet, what are we if we do not remind others of what we are, while subsequently demanding they ignore what we were.

I am with you on this one, I would like to believe Jim rushed it to the presses, but.... I truly think he just allowed emotional bias to rule the day.

 

[maximara]

Dear Jim, maybe you should inform yourself before making such a video and calling out Nintendo on something that they didn't do.

Just checked again and, yeah, unless I'm missing or misunderstanding something, this is how the whole thing went:

- Nintendo releases the game with the gay marriage thing
- The devs patch it away because it wasn't intentional
- The press starts going on about Nintendo being against homosexuality
- Nintendo responds, saying "this isn't what we were trying to say. We were just fixing a glitch"

Basically, the fault lies with whoever moron thought that patching gay relationship out of the game was necessary

No, this is what actually happened.
-Nintendo releases the game without gay marriage at all
-A bug was found when you transferring your Mii and the bug could prevent you from any progress in the game and it could literally damage your 3DS
-the bug was fixed
-a Japanese article about people crossdressing their Mii's as the opposite gender to "emulate" same sex marriage was written
-some incompetent western site mistranslated the bug report and the crossdressing article into one article making it seem like the bug was same sex marriage and Nintendo patched it out (not true, you can still crossdress)
-every other western gaming news site takes that article as 100% true and without any fact checking repost it
-people which actually understanding of Japanese and people who like to check for facts point that out, but obviously people would rather hate Nintendo than read real facts

Which doesn't explain Nintendo's comments. If this was all true why didn't they explain all this instead of giving the emptyheaded response we saw?

 

[WeepingAngels]

Inclusion should be the default? Oh boy that's could lead to all kinds of things like marrying kids and animals. I am betting that even Jim draws the line somewhere and then inclusion would not be the default.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

-snip-

Which doesn't explain Nintendo's comments. If this was all true why didn't they explain all this instead of giving the emptyheaded response we saw?

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

We asked Trinen if Nintendo had made any prior effort to clear up this confusion. ?I think, at the time, in Japan there actually wasn?t confusion,? Trinen said. ?As it was reported in Japanese, they had an understanding of what the [data corruption] issue was. The other wasn?t an issue. It was just a unique way that people were playing the game.?

Trinen continued, ?At the time, because the game wasn?t out here, we hadn?t really gotten into the detail on it. And that was primarily because we hadn?t announced that we were working on the game.?

Also what comments?
Like the comments of not planning the game that way? What about them?
The lack of a statement isn't a statement on it's own. Nintendo didn't include gay couples in the game, that doesn't mean Nintendo says gay people don't exist. We just simply weren't included in that game. Sure, it sucks. I always like role playing a gay character if there is a option. Literally 99% of all my Sims families were gay even when I was small and didn't really understand it myself. But it not being included means nothing. It's not a statement on the contrary.

And lets not completely ignore the circumstances in which the game was created. With gay marriage being illegal in Japan and the game being a Japan only game with no plans of a western release, it's completely logical to not include same sex couples so I don't see how "we didn't plan it that way" is insulting or homophobic in any way at all.

And considering how the game does everything for you and you just customize your Mii and only some small things, adding same sex relationships would require changing the game from the very core and is not financially feasible. Tomodachi 3DS was a test to see how such games will do outside of Japan. Investing tons of money to only test waters, especially when you post a rather big lose is quite a stupid thing to do from a company.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

The minute we start telling people how their supposed to think, we become no better than Germany and the Nazis in WW2.

So, Emancipation, Civil Rights and desegregation = Hitler?

Stunningly well thought-out argument there.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Where do we draw the line between including something and not including something? The first thing that pops into my head is the people on tumblr who make up their own pronouns to refer to themselves. Do "life" games have to have customization options so that you can be a ship, or a squid, or a fox, or a cup of water, or else they're making a "political statement"?

That's ridiculous. In the game, you can play as a person. As a person, you have the option of two genders. The game includes marriage. So, no assets would have to be added. We're just talking about the existing in-game options.

If you could play as a squid or a fox, then maybe squid-fox relationships would be an issue in this game.

If, for example, they didn't include same-sex marriage because they just didn't have the money to do so, would this still be a big deal?

Why would it cost more money? It seems it would cost more money to exclude same-sex marriage, as you'd have to write code specifically to prevent same-sex characters from marrying. A computer doesn't have any innate sense of sexuality - to them, all the characters would by default be capable of the same things, unless programmed differently.

 

[wulf3n]

I'm going to imagine this was done early on because my. fucking. God.

Goddammit Jim. You got the info of the bug wrong, you got the nature of the statement wrong, you got everything fucking wrong.

First off, the bug in question only came about due to a sex glitch within the Mii's during transfer that assigned whatever sex to whatever Mii. Due to this fact the game began to internally conflict and prevented player progression, corrupted save files, crashed the game, and in worst case scenarios actually damaged the 3DS software itself.

The gay coupling players saw in screenshots were not a result of the bug. It was a result of Japanese players dressing up their "female" characters as male character and having them romance each other.

Nature of the full bug at IGN (of all fucking places to get things right.) http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/05/nintendo-on-gay-marriage-and-tomodachi-life

Secondly this game is about a year old. It came out in early 2013. Early 2013 for a Japanese only audience. You want to know what's illegal in Japan? Gay marriage. Guess what dude, Nintendo is not a political crusader machine. Gay relationships in 2014 is only normal in first world countries like the United States and Great Britain. In many other parts of the world it fucking isn't normal and is often frowned upon, illegal, or met with a death sentence. Japan just happens to be one of those countries. So why would Nintendo- who are not- mind you- a political crusader company by any stretch of the word- implement a system in a game meant only for Japanese players that is illegal in Japan? Seriously. Ask yourself that. Why would they?
Let's also keep in mind as well that by the time Nintendo decided to port this game over to English, the game was well done and over with, the original dev team is off doing other projects, and nobody inside our outside of Japan gave a shit anymore?

Third, the message Nintendo sent to Miiquality wasn't fucking stupid. Did you not watch the video? The man was extremely realistic about the outcome of his video. He even stated that there is a high chance they wouldn't put it in this game, but they would put it in future games. And that's what Nintendo said. They specifically said that if the feedback is positive enough they will put them in future installments to Miiquality.

But that doesn't mean fucking anything. Because once again the whole world revolves around us. Did you even mention the legality of gay marriage in Japan? No. You didn't.
Japan never got a feature that we didn't. Their game doesn't have gay marriage in it and our game doesn't have gay marriage in it.
The only thing stupid here is the willingness-despite having all the evidence right in front of you telling the full story- you still decided to perpetrate the misinformation and misunderstanding that occurred throughout this fucking disaster.

To reiterate:

Nintendo did not patch out the bug because it contained gay marriage. They patched it out because it corrupted saves files, prevented player progression, caused the game to crash, and did actual harm to the 3DS system. This was a result of an error through Mii transfers from the Wii/DS systems where a random sex was designated (or absent) from the Mii's and it confused the games coding and caused it to fail.

Read the link. Read the IGN link. It explains fucking everything.

This needs to be quoted on every page.

OT:

Jim, I thought you learnt your lesson with the the ME3 fiasco. Get your facts right before jumping on the Social commentary bandwagon. I know it's "in" to "criticise" Nintendo about this, but if you want to have even a shred of credibility you've got to do some research.

 

[Something Amyss]

Well, yes, but I think it's jumping the gun a bit to go right to calling them "bigots" because of this. I can't say one way or the other whether Nintendo are bigoted or not, but saying stupid things and handling a sensitive situation in a poor manner doesn't automatically make them so.

Agreed. I don't know what goes on in their collective heads, and they may or may not be bigoted.

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?

-Nintendo responds to Miiquality with well-meaning, but idiotic statment
-Several websites pick up on Miiquaity and the earlier article and twist everything around.

Well, not exactly. People who were against "Miiquality" for whatever reason started complaining before Nintendo's response, kicking it up. If not for the people complaining, this would almost certainly have been the same as other requests for gay romances in games like Harvest Moon. They weren't picked up because there wasn't a huge backlash.

Probably because a huge portion of that game involved reproducing with your loved one with your child inheriting both parents traits. How would you go about it with a gay marriage? Select a surrogate? Magic pregnancies? A Mass Effect Asari body meld?

It's a quirky, whimsical game. homosexual pregnancies sounds whimsical to me....

but they were really awkward, poorly written, poorly animated...

So...it was written by Bioware?

Well the Japanese are horrifically homophobic, and while I'm at it, sexist, xenophobic, jingoistic and probably racist too.
Is ANYONE surprised by this? Seriously?!

http://www.ipsos-na.com/download/pr.aspx?id=12795 (PDF link)

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/18/national/52-4-of-japanese-say-they-oppose-same-sex-marriage/#.U3ExJihOr-Q

In the former instance, Japan isn't that far behind the US.

In the latter, it's not as rosy a picture in terms of marriage rights, but still not much worse than America 2 years ago. It also shows a sentiment that "sexual minorities" are poorly treated.

Perhaps it's a disservice to call them horrifically homophobic and ask if anyone's surprised. At the very least, it's dismissing a culture that has clearly been changing, even if it hasn't yet.

 

[Something Amyss]

False equivalancy for the win! Because being gay is the same as being a pedophile!

And excluding people simply for who they are is exactly the same as excluding illegal activities, don't you know?

 

[StriderShinryu]

I don't often watch Jim Sterling, but I watched this episode purely due to the subject and I absolutely agree. I particularly agree with the final bit about why certain communities feel the need to be loud about certain subjects. This is something that comes up all the time in reference to a feminist view on the game industry. Feminist views are often loud and in your face when it comes to games because of the all too common decisions that game publishers and developers make. If there wasn't a problem, or at least if it wasn't such a large problem, there wouldn't be such a large outcry about it.

 

[Lunar Templar]

You people crying 'Nintendo is homophobic' do get that Nintendo is a JAPANESE company right? The US HQ doesn't have the power to reverse stuff like this, sides ....

Part of the reason Tomodachi Life didn't intend have gay marriage in the first place was because Japan doesn't accept it as a whole, thank you Gaijin Goomba for pointing that out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50f8mLfTzwQ

It's not Nintendo 'fualt' per say, it's how the country on the whole seems to be.

 

[WeepingAngels]

Inclusion should be the default? Oh boy that's could lead to all kinds of things like marrying kids and animals. I am betting that even Jim draws the line somewhere and then inclusion would not be the default.

False equivalancy for the win! Because being gay is the same as being a pedophile!

That's not what I said. If inclusion is the default, then there is no end. If you draw the line somewhere, you are no longer making inclusion the default.

False equivalancy for the win! Because being gay is the same as being a pedophile!

And excluding people simply for who they are is exactly the same as excluding illegal activities, don't you know?

Well if you wanna go that route, then should gay marriage in video games only be allowed in states and countries where it is legal?

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Jim's said he's bisexual before, so it's not like he just came out or something.

"Bisexual" is such a small and limited term, hardly worthy of the majesty of Jim. How about "gender dismorphic bigenitalian pansexual"?

 

[Sticky]

I've said it before here and I'll say it again.

The same-sex marriage bug in Tomodachi was just that, a bug. Nintendo, being competent and professional developers, went out and squashed that bug. There is nothing more to this story.

Oh what, you wanted them to make that bug into a feature? Okay. I hope you're ready to cough up the money to add the following things to their development cycle:

-QA testing
-Bug reporting on the Bug that is now a feature
-Remodeling the male models (originally the males became pregnant)
-Remaking the logistics of marriage to the game so it understands that neither of two men can become pregnant
-QA Testing for THOSE remade logistics
-Another cycle of bug testing

What you (people slamming Nintendo for this) are saying Nintendo should do is go through another round of development hell just because you're 'offended' that they fixed this bug. When even the few examples of bugs-turned-features like strafe jumping and skiing had years of QA testing to ensure it didn't break the game (and in many cases maps and weapons were re-balanced just because of what many view as a harmless feature).

Two things

1) It is an AWFUL precedent to want to prevent developers from fixing bugs for any reason. We wail and scream every time EA or Ubisoft buries its bugs under mounds of red tape and PR, but we seem completely ignorant to the fact that we're actively encouraging a developer to release bugs to the public without properly testing and adjusting them first.

2) You're also, as a side effect of wanting it patched-in for the NA release, demanding Nintendo split its code base for a single game between an NA release and a JP release. Which if you've ever had to deal with multiple codebases before, is hamstringing future development of the game before it even goes through the rounds of testing required as outlined above.

The computer doesn't care how you feel, it doesn't care if you think it's a bigot or not, it's still a machine that has thousands of hours of labor put behind it in order to function. It's easy to sit on our little walled forum and hurl stones at Nintendo for not investing the man hours to make you, personally, feel satisfied.

This is EXACTLY why Nintendo also released a statement stating that it would be a feature in the sequel. Trying to redo the QA process for what is in actuality a tiny slip-up in the game code MAKES. NO. BUSINESS. SENSE.

Also Jim I'm genuinely amazed you, an industry veteran, thinks that Nintendo meant something deep and meaningful with their statement which was basically "We found a bug and fixed it, we meant nothing ill toward anyone by doing so". It mostly seems like you're nitpicking words and phrases out of context most of the video to try and slam Nintendo on an angle that I'm amazed anyone would find offense at. Me, not really liking Nintendo that much, would have been more than happy with a Nintendo bashing video if we were bashing Nintendo on it's failed business policies or policy regarding the Wii-U instead of bashing it for doing what a competent developer SHOULD DO in order to maintain a stable code base.

I'm sure I'll get more than a few ad-homs thrown at me by people who read the first line of my post and immediately clicked the quote button.

 

[Mike Lemond]

This is why so many Japanese games never come to America.