Nintendo Patches Out Same-Sex Marriage in Tomodachi Collection

[Olas]

So you're telling me the people responsible for this:

Are a bunch of homophobes?
Ya, of course, why didn't I see it before?

 

[Raine_sage]

That's a hell of a difference that you refuse to acknowledge.

But hey, I doubt I can change your mind. Just know that, while there definitely is malice, it's not as common as you seem to think.

Because while you have seen malice, I have also seen (and performed) incredibly offensive actions that weren't remotely intended to be so.

The problem with "I don't intend to be malicious" is that it's a scapegoat to keep on performing the same offensive/ignorant actions and evade the responsibility of making restitutions or even owning up to what they did.

And no, I still don't think that Nintendo, of all companies, is malicious.

That's cool, we don't have to think the same.

It's not about evading responsibilty so much though as helping you decide which course of action to take when confronted with someone being ignorant.
Like, if you get a fact wrong in conversation with someone completely on accident, and they go off on you like you just shot their baby even though a "hey dude sorry but it's not like that" would have sufficed, are you going to lend more or less weight to their argument? I've committed offense really without meaning too and had people tell me so in a variety of different ways. I'm definitely more willing to listen to someone who treats me like an intelligent adult who made a faux paw, than someone who screams at me about how I "should have known better" no matter how many times I try to apologize.

Likewise Nintendo sells products to Americans/Europe/Wherever else but it's still a Japanese company and in Japan Gay Rights as we know them here don't exist. Women's rights has only recently become a thing. Pretty much any movement that centers around individuality never picked up much traction there because Japanese culture emphasizes the family over the individual. Has this led to some less than ideal conditions for minorities? Of course. But calling their entire cultural viewpoint malicious wouldn't get you anywhere with someone if you were trying to communicate to them /why/ it's a bad thing. Sorry for rambling but I just think a little empathy and an understanding that people fuck up sometimes without meaning too goes a long way towards fostering understanding between groups.

 

[Darken12]

Sorry for rambling but I just think a little empathy and an understanding that people fuck up sometimes without meaning too goes a long way towards fostering understanding between groups.

I understand that. I understand everything you say. I merely resent being told how I should feel (or how forgiving I should be). I want to be angry at this. Let me be angry at this. Thank you.

 

[theultimateend]

Again, that could take days, depending on how messy the code is (and believe me, code can get unbelievably messy).

Also, I think you're being paranoid. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity, and this is definitely a case where they could have simply not thought of what their actions were implying.

I literally hate Hanlon's Razor with the stabbing fury of a thousand slashers. No. It's not all innocent stupidity. There is malice in the world, and I know because I have seen it. I refuse to accept "oopsie daisy, we're all just harmless bumbling fools, tee hee!" as a valid excuse. No. At the end of the day, I do not care if it's stupidity or malice. It makes absolutely no difference to me, and I heavily resent the implication that I'm supposed to excuse or forgive or change how I feel because someone did something I highly disapprove of out of stupidity instead of malice.

Do...

Do you have a job?

I only ask because 90% of the time our management is trying to do A and ends up accidentally also causing B.

B can sometimes be an unintended message and other times B can be an actual change to game design that results in people thinking it was intentional.

Your issue is mean-worth theory, basically for you the world is much harsher than it actually is. There are >a lot< of nasty people in the world but that's just a raw number. The actual % of people in the world that are 'evil' is quite small. It's large enough to be noticeable and inconvenient to life. So in that respect I do agree it should be addressed.

The odds that this update was done because of homophobia is incredibly slim. I imagine if people bring up the change and mention the message it sends the developers will change it or earnestly apologize.

You won't believe them, but it won't make it untrue.

The problem with "I don't intend to be malicious" is that it's a scapegoat to keep on performing the same offensive/ignorant actions and evade the responsibility of making restitutions or even owning up to what they did.

The Reddit argument.

"Oh I see! Reddit White Knights against misogyny and then now this post about tits is on the front page! Hypocrites!"

Different people are different people. Observing that some people lie does not mean all other people lie.

It's generally obvious when people are using a scapegoat to get out of trouble. It's not a very subtle thing.

Just like on Reddit some people like X and other people on Reddit like -X.

 

[Andy Chalk]

Sometimes, we forgot we're past the first decade of the XXI century...

 

[Darken12]

*snip*

And yet my viewpoints are my prerogative. We are all constantly making assumptions and decisions based on available evidence. We all have our systems for doing so. I haven't criticised yours (you can believe in the goodwill of Nintendo and the rest of the world as much as you want), so kindly refrain from doing the same with me.

But why? Nintendo are patching a bug that comes with game-breaking issues, as well as allowing male characters to get pregnant.

If this was a Bethesda game, we'd be calling on them to patch it ASAP. Now that it's Nintendo, why are you trying to turn it into this huge thing?

I don't care if it's Nintendo. I would be expressing my distaste of any company who pulled something like this. I am not buying the "we're just patching a bug!" excuse. If you want to fix a bug, you fix the bug.

Also, I am not making anything into a "huge thing", I am doing what everyone else is doing: sharing my opinions on this matter. I did not go around quoting people and starting arguments. I expressed my opinions and people latched onto that because goodness forfend I express a divergent opinion.

 

[EstrogenicMuscle]

I think that Nintendo prefers to avoid anything that might have a controversial meaning to anyone.

Despite the fact that Christians would like most Christian references in Nintendo games, they explicitly removed all references to Christianity in Nintendo games. Somehow I get the feeling conservative American Christians would have gotten a kick out of Link holding up a book with a cross on it rather than offended.

Though Nintendo will probably shy away from gay depictions of fictional characters until it becomes mainstream enough for them to see it as a profitable and safe thing to do. Nintendo doesn't really have an opinion on this sort of thing.

You don't see too many gay characters from Nintendo. Though you do see a lot of crossdressers and characters who seem in some way transgender. Or other characters who blur gender lines of some sort. For instance, Vivian from Paper Mario.

 

[Schadrach]

I am pretty sure that changing one line of dialogue from "we're pregnant!" to "we're adopting!" would have been a lot simpler than preventing the marriages altogether. They can't even claim simplicity or laziness on this one, because the lazy option was, coincidentally, the most progressive.

Except that the "mother" actually gets depicted as pregnant. So, it's not changing one line of dialog, it's also figuring out some reasoning behind why whenever a gay couple decides to adopt, one of them gets really fat for a while. =p

I find it hard to believe that people who wanted to avoid showing mpreg in a game went out of their way to depict mpreg in the in-game models.

Not to mention that if that was the bug they wanted to correct, that should have been the bug they corrected.

Likely there's either a "preg" piece that gets attached to existing models or a standard deformation applied to the model to apply "preg." IOW, there's like not special mpreg models.

Not a coder, are you? I can tell from the fact that you think "add a check that keeps men from being marked as a 'wife' which bars gay marriage but blocks actual problems too" and "add a mechanism for events to verify the gender of people instead of assuming they were put in standard 'husband' and 'wife' slots then check and potentially rewrite every event to utilize the new conditions and be sure that that didn't break anything in some other obscure corner case" are even remotely similar amounts of effort.

 

[Sticky]

*snip*

I don't care if it's Nintendo. I would be expressing my distaste of any company who pulled something like this. I am not buying the "we're just patching a bug!" excuse. If you want to fix a bug, you fix the bug.

But they fixed a bug, that's why we're having this conversation in the first place.

Think of this from the perspective of the people who fixed the bug:

When a game gets finished and bugs are found later, they do the natural thing they are contracted to do and apply patches. They don't add features, they don't add extra content to the game, because all that content is stuff that has to be tested as well. It's stuff that requires it's own prerogative to test and merge into the core game.

Adding features costs money, what may be just "leave the bug in!" to you is instead "contract a whole new team to add in this feature and test it against the stable code-base". Because the original team doesn't exist in whole anymore, they have already been shuffled off to a new project.

Even if this just was a text bubble malfunction, the crew who was left behind to fix bugs have no choice but to fix the bugs they were given. I doubt that programmer who fixed this was really going to put his job on the line over a bug. No one should have to.

Please don't act like this is the result of an evil bigoted programmer trying to crush gay rights, this is probably just a guy trying to keep his job.

Sometimes, we forgot we're past the first decade of the XXI century...

Yeah, evil Nintendo doing it's job. What an awful collection of bigots that Nintendo.

 

[Darken12]

*snip*

As I have repeatedly stated in this thread, I genuinely do not care if Nintendo did it on purpose or if they're just incompetent and unaware of how shitty their bug-fixing method is. The outcome is the same either way.

*snip*

Regardless of whether it's harder or easier to do this or that, the outcome is the same.

 

[Sticky]

*snip*

As I have repeatedly stated in this thread, I genuinely do not care if Nintendo did it on purpose or if they're just incompetent and unaware of how shitty their bug-fixing method is. The outcome is the same either way.

On the contrary, their bug-fixing method is actually extremely efficient because the bug doesn't exist anymore.

That's the one little factoid you seem to be missing.

Regardless of whether it's harder or easier to do this or that, the outcome is the same.

This is why I don't like threads that devolve into programmers vs non-programmers. Easier is by definition better as a decision for the person who made this change.

One of the reasons I'm so bitterly against outrage against programmers is because at the end of the day, they're just doing their job. It was this persons job to fix a bug, and he did it.

 

[Darken12]

On the contrary, their bug-fixing method is actually extremely efficient because the bug doesn't exist anymore.

That's the one little factoid you seem to be missing.

Right, right. Because if we take, say, WoW, and they receive a bug report about a certain ledge in an area which a player can jump from in order to bypass invisible walls, the perfect bug-fixing method is to make the entire area unavailable! Of course! Now that's some sound, intelligent bug-fixing.

You know what method has 100% efficiency in solving every single bug ever? Shutting down the entire game so that nobody can play it.

EDIT:

This is why I don't like threads that devolve into programmers vs non-programmers. Easier is by definition better as a decision for the person who made this change.

One of the reasons I'm so bitterly against outrage against programmers is because at the end of the day, they're just doing their job. It was this persons job to fix a bug, and he did it.

He fixed the bug by removing something that mirrors real-world bigotry, thereby (inadvertently, if we're feeling generous) mirroring real-world bigotry. This is like having a faulty polygon in one of the darker skin tones and saying that the way to fix it is to prevent players from creating darker-skin characters. Or having a glitch when female models enter a certain area, so the bug fixing is to prevent female players from entering that area. Or from leaving the kitchen.

It's not good bug-fixing, and I have no sympathy for whoever did this.

 

[Sticky]

On the contrary, their bug-fixing method is actually extremely efficient because the bug doesn't exist anymore.

That's the one little factoid you seem to be missing.

Right, right. Because if we take, say, WoW, and they receive a bug report about a certain ledge in an area which a player can jump from in order to bypass invisible walls, the perfect bug-fixing method is to make the entire area unavailable! Of course! Now that's some sound, intelligent bug-fixing.

You know what method has 100% efficiency in solving every single bug ever? Shutting down the entire game so that nobody can play it.

Once again, proving why I don't like having these programmer vs non-programmer arguments.

I'm sure Nintendo's actual solution was really to cause every Wii in the world to explode so they never have to see the evils of gay marriage. I'm also sure their original goal was to make the game completely unplayable like you're suggesting that they have done instead of fixing a bug to ensure that the game remained playable.

Or you know, maybe their actual solution was following typical QA guidelines, receiving a bug report, fixing a bug, and then closing that bug report.

A far cry from what you think they have done, which is completely destroy the game and any value it may have because they made a business decision that you don't agree with. Really I think you're just too emotionally invested in this particular argument.

He fixed the bug by removing something that mirrors real-world bigotry, thereby (inadvertently, if we're feeling generous) mirroring real-world bigotry. This is like having a faulty polygon in one of the darker skin tones and saying that the way to fix it is to prevent players from creating darker-skin characters. Or having a glitch when female models enter a certain area, so the bug fixing is to prevent female players from entering that area. Or from leaving the kitchen.

It's not good bug-fixing, and I have no sympathy for whoever did this.

Do you really not see the huge logical gap in your argument? Let me magnify it a bit for you

He fixed the bug ...
It's not good bug-fixing

The politics of it are irrelevant. That's up to the company to decide. The team in charge of maintaining the game only handles logical values.

 

[Darken12]

A far cry from what you think they have done, which is completely destroy the game and any value it may have because they made a business decision that you don't agree with. Really I think you're just too emotionally invested in this particular argument.

I see sarcasm is lost in you.

No, I do not think that this bug-fixing has destroyed the game. That was an exaggeration of your "meh, I'll just stop the players from being able to access the bug instead of actually fixing it" mentality, taken to its logical extreme. Stopping a player from accessing a bug is not good bug-fixing, much less when doing so mirrors real-life bigotry.

The politics of it are irrelevant.

The politics are literally the only thing that is relevant about all this, at least to me. I could not care less about the whys and hows of this. The only thing I care about is the fact that this sloppy, lazy "bug-fixing" has ended up mirroring (and, in an indirect way, supporting) real-life bigotry.

 

[Sticky]

Stopping a player from accessing a bug is not good bug-fixing, much less when doing so mirrors real-life bigotry.

Thank god there's no real programmers that think like you do. Segmentation faults and stack collisions everywhere.

Of course they would probably be very happy if customers thought this way, it would make their job a lot easier to just release buggy, broken products and then just saying "I'm sorry, we didn't fix these bugs because someone on our team found one of the bugs to be morally endearing". Where do you even work that you think that finding a problem and solving it is bad practice? Certainly not anything technical.

The politics are literally the only thing that is relevant about all this, at least to me. I could not care less about the whys and hows of this. The only thing I care about is the fact that this sloppy, lazy "bug-fixing" has ended up mirroring (and, in an indirect way, supporting) real-life bigotry.

When you program anything your care is in function. Everything else comes second. Everything else HAS to come second because computers aren't programmed using the powers of good feelings and positive inclusiveness. They're programmed by hard, logical facts about how that program should and shouldn't function. When someone makes a logical oversight, that can cause problems in a world that is based on 100% logical facts existing.

You saying "BUT IT'S BIGOTRY!" wouldn't actually fix the bug and doesn't add anything to the conversation. Because the game doesn't care about how you feel about it, it only cares about the logical facts that are put inside of it.

Once again, if you wanted to add a whole new set of logical facts that tell it that gay marriage is okay, that would require breaking down the game and adding in all those new laws of the universe that the game was completely unaware of beforehand. Like that two men can't get pregnant, or that marriage doesn't require an opposite gender slot.

Want that to happen? Petition Nintendo. Don't blame a mere coder and/or QA person whose mere job is to fix logical problems with how the game is currently defined.

 

[Darken12]

Want that to happen? Petition Nintendo. Don't blame a mere coder and/or QA person whose mere job is to fix logical problems with how the game is currently defined.

False dichotomy. Implies there is no possibility of fixing a bug without that kind of undesirable results. There is. Don't paint the programmers as tragic victims who had no other choice but to do this. There were other ways of accomplishing their goals. They just did not care.

 

[Sticky]

Want that to happen? Petition Nintendo. Don't blame a mere coder and/or QA person whose mere job is to fix logical problems with how the game is currently defined.

False dichotomy.

Only if you've never programmed a day in your life. If you are working as part of a team, you have only two choices: Fix it or get out.

Implies there is no possibility of fixing a bug without that kind of undesirable results. There is. Don't paint the programmers as tragic victims who had no other choice but to do this. There were other ways of accomplishing their goals. They just did not care.

Oh they had another choice:

They could lose their jobs.

Is that what you want? I mean, Nintendo would just go find someone else to fix the bug. And in the end nothing would have changed anyway. But do you think that programmer is going to lose his job over what amounts to something that he has to do every day?

I find it kind of interesting that you would rather this person get fired fighting this futile battle over a misunderstanding in the game instead of doing what would be the actual, moral thing to do if he really wanted to make change: Which is petition the higher levels to try and allocate resources to implement this feature.

Do you seriously think this was as easy as pressing a big red button called "Fix Bug Without Being a Bigot"? Do you think they just happened to press the one right next to it that was called "Fix Bug(Special Homophobia Edition)"?

 

[Darken12]

Oh they had another choice:

They could lose their jobs.

Nope. They could have taken the trouble to resolve the male-pregnancy issue without banning same-sex marriage. That was an option too.

Let's get one thing straight: unless you work for Nintendo and were there when they were handling this bug, everything you're saying is purely hypothetical. The option to fix the bug in a different way was always there. Whether it was the programmer's fault or if it was their management who refused to let them fix the bug in a different way, or if it was a direct order from the upper echelons stating that gay marriage was a mistake that should have never happened. I genuinely do not care. The outcome is the same.

And as I have repeatedly stated, I care far more about the outcome than the intricacies of where and why it went wrong, especially when those intricacies are used to excuse away the outcome.

 

[Sticky]

Oh they had another choice:

They could lose their jobs.

Nope. They could have taken the trouble to resolve the male-pregnancy issue without banning same-sex marriage. That was an option too.

Let's get one thing straight: unless you work for Nintendo and were there when they were handling this bug, everything you're saying is purely hypothetical.

Yeah, maybe I don't know for 100% fact how this particular instance went down. But I do know how large programming teams work, and I know how game companies typically function. And you very clearly do not. I would go as far as to say that you've never had to work with another large group of people in a company organization before based purely on how you say they should have solved this problem.

Let's get one thing straight: when you work in a section of a project, be it bug fixing, patching, testing, or adding features. You stay there, you do not overstep your bounds. Because the second you do that in a professional environment, you're out. Gone, period.

Here's how this situation likely went down with my experience with programming teams and bug fixing: Someone noticed the bug and filed a QA report on it. A QA tester verified the bug and forwarded it to the appropriate team for fixing. The team examined the bug and fixed it.

They didn't start adding features

They didn't start trying to find ways to keep the bug

They didn't start trying to re-form the team and make a whole new scenario where same sex marriage was possible

Why? Because that's not their job. They aren't managers, they aren't going to supersede the chain of command. And if that QA tester went back and found the bug un-fixed, that programmer would be in trouble.

Maybe you don't understand this, but people with good jobs at Nintendo don't want to risk their position. No one does, no one is going to take a stand over something that is, for all intents and purposes, unintended behavior with the game. The job of making a same-sex branch in the game code falls squarely in the realm of management. Not these bug testers

So you can take your hypotheticals about how these people should have gone over their manager and made a completely new branch of this project and find a manager who wouldn't fire your ass on the spot for even suggesting that.

Even the mere suggestion of that at some companies is akin to mutiny. I don't know why this is so hard for you to understand how large of a project you're proposing is. I guess as long as someone else is doing it, then it's real easy to say "IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE THIS WAY" from the sidelines, right?

And as I have repeatedly stated, I care far more about the outcome than the intricacies

Then you care more about feeling good than actual truth or facts. The devil is always in the details, and you so casually saying "ALL I'M SAYING IS THAT THE PROGRAMMERS AT NINTENDO ARE WRONG" completely misses why they did that, what the correct approach is, and how in the future this could be addressed.

Turning everything into a bad guy / good guy scenario only paints you as being extremely emotionally charged.

 

[Darken12]

Turning everything into a bad guy / good guy scenario only paints you as being extremely emotionally charged.

That's not what I'm doing. I am expressing my opinion in an open forum. You are the one repeatedly challenging my opinion and using hypotheticals to try and sway me. I have repeatedly stated that I do not care how or why it happened. I do not care if it was a programmer who did it wilfully, or because he didn't know better, or because it's a tyrannical workplace environment. I do not care if it was a direct order from the higher-ups and the programmers were doing what they were told. I do not care about the programmers and I am not blaming them for anything. My anger is directed at Nintendo as a company for the end result that we are currently witnessing.

You do not agree? That is perfectly fine. I have no intention of swaying you to my point of view. Feel free to keep on thinking whatever you want to think.