Now, I'll ask you again and don't avoid the question: Who is sanitizing their art here? Who do you feel lacks the artistic integrity in avoiding "Social commentary"? Who is designing their game around avoiding touching a sensitive and controversial topic?īecause I think the answer is immensely obvious and straight forward, but I'd love to know how you reach any other conclusion. I then challenged you by pointing out EAs bold refusal to remove Gay Marriage from the Sims 4 in Russia to get a non-adults only rating. Nintendo trying to avoid controversy by designing around just a standard heterosexual relationship and nothing more. IMO, I feel the first response by calling the issue "Social Commentary" was exactly what you are decrying. My idea is that if you do that, you don't give a public statement that literally demeans and degrades how a large group of people feel by calling their existence in a game "Implementing social commentary". I don't advocate the idea that if gay characters can't get married, the mechanic should never have been in there. You then ignore everything I wrote, focusing on an argument I don't think is even remotely important to anything I think or what many others have written about the topic, to go off on some tangent about adding or subtracting various things from games.
To me, obviously having homosexual relationships would be a better ideal but I already accepted it might not be possible. I don't care what they did or didn't do, I care about how they chose to respond to criticism of their decision. I have no idea what any of this paragraph that starts with this has anything to do with what I wrote. I mean I look at Nintendos original dismissive response and just wonder "How on earth could they do that?", while the traditional "Everyone loves to hate them" company in EA is sticking their middle finger up at the Russian Government, swallowing an R18+ rating (which will certainly affect sales) and releasing the Sims 4 in Russia with Gay Marriage still intact.īut given you bought this up, who do you genuinely think is the "artist" who is being brave for their vision of their game here out of EA or Nintendo? Don't expect me to take any of this "It's art" bullshit seriously, while games routinely take the easiest (albeit, often for real reasons that do have a lot of actual merit) and most conservatively default options again and again. Every female character is routinely a piece of meat? Well who cares, ART! No meaningful racial minorities as protagonists in most games, instead being a generic lazy bald headed white dude? ART! The only minorities in a game being horrific racially vilified stereotypes? ART! Relegating someones entire sexuality to a fobbed off "Social commentary" statement to support not having it? ART!įrankly it's asinine as an argument. I've gone over this before, but the asinine and intellectually void of merit "But it's Artistic License!" argument is nearly always used to support bigotry in games, or to just fob off giving a shit that some people who play games (or would like to) aren't cis-gendered straight white males. The idea that you should avoid controversy by going out of your way to design around touching it is abhorrent, an invitation for sanitized art. I think that's just primitive and lacks artistic integrity. The fact is, just because you can give it a justification doesn't suddenly mean you are completely correct and that having gay marriage available would degrade the game (honestly, it's so random and weird I don't see what it would have done).
People have used an apt analogy, which is if they had made exactly the same statement but "Insert Race" they'd be in obvious and complete shit with just about everyone. Nobody really seemed to give that much of a shit beyond pointing it out and saying "Well that kind of sucks" and then Nintendo figuratively threw gasoline over the entire issue, then lit a match. Some people are taking it to a more extreme point of view of "Why implement anything and not just a best friends system or similar", but the core complaint and controversy only got any traction post-response. The only thing that draws my anger is the derisive nature of their initial response and throwing gay marriage into a "social commentary" bucket, which is obscenely offensive and where saying "We just couldn't get the time and resources to change the game in this manner" is in fact entirely different. It's not that they didn't implement gay marriage, it's how they initially responded to it. To be honest, from my point of view this wasn't the point and never was. Is the point that if the game didn't include a relationship element at all, no one would feel excluded by a thing they didn't know existed, and therefore no one would have a reason to feel bad? And since no one knows about what game systems were missing, it wouldn't be a big deal?
I think you're missing the point entirely.
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