Nintendo Promises Future Tomodachi Games Will Be More "Inclusive"

Everyone with a different opinion than mine is literally Hitler, check!

This. It seems people want to be offended by everything nowadays.

@wilshere: Yeah, cause that's totally what I said, that everyone who doesn't agree with me is literally Adolph Hitler.

I've never seen so many people so offended by the notion that people might be offended by something that they themselves are not offended by. (Unpack that one!) This is more or less exactly what people mean when they use the term "privilege" by the way, the belief that if one in their own personal life experience has not faced a particular hardship, that said particular hardship must not actually exist, and that concerns to the contrary are thereby invalid. I'm so sorry that people are challenging your worldview! That must be tough... :-(

It's the nature of the game itself that makes it a magnet for this kind of controversy. A large part of the game involves creating virtual likenesses of yourself, your friends, and anyone else you can recreate in the Mii Maker, and watch them live out their virtual lives, interact with their virtual friends, and have virtual relationships and love affairs.

It's a bit of a harsh oversight that a game of this nature assumes that you and all your friends are hetero.

Some people pointed this out to Nintendo and appealed for them to do what they could to address it, and after fumbling their words, Nintendo eventually issued a statement promising to do exactly that, and everyone involved was happy with that.

Of course, this is the internet, so somewhere along the way, some other people decided it wasn't an oversight caused by cultural differences but a deliberate hate crime, and now it's turned into all this.

@patrickklepek: Isn't this the equivalent of me as a white male bitching about not having a male protagonist option in Tomb Raider or black people bitching that all of the Dead Rising protags were white with no black option? Not every game has to directly relate to your personal life experiences. I know we live in an age where the gay community (one which i support) has a much greater voice than it used to, but this still seems like self-entitlement.

"the company issued a tone-deaf response."

If by "tone-deaf response" you mean, a perfectly acceptable answer that isn't trying to defend itself and isn't dripping with PR, then yes I agree with you.

As someone said above, only people with an agenda (journalists) made this into a big deal, and only people with an agenda found fault with Nintendo's original response. There are a ton of games with a ton of things that you CAN'T do in them, stop looking to demonize every single thing out there if it doesn't fit into your specific notion of how it should be. Nintendo was making Zero social commentary with this game by including, or excluding, certain things, just stop looking for it.

And @ GB, I know the "news" these days is all about getting hits, regardless of any integrity, but come on....why not try to be better then everyone else and not let these click bait sensationalized non-issue articles from getting posted here.

This is probably the best breakdown of the situation out there.

Also this comment section isn't nearly as bad as some people claim it to be. Seems to me that, much like Nintendo's original statement, people want to interpret things in the worst way possible for the sake of controversy.

I feel bad for the people behind the Miiquality campaign. They made a positive, sensible, civil appeal to Nintendo only to have their campaign poisoned by people hungry for controversy and eager to fight.

It's too bad that even @patrickklepek seems to have gotten sucked into this. Guess I expected more after watching the PAX panel with him advocating civil discourse on the internet in such a profound way.

GB could have featured the original Miiquality video or interviewed Tye Marini and gotten behind the positive way in which the appeal was made... instead they waited until the whole thing turned into a shitstorm only to add fuel to the fire at that point. (Ie. the tweets and article featured in worth reading)

As was said on the panel, an important part of changing internet culture is actively getting behind exceptions to the rule instead of only pointing at the worst and either piggybacking it or crying foul.

Totally agree. The game is obviously a silly parody of life in an alternate world. If Nintendo doesn't include same-sex relationships in a silly, alternate world, that is completely their decision to make. There are plenty of dating sims out there that are strictly heterosexual or strictly homosexual, based on what the developer wants to do. Developers shouldn't be pressured to making their game a certain way. This sucks.

assigning "privilege" to anonymous posters based on their point of view is ignorant as fuck.

@neato: Well, what I find ignorant "as fuck," as you so elegantly put it (Great comment by the way! You're really contributing to the general level of discourse!) is people who start claiming that one's position on the bus doesn't matter only after someone else suggests that maybe they shouldn't have to ride in the back all the time. I imagine you likely won't appreciate the metaphor, so do feel free to tell me where I can stick it, in whatever colorful way you choose to use in place of critically examining my argument. And apologies if I come across as smug, being right has a habit of doing that to me.

The issue is with the implication that, in order for there to be support for homosexual couples, the game has to be social statement. That the very existence of homosexuals is still so controversial that to acknowledge them, to have the mere option of homosexual relationships would, by itself, turn the game into a social statement.

I don't think Nintendo, as a corporation, is bigoted. Let's make that clear. However, they're also very slow, very ponderous, very stubborn and set in their ways, and this is just the latest in a long string of things that prove their inability to adapt to changing market conditions. It's 2014, and they're acting like it's 1994.

@yukoasho: that implication is only there if you want it to be. The game was fine for the Japanese market and they simply localized it without stopping to think about whether this is even an issue. It's an oversight... And one they promised to address in upcoming installments.

Everybody, including Nintendo, agrees that same sex relations should have been in there and they tried to clarify that they didn't mean ill by overlooking it. You can either be happy with that or keep nitpicking at their statement, taking it in the worst way possible and keep fighting a battle over an issue that EVERYONE is on the same side of.

It's not. In your examples you're talking about a specific character with traits and a story written by the creators.

In this game your character is your Mii representation, except if you're gay it's an alternate reality version where you're straight and no one is gay.