@robbparris said:
@golguin
Ultimately it always come down to personal experience. Your Xcom argument is interesting to me, because it DID get a lot of people playing that style of game that otherwise wouldn't have. I also think it was an excellent game (having played those games since the original on the Amiga).
The same thing applies to Dream Daddy. Dream Daddy was a lot of peoples first real experience with that style of game, and it really resonated with them. You can disagree with their opinion, but you can't disagree with their experience with the game.
If I remember correctly I believe that XCOM is the reason that Patrick dove into Fire Emblem, but it wasn't due to the quality of XCOM. It was because people told Patrick that if he liked a mediocre TRPG like XCOM then he should check out a good one from the Fire Emblem series. At the time I believe Patrick was specifically putting in an effort to understand why people felt so passionately about games in genres that the rest of the staff had zero interest in playing and zero interest in understanding. Patrick put in the work to expand his taste and move past the bubble that so many people in the gaming industry unknowingly trapped themselves in.
I'm paraphrasing what Patrick said since it was so long ago, but there was this feeling in the industry that developers and publishers kept pumping out the same kinds of games. Patrick pointed out that the sentiment was only true if you kept playing the same types of games and ignored the genres you were unfamiliar with. Of course everything is going to feel the same if you keep playing the same sort of thing. Patrick was somehow one of the few people on staff to realize this very simple truth. It made him open to new ideas in video games and it made me more willing to try games out of my comfort zone.
All the talk around Dream Daddy has irked me in a very unreasonable way. As a PoC (I'm Mexican) I can't shake this unsettling feeling that underneath the praise for Dream Daddy there is a constant not so subtle jab at Japanese culture for not being able to "do it right." The dating sims/VN have been wrong for decades. It just needed a Western hand to make it right. It always needs a Western hand doesn't it?
The last time I felt this kind of feeling during the Giantbomb GOTY talks was with Red Dead Redemption. I was so surprised and happy to see a AAA game have part of it's story take place in Mexico. I didn't know it at the time, but it was hearing my language the way my family spoke it (there are different dialects in Mexico) and seeing characters on screen that looked like my family that made me feel like the video game industry gave a damn about my culture. Was it the best or most positive representation? Not at all, but when you are given nothing even these small steps feel like giant leaps. You can imagine my disappointment when "The Mexico Section" was seen as the most negative part of the game by the staff. I didn't have the words to describe my feelings at the time, but I now know that I felt marginalized.
I know full well that people who play Dream Daddy are in no way trying to shit on a different culture for not making something that appeals to their own culture. However, there is this underlying feeling that is not quite ethnocentric, but is close enough to it that it makes me feel unsettled. I know that this feeling is unreasonable, but I understand it as something that came from going to school and being told to be less like that and more like this. That my culture was less and I should emulate one that's more. It's my understanding that schools don't do that anymore. Maybe that's why I get a chip on my shoulder for these sorts of things. Hmm.
Log in to comment