"We're Not Trying to Take Your Games Away"

If you'd told me a few months ago that the hot new meme of 2018 would be hordes of deformed 3D Knuckles models wandering around in virtual reality quoting a low-budget Ugandan action movie at anyone and everyone who would listen, I would have probably laughed at you and said "what the fuck?" But this, it seems, is the world we live in. And I kind of love it.

Unfortunately, that ever-reliable source of finger-wagging, public-shaming "games journalism" (and I use that term loosely) Polygon has elected to write a finger-wagging, public-shaming news piece on the new phenomenon, even going so far as to call it their favourite word "problematic" and actually put some pressure on the makers of VRChat to ban the meme. It's "racist", you see.

This is just the latest in a long line of incidents where people who don't bother to do a bit of basic research into something that is going on feel like they should make sweeping moral judgements about things. Japanese games, of course, are particularly prone to getting this sort of negative attention about them, with the latest example being Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

I posted about this recently on Twitter, but it bears exploring in a little more detail. Having spent most of the weekend playing the game, I came to the unsurprising conclusion that everyone who had been complaining about how "problematic" Pyra's outfit and figure were had not even bothered to consider her as an actual "person"; all they had done was judge her by her appearance.

Pyra is, for those who have not played the game, an absolutely lovely person. She's kind and caring, has some nice chemistry with protagonist Rex, and is badass when she needs to be, yet also has an endearing fragility about her that makes you want to protect her — not because she's a woman, but because she's just someone without whom the world would be a darker, less happy place. She is much more than a pair of boobs.

This is, of course, not the first time this has happened; I've previously commented on some absolutely vile reviews of the Senran Kagura and Valkyrie Drive games in which supposedly professional reviewers admit to playing less than a couple of hours of the games and write them off as mindless fanservice, completely failing to take into account any of the actual characterisation and narrative arcs throughout the games. I'm yet to play Valkyrie Drive — I'd like to cover it in detail later this year, actually — but I can speak from extensive experience with Senran Kagura that there is not a single character in that enormous cast who is not a fascinating individual in one regard or another.

This sort of thing is why I find myself getting frustrated, and why I feel sites like MoeGamer are important. While professional, commercial sites are calling for things to be banned because they don't understand them, as in the case of Polygon and VRChat, and large communities such as ResetEra are libelling legally available titles like Criminal Girls as being "child pornography" without having any actual experience of what the game really is, we have a problem. A serious problem.

It's easy to get angry and frustrated at this situation, and indeed I know I have done in the past. It's less than productive to lash out wildly, though, since this just causes people to be further entrenched in their positions. Instead, what I intend to put a greater focus on going forward is ensuring that MoeGamer provides ample resources for people to be able to argue against ill-informed opinions based on nothing but hearsay and superficial glances.

There are already more than 350 articles on MoeGamer, covering over 150 games. I hope at least some of them help you find out a bit more about games that habitually get misrepresented by the supposedly "professional" side of the press, and perhaps even win an argument or two. 🙂

Thanks, as ever, for your support.