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#Miiquality | Bringing same-sex relationships to Nintendo's Tomodachi series

Toad.T

Banned
Sorry for the bump, but I'd figure this would be the best place to ask: Other than the likes of Birdo, Vivian and the Magypsies from Mother 3, are there any other characters that fit into the LGBTQ spectrum? I'm composing an article about it and have some leads, but I'm not sure about the likes of the Zelda, FE and possibly Pokémon. (I doubt there's any characters from F-Zero or Golden Sun that fit the bill, but you never know.)
 
Sorry for the bump, but I'd figure this would be the best place to ask: Other than the likes of Birdo, Vivian and the Magypsies from Mother 3, are there any other characters that fit into the LGBTQ spectrum? I'm composing an article about it and have some leads, but I'm not sure about the likes of the Zelda, FE and possibly Pokémon. (I doubt there's any characters from F-Zero or Golden Sun that fit the bill, but you never know.)

In Nintendo games or games in general? If it's the latter, there's this .
 

Amir0x

Banned
Just wanted to stop in and say congratulations. I'm always glad to support a positive movement, and support my LGBTQ friends. I'm happy so many others are as well. Progress comes if we work together :D
 
Sorry for the bump, but I came across some articles regarding Tomodachi Life that brought this issue back to my attention.

Mostly, I'm looking to see if someone with more experience in game development than me (I've only coded one full game so far, and a bunch of unfinished ones before that) to clarify this for me, because when I see Nintendo's statement, the only thing that comes to mind is "bullshit".

Here's what they say:
"Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to change this game’s design, and such a significant development change can’t be accomplished with a post-ship patch."

Looking at the way the game works, I can't help but think that this is just a blatant lie. Now, I'm not going to pretend I know how patches work (as I've never had to create one), so that might affect the argument somewhat. In addition, I can't be 100% sure how Nintendo structured the game, but if they used any sensible design patterns, the following would hold.

Based on the fact that characters can unintentionally cross dress indicates that the ability to do so was an oversight on Nintendo's part. The fact that this oversight was present indicates something about the design - particularly, that they used inheritance to design their game, and that at the very least they have most of their code in common, with only minor differences. That means that the Mii's are structured in the following way:

mii.jpeg


Either that, or they have a "gender" property in the Mii object itself. Regardless, they share most of their code, and any relationship and dressing functionality is implemented in the Mii class itself. Then there's a bit of gender specific code for the relationship functionality, that likely looks something like this:

Code:
function startRelationship( other_mii )
  if( other_mii.gender == this.gender )
    return false;

Or you might have relationships defined in a function outside the scope of the actual Mii characters:
Code:
class God
  ...
  function startRelationship( miiA, miiB )
    if( miiA.gender == miiB.gender ) 
        return false;
  ...

If we didn't have that line of code, a relationship could be started between any two mii's, regardless of gender. But this function would check if the Mii is already in a relationship, and whether the genders of the Miis are considered "appropriate" for a relationship. They just forgot to include this line when it came to clothes, so cross dressing is possible.

Pregnancy is handled in a different function altogether, and will have a check to see if the Mii is female.

Considering every character, whether male or female, is still a Mii, I honestly doubt that it would be more work than the removal of 2-3 lines of code and some testing to enable gay relationships in a game. And since the change is so small, I don't see why you can't push out a post-release patch for a change as simple as this, when Mass Effect 3 added an hour of content to the ending, and Sim City removed online DRM through a post release patch.

If you ask me, Nintendo's statement is bullshit, playing in on the ignorance of people about how development actually works.

Those are my 2 cents on the issue, and I'd love to hear back from someone more experienced with game development on if I'm right or wrong.
 

Oxirane

Member
Pregnancy is handled in a different function altogether, and will have a check to see if the Mii is female.

They would also have to implement an adoption and sperm donation system to go with that.

I too, have no idea how hard that would have been to implement during localisation.
 

Labrys

Member
They would also have to implement an adoption and sperm donation system to go with that.

I too, have no idea how hard that would have been to implement during localisation.

no need for that, just combine the features of the two adopting parents like a regular pregnancy and present it as an adoption.
 

BY2K

Membero Americo
It would not be impossible, but it would require a few things:

- Time
- Money (put toward a game, the localization of a game, even, that is kind of niche and isn't expected to sale a whole lot - though they did say sales were much higher than expected in NA)
- Getting back the game's original team, who stopped worked on this game more than a year ago and moved on to other projects. And getting a new team with no prior experience on the project would just require more time and money
- It would require some changes to the core design of the game (unless they don't care about explaining how a same-sex couple can have babies.)

The pay off would just not be worth the trouble. But I'm confident we'll see it in the sequel (if there's one, but I believe it's pretty popular in Japan.)
 
no need for that, just combine the features of the two adopting parents like a regular pregnancy and present it as an adoption.

Either that, or just exclude the ability to have a child at all if you're in a gay relationship. I can understand if adoption is left out just because it wasn't inherent to the game's design, and I think that'd be pretty reasonable as hetero sexual couples can't adopt either in the game.

It would not be impossible, but it would require a few things:

- Time
- Money (put toward a game, the localization of a game, even, that is kind of niche and isn't expected to sale a whole lot - though they did say sales were much higher than expected in NA)
- Getting back the game's original team, who stopped worked on this game more than a year ago and moved on to other projects. And getting a new team with no prior experience on the project would just require more time and money
- It would require some changes to the core design of the game (unless they don't care about explaining how a same-sex couple can have babies.)

The pay off would just not be worth the trouble. But I'm confident we'll see it in the sequel (if there's one, but I believe it's pretty popular in Japan.)

Time and Money are really the same point here, but like I stated before, I'd be surprised if it takes more than 2 hours. Also, they really wouldn't need to put the entire team back together. They just need one guy - the guy who implemented the relationship functionality - to fix a few lines of code, and any generic Q&A team can do the rest.

And like I said, we can just leave babies out of same-sex couples. As I mentioned in my earlier reply, the code that determines whether a Mii can be pregnant or not depends on its gender. That is, if there's no female mii in the relationship, neither Mii can get pregnant. That should come for free, and should otherwise be a very easy fix.
 
Sorry for the bump, but I came across some articles regarding Tomodachi Life that brought this issue back to my attention.

Mostly, I'm looking to see if someone with more experience in game development than me (I've only coded one full game so far, and a bunch of unfinished ones before that) to clarify this for me, because when I see Nintendo's statement, the only thing that comes to mind is "bullshit".

Here's what they say:
"Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to change this game’s design, and such a significant development change can’t be accomplished with a post-ship patch."

Looking at the way the game works, I can't help but think that this is just a blatant lie. Now, I'm not going to pretend I know how patches work (as I've never had to create one), so that might affect the argument somewhat. In addition, I can't be 100% sure how Nintendo structured the game, but if they used any sensible design patterns, the following would hold.

Based on the fact that characters can unintentionally cross dress indicates that the ability to do so was an oversight on Nintendo's part. The fact that this oversight was present indicates something about the design - particularly, that they used inheritance to design their game, and that at the very least they have most of their code in common, with only minor differences. That means that the Mii's are structured in the following way:

mii.jpeg


Either that, or they have a "gender" property in the Mii object itself. Regardless, they share most of their code, and any relationship and dressing functionality is implemented in the Mii class itself. Then there's a bit of gender specific code for the relationship functionality, that likely looks something like this:

Code:
function startRelationship( other_mii )
  if( other_mii.gender == this.gender )
    return false;

Or you might have relationships defined in a function outside the scope of the actual Mii characters:
Code:
class God
  ...
  function startRelationship( miiA, miiB )
    if( miiA.gender == miiB.gender ) 
        return false;
  ...

If we didn't have that line of code, a relationship could be started between any two mii's, regardless of gender. But this function would check if the Mii is already in a relationship, and whether the genders of the Miis are considered "appropriate" for a relationship. They just forgot to include this line when it came to clothes, so cross dressing is possible.

Pregnancy is handled in a different function altogether, and will have a check to see if the Mii is female.

Considering every character, whether male or female, is still a Mii, I honestly doubt that it would be more work than the removal of 2-3 lines of code and some testing to enable gay relationships in a game. And since the change is so small, I don't see why you can't push out a post-release patch for a change as simple as this, when Mass Effect 3 added an hour of content to the ending, and Sim City removed online DRM through a post release patch.

If you ask me, Nintendo's statement is bullshit, playing in on the ignorance of people about how development actually works.

Those are my 2 cents on the issue, and I'd love to hear back from someone more experienced with game development on if I'm right or wrong.

You can't really deduce the programming paradigma or the implementation from the content and the rules of the game.

I guess when Nintendo said they couldn't patch it, they meant they couldn't patch it withn reasonable costs. I doubt there is a technical limitation that prevented "patching it in", but that might could have meant reprogramming the majority of the game. So nobody should expect them to do that.
 
A bunch of psuedocode here

The biggest problem with your theory is that the bug was not that some male Miis could crossdress, but rather that some male Miis were wholly considered female Miis. That had much more far reaching consequences than just relationships.

Additionally, here's a more accurate psuedocode of how relationships are handled in this game:

Code:
function start_relationship()
[INDENT]if (this.gender == Gender.MALE)[/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]other_mii = get_random_mii(Gender.FEMALE)[/INDENT][/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]return new Relationship(this, other_mii);[/INDENT][/INDENT]
[INDENT]else[/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]other_mii = get_random_mii(Gender.MALE);[/INDENT][/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]return new Relationship(other_mii, this);[/INDENT][/INDENT]

Your psuedocode assumes that you can choose which Mii you can have a relationship with (a parameter for the other Mii wouldn't be necessary otherwise). It also assumes that the gender is treated irrelevant for the people involved in the relationship, when the actual game behavior very much relies on the fact that one Mii is male and the other Mii is female.

It's possible to change the logic and several game elements to make this all happen, but it'd be a rather significant change nonetheless and it's simply not worth it for a game that's been code frozen for a long while now.
 

BY2K

Membero Americo
Time and Money are really the same point here, but like I stated before, I'd be surprised if it takes more than 2 hours. Also, they really wouldn't need to put the entire team back together. They just need one guy - the guy who implemented the relationship functionality - to fix a few lines of code, and any generic Q&A team can do the rest.

And like I said, we can just leave babies out of same-sex couples. As I mentioned in my earlier reply, the code that determines whether a Mii can be pregnant or not depends on its gender. That is, if there's no female mii in the relationship, neither Mii can get pregnant. That should come for free, and should otherwise be a very easy fix.

Ha. Haha. Hahahaha.

No. Changing one line of code can fuck up a lot. This cannot be done in 2 hours, absolutely not.

And leaving out babies out of same-sex relationships would just create a whole other issue, and you know it.
 
All Miis use the same generic body model and animations which explains why they can wear clothes from either gender with no issues. It's safe to say that the lack of limitations with regards to code is intentional. We've seen this in Animal crossing, although that game does have code that specifies clothing as either male or female given the fact that neighbors will comment on you wearing opposite gender clothing. Tomodachi may not even have such specifications outside of menu categories.

Gender specifications and preferences are required for love triangles/squares(?) to make sense. There'd need to be a separate routines for male/male, female/female, and bisexual relationships.

Also what BY2K said. It may be more profitable to just fix it in the sequel, depending on how their development teams are structured.

This isn't even getting into the specifics of the game's coding which we don't know.
 
The biggest problem with your theory is that the bug was not that some male Miis could crossdress, but rather that some male Miis were wholly considered female Miis. That had much more far reaching consequences than just relationships.

Additionally, here's a more accurate psuedocode of how relationships are handled in this game:

Code:
function start_relationship()
[INDENT]if (this.gender == Gender.MALE)[/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]other_mii = get_random_mii(Gender.FEMALE)[/INDENT][/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]return new Relationship(this, other_mii);[/INDENT][/INDENT]
[INDENT]else[/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]other_mii = get_random_mii(Gender.MALE);[/INDENT][/INDENT]
[INDENT][INDENT]return new Relationship(other_mii, this);[/INDENT][/INDENT]

Your psuedocode assumes that you can choose which Mii you can have a relationship with (a parameter for the other Mii wouldn't be necessary otherwise). It also assumes that the gender is treated irrelevant for the people involved in the relationship, when the actual game behavior very much relies on the fact that one Mii is male and the other Mii is female.

It's possible to change the logic and several game elements to make this all happen, but it'd be a rather significant change nonetheless and it's simply not worth it for a game that's been code frozen for a long while now.

Thanks for the pseudo code, again I'm not that experienced with Game Development to know exactly how Nintendo put this thing together, and I haven't really tried Tomodachi life to have an accurate idea of exactly what the game does.

I have one additional comment on the pseudo code though - I understand that the relationship would be started with a random mii based on its gender, but to make the function work for gay relationships, I'd imagine a change to the get_random_mii function would be more than sufficient to include gay relationships. Whilst strictly speaking that change would be a hack, it's a pretty acceptable one.

I'd imagine the function just gets a list of Miis with that gender and selects one at random, so the only change that would be needed would be to get a list of all Miis regardless of gender, and select one at random.

As for the bug, based on Nintendo's comments I was under the impression that the bug concerned people creating a male and female character, and then making the female character cross dress to make her appear like a man.

Ha. Haha. Hahahaha.

No. Changing one line of code can fuck up a lot. This cannot be done in 2 hours, absolutely not.

And leaving out babies out of same-sex relationships would just create a whole other issue, and you know it.

Depends on the line of code that you're changing. I've made similar changes in other types of software without a problem. If the game is properly designed and errors are handled appropriately, it really shouldn't take a lot of time.

Since any female or male character is still a Mii, and most of the code is the same for both, it shouldn't fuck up anything if you changed these particular lines of code.

In regards to costs, even if it takes a day or a week, it would still give Nintendo a significant reputation boost for "listening to their audience", which would be worth it regardless.

Finally, leaving out babies.. At least they'd have a valid argument for that. "Adoption was never part of the game's design". Equality is still there, as adoption doesn't exist within the game's world for any sexual orientation. I believe people would have much less of a problem with that, than they do with this.
 
Thanks for the pseudo code, again I'm not that experienced with Game Development to know exactly how Nintendo put this thing together, and I haven't really tried Tomodachi life to have an accurate idea of exactly what the game does.

I have one additional comment on the pseudo code though - I understand that the relationship would be started with a random mii based on its gender, but to make the function work for gay relationships, I'd imagine a change to the get_random_mii function would be more than sufficient to include gay relationships. Whilst strictly speaking that change would be a hack, it's a pretty acceptable one.

I'd imagine the function just gets a list of Miis with that gender and selects one at random, so the only change that would be needed would be to get a list of all Miis regardless of gender, and select one at random.

As for the bug, based on Nintendo's comments I was under the impression that the bug concerned people creating a male and female character, and then making the female character cross dress to make her appear like a man.

The one other thing that I wanted to show with that psuedocode is that the "Relationship" object was constructed with specific parameters (namely, male and female Miis in that order). In retrospect, this code wasn't clear about showcasing it because this code doesn't clearly show that the other_mii had to be of a specific type of object.
 
The one other thing that I wanted to show with that psuedocode is that the "Relationship" object was constructed with specific parameters (namely, male and female Miis in that order). In retrospect, this code wasn't clear about showcasing it because this code doesn't clearly show that the other_mii had to be of a specific type of object.

I understand, though that would still be a pretty easy fix by adding a constructor to relationship that takes two male mii's, and one that takes two female mii's wouldn't it? I suppose it depends on exactly what they're doing in the constructor that's gender specific, but I can't see it being an enormous amount of operations that is anywhere near the scope that Nintendo indicates it is.
 

zhorkat

Member
I guess you can do that if you're fine with the solution to including same-sex relationships being a patch that makes every Mii bisexual, but I'm guessing Nintendo and a bunch of people wouldn't be fine with that solution.
 

Oxirane

Member
no need for that, just combine the features of the two adopting parents like a regular pregnancy and present it as an adoption.

If they are implementing features to better mimic real world relationships and families, I see no reason why both adoption (for all couples or single Miis) and sperm donation (for female Miis) can't be included in a future game (not expecting any changes to the current game).

-Use a traveler-like system to send unwanted babies into the cloud for a stork to pick up and deliver to Miis who want them.
-Guessing the father of a Mii could be one of those mini games.
 
I guess you can do that if you're fine with the solution to including same-sex relationships being a patch that makes every Mii bisexual, but I'm guessing Nintendo and a bunch of people wouldn't be fine with that solution.

I suppose that would be a point.. You'd have to add a flag for sexual orientation into the Mii object that would determine which of the relationship types would be reasonable. That would be more work though, and quite a bit more testing.

Whilst still nowhere near the scope that Nintendo indicates, with my renewed understanding of how relationships work in Tomodachi Life I can at least understand some of the argument that Nintendo is making, even if they're massively overstating the problem.
 

BY2K

Membero Americo
Finally, leaving out babies.. At least they'd have a valid argument for that. "Adoption was never part of the game's design". Equality is still there, as adoption doesn't exist within the game's world for any sexual orientation. I believe people would have much less of a problem with that, than they do with this.

They used that argument for why same-sex relationship wasn't part of the game, and it only made the situation worse for them.

EDIT: Wait no, it's the "we didn't want to make social commentary" thing that made it worse.

In regards to costs, even if it takes a day or a week, it would still give Nintendo a significant reputation boost for "listening to their audience", which would be worth it regardless.

Their second apology achieved that already. If the next game sales significantly more than the first one, it worked.
 
If they are implementing features to better mimic real world relationships and families, I see no reason why both adoption (for all couples or single Miis) and sperm donation (for female Miis) can't be included in a future game (not expecting any changes to the current game).

-Use a traveler-like system to send unwanted babies into the cloud for a stork to pick up and deliver to Miis who want them.
-Guessing the father of a Mii could be one of those mini games.

I think they're going to be pushing for an E rating, dude.
 
They used that argument for why same-sex relationship wasn't part of the game, and it only made the situation worse for them.



Their second apology achieved that already. If the next game sales significantly more than the first one, it worked.

I dunno, saying that they'll add it in a hypothetical second installment that is likely to never be created seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. A way to shut people up more than anything else.

I wasn't aware they used that argument though - could you give me a link for that? I'd like to read what they said and how people responded to it. I would've thought meeting the activists at a half way point would have been acceptable to most people.

Edit: Just saw your edit, thanks. I thought I might have missed something.
 
Please change this sentence

"A man and a woman can marry and have a child."

to this sentence

"Multiple combinations of a man and a woman may or may not be able to marry and will result in different methods of having a child."

without changing the total number of characters and the locations where the spaces lie.

That's how difficult it is for a localization team to change a game.
 

BY2K

Membero Americo
I dunno, saying that they'll add it in a hypothetical second installment that is likely to never be created seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. A way to shut people up more than anything else.

I hate it when people say that. "They said they'll do it in the next game so there won't be a next game."

IIRC, Tomodachi Life is pretty popular in Japan (there was a DS game before this one), I would be surprised if there wasn't another game.

And don't say: "Well they won't localize it." Because Nintendo is probably very aware that not localizing the next game would be DISASTROUS after promising such a thing. And they said sales in NA were much higher than expected, so it wouldn't even make sense for them not to localize it.
 

Kinyou

Member
And like I said, we can just leave babies out of same-sex couples. As I mentioned in my earlier reply, the code that determines whether a Mii can be pregnant or not depends on its gender. That is, if there's no female mii in the relationship, neither Mii can get pregnant. That should come for free, and should otherwise be a very easy fix.

From what I understand is raising a kid sort of the goal of the game. When you accomplished that you'll get the credits roll. I imagine leaving that out would remove an integral part of the game.
 
I hate it when people say that. "They said they'll do it in the next game so there won't be a next game."

IIRC, Tomodachi Life is pretty popular in Japan (there was a DS game before this one), I would be surprised if there wasn't another game.

And don't say: "Well they won't localize it." Because Nintendo is probably very aware that not localizing the next game would be DISASTROUS after promising such a thing. And they said sales in NA were much higher than expected, so it wouldn't even make sense for them not to localize it.

I'd be surprised if there would be another game. To be fair, I was also surprised there was a second LittleBigPlanet, so I might be off the mark here, but it just doesn't strike me as the type of game that would benefit of having a sequel.

I didn't say "they said they'll do it in the next game so there won't be a next game", I said that they made a statement about a hypothetical second game that I sincerely doubt they ever intend to make.

It has nothing to do with this particular issue, but everything with the fact that I don't see it getting a sequel because of the type of game it is.

But then again I might be wrong, and we might see a new game with gay relationships and adoption, and I'll be the first person to say I was wrong about them.
 

mollipen

Member
From what I understand is raising a kid sort of the goal of the game. When you accomplished that you'll get the credits roll. I imagine leaving that out would remove an integral part of the game.

Baby-having should never have been a major goal of the game, or at least one that's forced upon you. That was one of the fundamental arguments that I had with Tomodachi Life (the push for romantic relationships).

Also, just as a side note for the thread, I ran smack into the no-same-sex-relationships thing when I was playing the game for work, and got into it a bit for my EGM review. It caused me to have to deal with my real life wife's Mii wanting to date the Mii of a friend of mine, which lead to me having weird emotions I wasn't expecting to have over the game. Made me rather uncomfortable, which kind of spoiled the entire experience to a degree for me.

If allowing same sex relationships won't be in the cards for the future - and, really, I'm not holding my breath - the bigger fix should (and needs) to be actual, direct controls over relationships in the game. For some people, whatever happens happening is just fine, but I hope they acknowledge the really weird situations it can cause for other players.

If nothing else, just let is turn romance completely off. Getting married and having a baby being a main goal in a videogame feels weird, antiquated, and a little preachy to me at this point in life.


And don't say: "Well they won't localize it." Because Nintendo is probably very aware that not localizing the next game would be DISASTROUS after promising such a thing. And they said sales in NA were much higher than expected, so it wouldn't even make sense for them not to localize it.

I think NOA is far better off not touching the series anymore. They took a chance on bringing over a weird niche title, and got bitched at for it. They skip localizing games all the time - they can easily do it again, and I think they'll catch far less flack for not doing so versus what they caught recently for the lack of gay marriage in the game.

My experience with Japan being what it is, they will have no motivation to add homosexual options for their own country, and I honestly doubt their concern over Westerner's request for such options. Either they make changes to the Western releases to add those features in, or NOA/NOE do it themselves - and I have no faith in that happening. Would love to be proven wrong, but yeah. No faith.
 
Please change this sentence

"A man and a woman can marry and have a child."

to this sentence

"Multiple combinations of a man and a woman may or may not be able to marry and will result in different methods of having a child."

without changing the total number of characters and the locations where the spaces lie.

That's how difficult it is for a localization team to change a game.

"A man and a woman can marry and have a child."

"A man and a man can marry and adopt from a Stork in the Clouds."

"A woman and a woman can marry and adopt from a Stork in the Clouds or go to a sperm bank."

There. I solved your problem.
 
Baby-having should never have been a major goal of the game, or at least one that's forced upon you. That was one of the fundamental arguments that I had with Tomodachi Life (the push for romantic relationships).

Also, just as a side note for the thread, I ran smack into the no-same-sex-relationships thing when I was playing the game for work, and got into it a bit for my EGM review. It caused me to have to deal with my real life wife's Mii wanting to date the Mii of a friend of mine, which lead to me having weird emotions I wasn't expecting to have over the game. Made me rather uncomfortable, which kind of spoiled the entire experience to a degree for me.

If allowing same sex relationships won't be in the cards for the future - and, really, I'm not holding my breath - the bigger fix should (and needs) to be actual, direct controls over relationships in the game. For some people, whatever happens happening is just fine, but I hope they acknowledge the really weird situations it can cause for other players.

If nothing else, just let is turn romance completely off. Getting married and having a baby being a main goal in a videogame feels weird, antiquated, and a little preachy to me at this point in life.

I think the goal being that comes down to the problems that Japan is currently experiencing in terms of low birth rates and low marriage rates. I guess the game might have been an attempt to stimulate people to get married and have babies, which weirdly makes their "no social commentary" statement even worse.
 

mollipen

Member
I think the goal being that comes down to the problems that Japan is currently experiencing in terms of low birth rates and low marriage rates. I guess the game might have been an attempt to stimulate people to get married and have babies, which weirdly makes their "no social commentary" statement even worse.

I don't think I'd pin the game's (or the team's) motivations on any sort of social commentary on what Japan is currently going through. I think it's more just long-held stereotypes and social expectations that some outside the country could see as being somewhat out of date.

I mean, to be clear, I'm not saying that starting a family and having children is an out-of-date concept—just that making that such an important and established goal of the game feels a little so to me, as if no other goals in your Mii's life could possibly exist. *heh*

Of course, not working at Nintendo or on the Tomodachi Life team, I can't say any of that for sure, so you could always be right in the game actually being some sneaky collaboration with the government to convince more Japanese citizens to get to baby-makin'.
 
I don't think I'd pin the game's (or the team's) motivations on any sort of social commentary on what Japan is currently going through. I think it's more just long-held stereotypes and social expectations that some outside the country could see as being somewhat out of date.

I mean, to be clear, I'm not saying that starting a family and having children is an out-of-date concept—just that making that such an important and established goal of the game feels a little so to me, as if no other goals in your Mii's life could possibly exist. *heh*

Of course, not working at Nintendo or on the Tomodachi Life team, I can't say any of that for sure, so you could always be right in the game actually being some sneaky collaboration with the government to convince more Japanese citizens to get to baby-makin'.

The government here isn't all that sneaky about it really. They take any chance they see to motivate people to start making babies.

To get an idea of how a lot of individuals in the Japanese government think about the issue, you can read this article:

http://www.japancrush.com/2014/stor...iven-to-tears-after-being-mocked-in-diet.html

But then again, I can't do more than speculate. But timing seems awfully convenient.
 
D

Deleted member 20920

Unconfirmed Member
I think NOA is far better off not touching the series anymore. They took a chance on bringing over a weird niche title, and got bitched at for it. They skip localizing games all the time - they can easily do it again, and I think they'll catch far less flack for not doing so versus what they caught recently for the lack of gay marriage in the game.

My experience with Japan being what it is, they will have no motivation to add homosexual options for their own country, and I honestly doubt their concern over Westerner's request for such options. Either they make changes to the Western releases to add those features in, or NOA/NOE do it themselves - and I have no faith in that happening. Would love to be proven wrong, but yeah. No faith.

To be fair I wouldn't call Nintendo being "bitched at". This was a fair awareness campaign to tell Nintendo that adding same-sex relationships should be considered. It was a very civil conversation, especially when you compare it to some more the more poisonous calls for boycotts and whatnot.
 

NotLiquid

Member
Also, just as a side note for the thread, I ran smack into the no-same-sex-relationships thing when I was playing the game for work, and got into it a bit for my EGM review. It caused me to have to deal with my real life wife's Mii wanting to date the Mii of a friend of mine, which lead to me having weird emotions I wasn't expecting to have over the game. Made me rather uncomfortable, which kind of spoiled the entire experience to a degree for me.

I haven't played a lot of Tomodachi Life so maybe I'm not qualified to make this statement, but it's my understanding that your input in dictating who your Mii falls for is a set of random variables that you barely have any input in to begin with, which is technically the point of the entire game. My girlfriend tried to hook our Miis up but failed, and instead they ended up attracted to other people. The game is basically a soap opera that skewers any sort of avatar imaginable for a zany scenario, and is supposed to break expectations. In my experience it turned into laughs when we basically went "he fell for /THAT/ person?"

I can see why people would prefer to have a little more control over the situation but if a player expresses uncomfort on account of the game segwaying into an element of the game subverting how the parameters define in-game preferences (for the record this isn't something I've seen expressed only because of their sexual orientation), it seems like it's a little bit of a misplaced expectation on the kind of game Tomodachi is trying to be, which is random in every sense of the word. That isn't just an element exclusive to the romance, and I imagine not treating each element in the game with the same outlandish balance would create a big deal of player dissonance.

Mind you I'm generally still hoping for more inclusive elements with the series and that includes sexual orientations, but that needs to be accomplished within the confines of the game design which would still do very little in changing the idea that you're in control of Tomodachi. That's something I imagine needs to be realized, so even if it does represent more people, it still runs a good chance of not being a game for everyone, especially people who want more realistic life simulators.
 

J.W.Crazy

Member
Baby-having should never have been a major goal of the game, or at least one that's forced upon you. That was one of the fundamental arguments that I had with Tomodachi Life (the push for romantic relationships).

Also, just as a side note for the thread, I ran smack into the no-same-sex-relationships thing when I was playing the game for work, and got into it a bit for my EGM review. It caused me to have to deal with my real life wife's Mii wanting to date the Mii of a friend of mine, which lead to me having weird emotions I wasn't expecting to have over the game. Made me rather uncomfortable, which kind of spoiled the entire experience to a degree for me.

If allowing same sex relationships won't be in the cards for the future - and, really, I'm not holding my breath - the bigger fix should (and needs) to be actual, direct controls over relationships in the game. For some people, whatever happens happening is just fine, but I hope they acknowledge the really weird situations it can cause for other players.

If nothing else, just let is turn romance completely off. Getting married and having a baby being a main goal in a videogame feels weird, antiquated, and a little preachy to me at this point in life.

You're not really asking for changes to the game, you're asking for an entirely different game.
 

Kinyou

Member
Baby-having should never have been a major goal of the game, or at least one that's forced upon you. That was one of the fundamental arguments that I had with Tomodachi Life (the push for romantic relationships).

Also, just as a side note for the thread, I ran smack into the no-same-sex-relationships thing when I was playing the game for work, and got into it a bit for my EGM review. It caused me to have to deal with my real life wife's Mii wanting to date the Mii of a friend of mine, which lead to me having weird emotions I wasn't expecting to have over the game. Made me rather uncomfortable, which kind of spoiled the entire experience to a degree for me.

If allowing same sex relationships won't be in the cards for the future - and, really, I'm not holding my breath - the bigger fix should (and needs) to be actual, direct controls over relationships in the game. For some people, whatever happens happening is just fine, but I hope they acknowledge the really weird situations it can cause for other players.

If nothing else, just let is turn romance completely off. Getting married and having a baby being a main goal in a videogame feels weird, antiquated, and a little preachy to me at this point in life.
I can understand that, but apparently that's also just what the series seems to be about. The prequel "Tomodachi Collection" (which was never released outside of Japan) ran the credits over your honeymoon pictures
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiW1v_Qhpl4

Though when there's such a heavy focus on it there maybe really should be a bit more control left to the player about what relationships happen, then again it's supposed to be a bit of a simulation which imo also means that some things are meant to happen independently from the player.
 

daycru

Member
You're not really asking for changes to the game, you're asking for an entirely different game.

If only we could get Mario to stop jumping.

Tomodachi life is a dollhouse, where the dolls are your friends. Every single one of my sisters' dolls has been married countless times. It's what they do.
 

BooJoh

Member
It has nothing to do with this particular issue, but everything with the fact that I don't see it getting a sequel because of the type of game it is.
Except your point is a bit moot since this game is a sequel, and the first game was the same type of game.

Also, just as a side note for the thread, I ran smack into the no-same-sex-relationships thing when I was playing the game for work, and got into it a bit for my EGM review. It caused me to have to deal with my real life wife's Mii wanting to date the Mii of a friend of mine, which lead to me having weird emotions I wasn't expecting to have over the game. Made me rather uncomfortable, which kind of spoiled the entire experience to a degree for me.
As touched on by others, this is something that really has nothing to do with sexual orientation and lack of same-sex marriage in the game. A straight person playing the game could just as easily put their wife in the game, try to hook it up with their own Mii, and end up with their wife's Mii marrying one of their friends. The "spouse" tag you can put on a Mii might prevent them from marrying your siblings or parents, but I can't be sure. Either way, it's not something players have much control over, and if you're going to have emotional issues with a game because you feel jealousy or discomfort over their Mii dating another person's Mii, this probably isn't the game for you.

"A man and a woman can marry and have a child."

"A man and a man can marry and adopt from a Stork in the Clouds."

"A woman and a woman can marry and adopt from a Stork in the Clouds or go to a sperm bank."

There. I solved your problem.

I don't think you quite understood the problem. A localization team typically only alters what's already there, rather than adding to it. This isn't always true these days outside of fan translations, but for the most part it is. Their job at NOA is essentially to rewrite the Japanese text into English text, and depending on the game, change certain graphical elements etc from Japanese themes to Western themes. I'm not saying it's impossible to add/change things, for example, changing holidays by region is common in certain games, but those games are often translated as they're developed so the localization team can request that the dev team make changes to the game.
 

zigg

Member
Time and Money are really the same point here, but like I stated before, I'd be surprised if it takes more than 2 hours. Also, they really wouldn't need to put the entire team back together. They just need one guy - the guy who implemented the relationship functionality - to fix a few lines of code, and any generic Q&A team can do the rest.

Ha. Haha. Hahahaha.

No. Changing one line of code can fuck up a lot. This cannot be done in 2 hours, absolutely not.
I just needed to pitch my hat in with BY2K here.

The funny thing about software designed with one specific specification at its core is how that one specification creeps in as a dependency all over the place. You're assuming software that is already designed in a very modular fashion, already wired to accept the notion that a relationship can be between any genders, only one step away from just having a bit flipped to turn on your desired behavior. It's not good to make assumptions of that kind in estimation.

I also think it's pretty poor form to characterize the efforts of development as the real work and the work of "any generic Q&A team" as not worth counting. QA efforts take real time, and they're as much a part of the team as any developer or artist. Additionally, having played TL a bit myself, I imagine its QA requirements aren't negligible—lots of hidden inputs. There's almost certainly asset creation, writing, and localization that falls out from the changes required to implement this as well.

No offense intended, jack, but I think you need exposure to a lot more software development before making more pronouncements like this.
 
I just needed to pitch my hat in with BY2K here.

The funny thing about software designed with one specific specification at its core is how that one specification creeps in as a dependency all over the place. You're assuming software that is already designed in a very modular fashion, already wired to accept the notion that a relationship can be between any genders, only one step away from just having a bit flipped to turn on your desired behavior. It's not good to make assumptions of that kind in estimation.
The thing is that I don't see how gender should play a part in most of the functionality of the software, therefore I would consider it poor design if it's a dependency in most of the code that shouldn't use it. In fact, gender is only a minor part of the overall functionality of this game, and as such should have very few dependencies in the overall scope of the project.

Notice that every time I discuss this I use the word "should" and "imagine". The assumption I made here wasn't that this is possible in any code base. The assumption here was that Nintendo's programmers are skilled software engineers with a keen eye for design. Considering the quality of the software they produce (I have yet to encounter bugs in games made by Nintendo.. Not saying they don't exist, just a lot less common), a good design philosophy seems to be central.

I also think it's pretty poor form to characterize the efforts of development as the real work and the work of "any generic Q&A team" as not worth counting. QA efforts take real time, and they're as much a part of the team as any developer or artist. Additionally, having played TL a bit myself, I imagine its QA requirements aren't negligible—lots of hidden inputs. There's almost certainly asset creation, writing, and localization that falls out from the changes required to implement this as well.
I never characterized QA as "not real work", I'm fully aware how difficult and important it is. The statement was referring to that "the team needs to be put back together", a statement which I dismissed by saying that any QA team in Nintendo could deal with a small feature upgrade, and it doesn't have to be the team that did it back when the game was being developed.
 

prag16

Banned
The thing is that I don't see how gender should play a part in most of the functionality of the software, therefore I would consider it poor design if it's a dependency in most of the code that shouldn't use it. In fact, gender is only a minor part of the overall functionality of this game, and as such should have very few dependencies in the overall scope of the project.

Notice that every time I discuss this I use the word "should" and "imagine". The assumption I made here wasn't that this is possible in any code base. The assumption here was that Nintendo's programmers are skilled software engineers with a keen eye for design. Considering the quality of the software they produce (I have yet to encounter bugs in games made by Nintendo.. Not saying they don't exist, just a lot less common), a good design philosophy seems to be central.


I never characterized QA as "not real work", I'm fully aware how difficult and important it is. The statement was referring to that "the team needs to be put back together", a statement which I dismissed by saying that any QA team in Nintendo could deal with a small feature upgrade, and it doesn't have to be the team that did it back when the game was being developed.
Domain knowledge is almost as important in QA as it is in development. Stating that they can just get "any random team" absolutely does downplay the importance of that phase of the software development life cycle.

And it seems you have backpedaled. You started out accusing Nintendo of lying, but now you're just saying that they "should" have designed things in such a way that would now make them liars. But I guess the new implication is that if they're not liars, they're incompetent developers.

As was said, for your assumption to be correct, they would essentially have had to design things with gay relationships in mind, but then just leave the functionality disabled. That's pretty obviously not the approach they took

It sounds like you've never worked on a very large scale software application (I have no idea what the scope of your one game was). Some people in this thread including myself have in fact done just that. As others have said, you make some very questionable assumptions.
 
Domain knowledge is almost as important in QA as it is in development. Stating that they can just get "any random team" absolutely does downplay the importance of that phase of the software development life cycle.

And it seems you have backpedaled. You started out accusing Nintendo of lying, but now you're just saying that they "should" have designed things in such a way that would now make them liars. But I guess the new implication is that if they're not liars, they're incompetent developers.

As was said, for your assumption to be correct, they would essentially have had to design things with gay relationships in mind, but then just leave the functionality disabled. That's pretty obviously not the approach they took

It sounds like you've never worked on a very large scale software application (I have no idea what the scope of your one game was). Some people in this thread including myself have in fact done just that. As others have said, you make some very questionable assumptions.

I haven't really backpedaled if you look at my initial response. I merely stated that for as far as my knowledge in this domain goes it sounds like they're lying. I also stated quite clearly that I don't have enough experience in this particular area to make concrete statements and accusations, and I've used this opportunity to discuss this subject with people who do have that experience.

I know that not all my assumptions were correct and some of them may in fact have been completely off the mark. The reason I've responded to these statements with arguments is not because I don't believe any of you to be right, but as a way of getting more information about the development of a large-scale video game project to establish my own understanding of this particular issue. I still don't completely comprehend what the massive difficulty would be in making gay relationships possible in a game like this, as I've argued before, but I understand that dependencies might be a problem. So my question in that regard is, why would dependencies be a problem for a property like gender? Adding different types of relationships, for as far as I know, wouldn't change any of the properties in the Mii itself, so the only dependencies you might have to deal with are those that are a direct consequence of a relationship. Any of those dependencies should be encapsulated completely within the relationship object.

Again, this is just speculation based on the way I would design a system like that, and based on what I have been taught is considered good design. I know design often suffers from a large scope, and most projects end up with a lot of hacks. My confusion here is that it's generally obvious which projects use a lot of hacks to achieve their goal and which projects don't, and I've always held Nintendo's coders at a high regard. So with a good design, my question remains - how can adding or removing a few lines of code to enable gay relationships create a long chain of dependency problems if the software is well designed?

As for the QA team, I'm sorry you took it like that. My intention was never to downplay their importance, but to imply that in my knowledge, any QA team that Nintendo has that is trained to test video games would be able to perform QA on this particular game, at least for blackbox testing. Then again, my inexperience in large scale video game projects doesn't help me here, and I might still be completely off the mark with that.
 

prag16

Banned
As for the QA team, I'm sorry you took it like that. My intention was never to downplay their importance, but to imply that in my knowledge, any QA team that Nintendo has that is trained to test video games would be able to perform QA on this particular game, at least for blackbox testing. Then again, my inexperience in large scale video game projects doesn't help me here, and I might still be completely off the mark with that.

My experience comes from large business applications, not games. But as I said domain knowledge is very important, and if getting the original team for additional QA wasn't feasible, that's potential for significant inefficiency.

That doesn't mean that for black box testing, use of outside teams isn't a good idea. Fresh sets of eyes can definitely be a benefit, but probably not for full retesting of a major feature central to the game.

And again, your idea of "well designed", in effect means something more like "designed with gay relationships 100% in mind, but then disabling that feature". We can't presume to know all the inner workings of the game.

It's possible that they're overstating certain things to some extent. But you can't have thought alleging that they are outright lying (while admitting partial ignorance) was going to go over all that well.

It's a good discussion, but probably one that was largely already had earlier in this topic.
 
My experience comes from large business applications, not games. But as I said domain knowledge is very important, and if getting the original team for additional QA wasn't feasible, that's potential for significant inefficiency.

That doesn't mean that for black box testing, use of outside teams isn't a good idea. Fresh sets of eyes can definitely be a benefit, but probably not for full retesting of a major feature central to the game.

And again, your idea of "well designed", in effect means something more like "designed with gay relationships 100% in mind, but then disabling that feature". We can't presume to know all the inner workings of the game.
Well designed to me just means that the code is flexible enough to allow things like this. My main experience in software development is in web applications and enterprise software, but admittedly nowhere near as large scale as a project like Tomodachi life. I just know that if I was tasked with a problem like this, I'd design the game in a fairly modular way, with an emphasis on minimizing inter-dependencies between classes and properties (this is what I do for web applications and other software as well). Given the quality of the Software that Nintendo pushes out, this type of design seems natural to the company, as it would allow them to test modules far more effectively than a piece of software that is a dependency mess.

It's possible that they're overstating certain things to some extent. But you can't have thought alleging that they are outright lying (while admitting partial ignorance) was going to go over all that well.

It's a good discussion, but probably one that was largely already had earlier in this topic.

I certainly could have phrased it better, I'll admit that. I couldn't find the discussion earlier in the topic, which is quite large so I probably missed it if it's there, but I felt it was something worth discussing regardless.

The whole Sim City debacle came to mind, with different parties claiming different things, and with recent statements made by Ubisoft about the inclusion of female assassins taking "way too much work", whilst one of the AC developers stated it would've taken no more than 2 days, makes me want to double check most PR statements that are made, and based on my knowledge this one in particular seemed fishy.

I have no doubt there's certain underlying technical issues at play here, but I'm also very reluctant to accept a statement in which they're saying it can't be fixed in a post-release patch when Sim City was able to take an entire DRM system out of their game, which was for as far as I could tell quite fundamental to the way the game worked, in a single patch.
 

prag16

Banned
To be fair, there were multiple topics about this at the time. It's possible the larger portion of the discussion took place in another one.

It's cool, it's still a good discussion. Only thing I'd say is prefacing it with "sounds like Nintendo is a bunch of bald faced liars" probably isn't ideal.
 
"A man and a woman can marry and have a child."

"A man and a man can marry and adopt from a Stork in the Clouds."

"A woman and a woman can marry and adopt from a Stork in the Clouds or go to a sperm bank."

There. I solved your problem.
Those alternatives have too many characters and spaces and thus would glitch out the game.
 
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