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Nintendo denies Paper Mario: Color Splash joke references "online hate campaign"

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Neither Zoe nor Nintendo did anything wrong here- Nintendo very plainly didn't intend to reference Zoe's situation, and given everything she's been through Zoe had a very understandable reaction to a few lines of dialogue presented out of order or context.

The wrongdoer in this case is the shithead who put those two images together in the first place.
 
I don't know why people are aiming their annoyance at her and not with whatever dick sent her the two intentionally out-of-context screenshots to start this fuss in the first place.

I think everyone can agree that whoever edited that shit like that and sent it to her are assholes. So there is nothing to debate there.
 
Why would a huge company like Nintendo (or Sony/MS etc.) put ANYTHING gamergate related in their videogames? What would they gain except for backlash? Like Nintendo didn't get enough backlash the last time with Alison Rapp. Think for a second.

I'm not surprised this gamergate thing isn't going away when people keeps talking about them and keeps connecting them with unrelated situations.

There's been plenty of "it's about ethics in [x] journalism" jokes, I'm pretty sure one in a Paper Mario game as well.
 
Saying Zoe Quinn was wrong should have been the end of it, but then people couldn't resist the urge to scum it up a bit by implying she was out for attention. Happened in the previous thread and has even popped up here too.

This thread is going much, much better than that last one.
 
Some responses in this thread show that we need to go back to teaching history. It seems so many people don't know what watergate is.

People do know history and watergate was. This "learn history lulz" is some of the most idiotic token posts in this threads, holy shit.

Hilariously enough, most people spewing those lines don't know shit about it and are just hopping on the bandwagon, as usual.
 
Neither Zoe nor Nintendo did anything wrong here- Nintendo very plainly didn't intend to reference Zoe's situation, and given everything she's been through Zoe had a very understandable reaction to a few lines of dialogue presented out of order or context.

The wrongdoer in this case is the shithead who put those two images together in the first place.
This.
 
no i think they probably will remove it because nintendo is allergic to even the slightest whiff of social controversy, and overall that's a good thing because it will make someone who's been systematically abused for two years feel a bit better about the world not being entirely out to get her even if she understandably overreacted about it.

i don't think there's a grander battle of ideals over censorship and creative freedom here.

So if any point someone manages to splice together two unrelated lines of dialogue in order to reference something you or someone else disagrees with, it should be removed.

Because that's what your asking for.

Remove Quinn from the equation here, because this is not reasonable in any context. I could literally make any and every game with dialogue out there offensive to somebody if we're supposed to think like this.

And if you're saying they should do this SPECIFICALLY for Quinn, that's just as unreasonable as it downplays anyone else who may take offense to something and wonder why she's the one getting special treatment. Even if you think it's justifiable given the treatment she's gotten, it's not the solution.

The thing Nintendo should do is leave it exactly as it is. They already did their job coming out of the gate (oops) and explaining it. Quinn overreached. Justifiable? Maybe. But ultimately misplaced.
 
Localization teams were going to get a fucking good one either way, and it had saved them the trouble to figure something else out.

I'd argue people can edit and take things out of context to create things that are not and we're never there. No Localization team can work around that.
 
I don't understand how someone can misunderstand the watergate reference. "-gate" predates gamergate by many years, many jokes have come it of it. Whoever made the original image is a troll.
 
The thing Nintendo should do is leave it exactly as it is. They already did their job coming out of the gate and explaining it.

Yep.

Nintendo went above and beyond to actually come out and assure Zoe and everyone else that this is not a reference to anything that happened to her, even going so far as calling Gamergate a hate campaign.

Good on them. They need to do nothing else.
 
The amount of people saying "OBVIOUSLY it wasn't a GG joke" don't get it.

Localization teams should take context into account and consider how something might be perceived. Let's be honest, even knowing it's a Watergate joke (how many of the planned audience were going to get a fucking Watergate joke? Be real.), it's not a very good one either way, and if it had saved them the trouble to just cut it and figure something else out, maybe they should've just scrapped it.

Ridiculous
 
Yes, obviously. The original thread about this was fucking ridiculous, with people immediately jumping to the worst possible (and least likely) conclusion, wanting to get outraged at every opportunity, etc. And the tweet was ridiculous too. So self-important. I get that she has been through some stuff, but the world does not revolve around her.
 
What bothers me is


Like, yo, come on how could you not know what watergate did to Nixon? It's like people who don't know the titanic or WWI actually happened.

Well:

James Cameron said:
"It's shocking to me that someone could actually tweet -- because it requires some neuro-motor capability -- and not know that the Titanic was a real event." James Cameron told MTV in an interview. "It's a sad comment on our society." With all the 100th anniversary memorabilia, documentaries on tv, commemorative magazines on news stands right now, one wonders how the fact the Titanic was a real, doomed ship could possibly pass people by right now, even if their education or desire to learn history was small.
 
Examples please? Of anything that would possibly be anywhere close to as offensive as this would have been

Offensive? I can't really think of anything that would have come close. The next most offensive thing Nintendo continues to use would probably be Birdo, but that's an issue that goes beyond Treehouse, obviously.

But I doubt they'd have had the awareness to judge whether people would be offended or not, they'd just look at it and go, "let's modern it up, the kids'll love it", and GG isn't quite peripheral enough in the gaming community for someone not to throw a joke about them in there. I think Borderlands or something did it quite recently.
 
a good reminder


The thread is being locked because at this point it has degenerated to people, including people with multiple past gamergate bans and people fresh off bans for losing their shit about feminists, hurling unusually personal invective against Quinn.

Take the time to be aware that getting outraged about outrage is the outrage culture you're outraged about.
 
i'll bet you $100 that it didn't have a -gate reference

or an English pun.

also the gamergate reaction to this was predictable and hilarious:

nXmck9n.jpg
 
Ugh when will NOA stop censoring the original Japanese with their garbage excuse for "humor". I'm reminded of Vic Irelands hack job on Lunar. Keep original meaning INTACT
 
I don't even think it was, like, a "reference" to Watergate beyond "scandals end in -gate."

From what I can tell, gators initially noticed these two dialogue boxes last week, put the images together, had the debate over whether this was the true gamer industry secretly being on their side or the SJW overlords mocking them, aka a Tuesday in their world.

Then someone saw this, sent it to Zoe Quinn (I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they were sincerely concerned) and she was understandably and reasonably upset, given that she has all the reason in the world to be cynical of this industry at this point.

Gators then weren't sure whether to crow about Nintendo being on their side or be gaslighting shits saying that she was imagining it even after they were the ones who made the connection to start with. This extended to a ludicrously reaching defense about how the five Toads that some random programmer at Intelligent Systems in Japan placed in the game were somehow a reference to five Watergate burglars, which sounds like nonsense and naturally made people say, "Oh look, they're trying to lie about what it's really about," and believe it was an intentional GG reference even more. (Note: my pop psychology reason for why GGers would try to explain it away with a far more contrived reference is that they see every goddamned thing as some kind of coded message about themselves or the globalist SJW mind control).



So, yeah, I think that nobody at NoA had a corkboard with string on it trying to make Kamek into G. Gordon Liddy, but I think the weird "EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS EXPLICITLY WATERGATE, IT'S ABOUT THE BURGLARS AND THIS RANDOM BOOK" defense created a false dichotomy where you either believed that or that a small group of localizers inside Nintendo (who were just recently being attacked by GG for being censorious communist hipsters) put in a very odd and specific reference to a woman's trauma as a coded joke requiring you to connect two disparate pieces of text. (Also, like... looking past the possibility of some bad actor slipping a really confusing and cruel reference under the radar, you'd think if someone at NoA actually intentionally referenced GG it would be with some year old "Actually it's about..." joke like Arkham Knight or Baldur's Gate, not this)



I honestly think this was a very unfortunate coincidence that ended up causing a lot of pain to someone who didn't deserve it.

Well said.
 
Oh piss off. I have diagnosed PTSD, and if I lose my shit with somebody over a misunderstanding I fucking apologise.

We're not talking about her losing it at someone standing in line at the bank. People are acting like Nintendo has had it's honor besmirched or something. I'm pretty sure nobody's feelings will be hurt if she doesn't want to apologize.
 
There's been plenty of "it's about ethics in [x] journalism" jokes, I'm pretty sure one in a Paper Mario game as well.

Nintendo's not exactly the type for humor that steps on toes, though. They'll occasionally freshen up localization with modern humor & verbiage, but referencing something like GG would be pretty out-of-character for them.

Still, I can't imagine this going through without at least one person being aware of the potential dual-meaning.
 
Zoe Quinn's reaction was 100% understandable, and she's not at fault for that. She saw something there because of an awful movement that she has intimate knowledge of because it personally affected her.

Everyone else's reaction was kind of overboard though.
 
People could give Zoe a break, or put themselves in the shoes of someone who's been harassed constantly for years and has plenty of reason to be jumpy. But of course that would require some empathy.
 
So one might say that this isn't about a hate group, but rather, ethics in online reactions?

It's a reach. Please god don't ban me! I renounce radical gaming.
 
As someone who lives in a region that will receive the Treehouse translation but is not the USA so barely remembers Watergate existed, let alone it also had 5 guys related to it ....

..... I am pretty sure lots of people in the internet know more about hate than usa political history, so, even understanding that it is not their idea, I would have changed
 
I don't understand how someone can misunderstand the watergate reference. "-gate" predates gamergate by many years, many jokes have come it of it.

It is sad to me there are probably a good amount of Americans who know every detail about GamerGate but have never heard about Watergate.
 
The joke is in extremely poor taste an inappropriate. Nintendo should issue an apology to Richard Nixon's surviving friends and family as soon as possible.
 
People do know history and watergate was. This "learn history lulz" is some of the most idiotic token posts in this threads, holy shit.

Hilariously enough, most people spewing those lines don't know shit about it and are just hopping on the bandwagon, as usual.

You'd be surprised, a lot of college age people today don't know jack shit about history. They can't even tell you who the vice president is now, let alone who nixon is or what watergate was. And its these college aged people who are constantly offended for the sake of being offended.
 
Hey, you know how you've been personally targeted the last couple years, had to live in secret, family threatened? Remember how even you're allies were targeted at companies and fired in relation to that? Well one of those companies has just immortalized those years in a joke! Here's a pic! Want to verify? Go watch that 8 hour live stream.

No.
I didn't know the image was presented to her. I apologize.
 
People do know history and watergate was. This "learn history lulz" is some of the most idiotic token posts in this threads, holy shit.

Hilariously enough, most people spewing those lines don't know shit about it and are just hopping on the bandwagon, as usual.

Well it certainly seems Zoe Quinn herserlf didn't know otherwise she wouldn't have made that stupid statement.
 
Ugh when will NOA stop censoring the original Japanese with their garbage excuse for "humor". I'm reminded of Vic Irelands hack job on Lunar. Keep original meaning INTACT

Ya I can't believe people aren't talking about the blatant censorship going on here.
 
You'd be surprised, a lot of college age people today don't know jack shit about history. They can't even tell you who the vice president is now, let alone who nixon is or what watergate was. And its these college aged people who are constantly offended for the sake of being offended.

yeah outrage culture is pretty outrageous
 
The amount of people saying "OBVIOUSLY it wasn't a GG joke" don't get it.

Localization teams should take context into account and consider how something might be perceived. Let's be honest, even knowing it's a Watergate joke (how many of the planned audience were going to get a fucking Watergate joke? Be real.), it's not a very good one either way, and if it had saved them the trouble to just cut it and figure something else out, maybe they should've just scrapped it.

The "Gate" Suffix has lived way longer then Watergate with every controversy, so Nintendo should bend over backwards for GG and not use it just for them? I mean people use it as a joke all the time.
 
What is the original Japanese dialog?

Nobody knows. The game is not out yet and that scene has only been showed with the American English version at E3.

i'll bet you $100 that it didn't have a -gate reference

I'm not sure if you're serious about this being a problem, but say you're localizing a game written in English originally that does include a -gate reference. You probably would not keep that exact reference if your target language and culture does not have any notion of using the -gate suffix as a way to indicate a scandal. You would localize the concept and use whatever is culturally appropriate.
 
For the people saying they shouldn't change it, why?

Is it just on principle? That if they change it here it's no different than changing any other unintentional meaning that could be read from separate lines in a scene?

Is it because you think the joke is good and should stand on it's own?

What sort of changes would you be opposed to? If it was just changed from "Five Fun Guys" to "Fungi Fun Guys" or "Fun Guys" would that be fine with you?

I'm legitimately curious. It seems like most are against it on principle, but for me it seems like you can alter the joke pretty easily without changing much.
 
More people are familiar in the game industry right now with GG, being topic of the year.

And don't give me that strawman like so many people here are doing, who's saying Nintendo needs to be ever vigilant in every possible context? All anybody is saying is that Nintendo's localisation team needs to be a bit more thoughtful on how they translate and what is put in.

It is not unreasonable for this to have been construed as GG (especially since GG are the ones who initially saw it as such before gaslighting and saying "no, it's a Watergate reference!"). This isn't the first time games, or even Nintendo, have referenced "ethics in games journalism".

More people know about Watergate than Gamergate. It is one of the defining moments in history. To downplay it because 'it's yesterday's news' is foolish.

You're saying Nintendo needs to be more careful about what they do, in spite of the context providing the actual substance of the situation. This whole thing started because something got taken out of context.
 
I'd bet the vast majority of people at Nintendo and the localization team have no idea who she is. This is ridiculous
If they did research to know GG was a hate group then they probably know who Zoe is since she was the sole reason they existed.
I'm curious, is this the first time Nintendo (or any of the big three for that matter) reference GamerGate and even calls it a hate campaign?

I feel sorry for Zoe, the shit she has been through must be horrifying. I hope that the person who sent the images to her didn't do it with the intention to get a reaction out of her.

Chances are they did want a reaction out of her with the words "fun guys" and "gate". Emotional manipulation.
 
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