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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 25, 2016 12:04:40 GMT -5
@discoalucard again, didn't one of the localizers explicitly say that when he sees problematic content, he wants to 'fix' it? And I'd respond the same way as I did a few pages ago, it's within their rights to do this, especially if a situation or trope is read differently between cultures. I feel like one of your main concerns is that these sweeping changes are made at the whims by a single person. This is not how it works in modern game development. I heard one of my developer friends weigh on the controversy surrounding that character in Overwatch. Costumes, character quotes and voices, character models, everything, these are all carefully decided by several divisions, ranging from artists to writers to marketers, to make sure their product is properly represented and targeted at their intended audiences. Many changes occur during development based on these types of meetings, the only difference with Overwatch is that it happened publicly. While a single writer (either translator or editor) might be able to rewrite lines as they fit, as is their responsibility, they also have to work within specific guidelines, set down by the publisher, which may be set down by the ESRB or PEGI. Any larger changes outside of writing require time and money, from both a development and a QA perspective, and these are things that are only approved by management who control those resources. It's never just one prude in an office going "you know what, no panty shots" and then having it be done. That may have been the case 25 years ago, when the industry was much smaller, but those days are long gone.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 25, 2016 11:28:42 GMT -5
it's not just criticism when it results in things being removed from western releases That's the publisher's decision, made on their own free will. I would venture to say that Nintendo's policies towards localization has little to do with the feminist movement, and more towards aiming at the broadest markets as possible.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 25, 2016 9:09:09 GMT -5
"Imposing" means you are forcing someone to do or think something. "Imposing" takes the forms of laws and regulations. There's nothing "imposing" about criticism.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 25, 2016 8:49:58 GMT -5
For the second time in this thread, comparing anti-violence crusaders to social critical movements is wrong, 100% of the time. A corrupt politician, whose laws never went anywhere because they were ruled unconstitutional, as they are meant to be in a system with checks on balances. To suggest otherwise verges into conspiracy theory. Both consist of imposing certain morals onto people who are obviously not receptive to them (lest there would be no need for campaigning), so the comparison is quite apt. There are differences in the values providing the motivation (conservative Christianity vs. New Left), methods and degree of success, but these do not invalidate the comparison when we say that both amount to moralist policing. We can get around this by discarding pluralism and taking as an axiom that leftist values are good and conservative ones are not, but I should not need to point out the problems in this approach. You don't even understand the meaning of the word "imposing" so basically everything after that word is completely off base.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 24, 2016 21:59:00 GMT -5
The removal of the bust size slider is just all kinds of bizarre to me. This isn't a sex simulator like Oppai Slider we're talking about here. We're talking a regular RPG with a character creator. If you're given a whole bunch of other options to customize the physical appearance of your character, why not the bust too? Removing that option and locking all female characters at a medium-sized bust is only sending the message that small-chested women aren't feminine enough and that large-chested women can't be seen as anything but sexual objects. It also denies female players the option to make the character as much like themselves as possible, meanwhile male gamers had no customization options stripped away from them. It's just a really stupid, shortsighted move, probably made without even consulting women, and sends a whole slew of nasty messages. It just shows how male-focused the industry really is, that they can't even imagine any scenario outside of straight, male gamers playing the game, huffing to themselves as they crank the slider to the max. I think the main reason it was removed was because you could create a character with the same body size as Lin and put in the same type of costumes they were trying to remove. (I can't remember...were those costumes taken out?) So it introduced this weird situation of, "what body type is this armor consider acceptable?" and rather than answering that question, they took the simplest route and axed it completely. Just a theory. It was silly that "face" and "bust" were the only things you could actually alter about your character, it wasn't exactly a thorough avatar creator, but its removal was still really weird. I'm having trouble finding it now, but I remember reading an article explaining why gay scenes are toned down or removed entirely in shows like Steven Universe and Adventure Time. The markets there view it as immoral, and leaving things like that in could have the entire show cancelled for that market. This is bad because places like China and Russia are huge sources of revenue for channels like Cartoon Network. Theoretically, having a show banned or cancelled in one market could have it cancelled in all of them. In order for us to enjoy something progressive, companies have to compromise and do things we'd consider immoral. It's dodgy, but it illustrates how localization and market factors are more complicated than we like to admit. I found an article that suggested that just kissing and other close contact, hetero or homosexual, was inappropriate for the network's censors, so everything was kind of cut or at least reduced. I'm no expert on the show but there's no way you can remove the subtext from it though.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 24, 2016 11:14:59 GMT -5
I don't think you understand just how precarious a situation video games have been in for decades now, the mainstream culture hates video games, pretty much always has save for a brief window of time of Wii bowling and Guitar Hero, guys like Leland Yee wanted to classify video games in the same league as pornography where if an M rated game was sold to a minor someone would go to jail for it (so much for "the Government can't arrest you") and I guess had gamers had the attitude back then that they have now he probably would have succeeded. For the second time in this thread, comparing anti-violence crusaders to social critical movements is wrong, 100% of the time. A corrupt politician, whose laws never went anywhere because they were ruled unconstitutional, as they are meant to be in a system with checks on balances. To suggest otherwise verges into conspiracy theory. Also the "vote with your dollars" argument is also bad, always. You're American, aren't you? Are you complete unaware of our history with the civil rights movement? And the same goes for calling localisation changes 'self-censorship'. Take FE:Fates for example. Nintendo could've legally sold that with the petting thing included, but they didn't. Some people then got up in arms about that, claiming they censored themselves, but in the end, this is just something they did because they believed the game will sell better/go over better now. If you think it's a shame it's not included, fine, but screaming censorship over a decision that was made purely from a business pov is ridiculous. And considering the huge amount of backlash they got for including it in FE in the first place, it was probably the best move. This is an interesting recent example because the face touching has nothing to do with sexuality or morals, it's something that the mainstream Western audience finds weird and alienating, so Nintendo removed it. I don't believe it was really necessary to do this, but I understand why they did.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 24, 2016 9:20:26 GMT -5
people voting with their dollar is imperfect but it sure says a lot more about what people want than arbitrary localization decisions driven by what the localizer finds appropriate They're not arbritrary though, and outside of some line-by-line writings they're decisions made by committees. Divorced from a commercial perspective I'd be fine with just keeping whatever content intact, but gaming wants to be viewed as arts then it needs to be prepared to be criticized as it. And the gaming audience has shown it's far too juvenile to handle this. Incidentally I've noticed some weirdly regressive pieces arguing that "games should be toys" to absolve them of any responsibility. www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2016/03/25/why-wont-you-take-me-seriously-is-the-question-that-is-slowly-killing-gaming/#60d059ea1ac9
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 23, 2016 22:11:14 GMT -5
I feel there's some value to this topic and I'm going to unlock it (for now) as long as posters trying to be respectful. As for this: Censorship sucks, plain and simple, anyone who's on the side of censorship, who thinks it's ok in certain contexts has an inherently flawed argument in my opinion, because censorship is a slippery slope, who determines what is ok and not ok to censor? That changes from era to era, you may sympathize with modern attitudes but ten/twenty years ago it was Thompson and Lieberman who were calling for censorship of games and if you take the stance today that censorship is ok provided it's of the "right" things you may regret setting that precedence tomorrow. I mean the point of "freedom of speech" is that it protects what you don't like, what you don't agree with, if you're not willing to be uncompromising in that attitude then you don't have it all and you've opened the floodgates for anything and everything to be censored. The reason JK Darkside is callously mocking you is because you only display a cursory understanding of the concept of "censorship", a naive understanding of "artistic freedom", and a completely incorrect definition of "freedom of speech". "Artistic freedom" is not the reason for panty shots or scantily clad 14 year olds are in Japanese video games, they're in there because there's marketing data in Japan that says "this stuff sells games". In America (and most other English speaking territories), they have marketing data that says "this stuff is offputting to the general audience". "Freedom of speech" only means the government can't arrest you. A company altering their games is not violating freedom of speech. Neither is someone criticizing a product or telling someone they're wrong on Twitter. as for Kojima, I think some of the out of place nudity there is defensible given other craziness about character designs and the fact that male characters tend to get naked a lot too (Sniper Wolf's outfit is still less stupid than a huge shirtless guy with a minigun, also in the Arctic). but that's not even the point, the point is that even if those things are stupid, I don't want them to be censored. translator's job is neither to impose his morals on the audience nor to change the designs so the worldbuilding makes sense. Metal Gear Solid is regarded as having the strongest localization of any of the series precisely because the translator put the extra effort into fixing up (or trying to fix up) the stuff that didn't work for an English speaking audience. Some goofy-ass stuff got through like "Decoy Octopus", and that protesting is why he was absent from the subsequent games, but a lot of extra effort shines through. The main thing is that certain personality types and actions have different interpretations across cultures. A big one is the "dirty grandpa" stereotype. In Japan the pervy old man leering at kids isn't viewed positively but it's regarded as harmless comic relief, whereas Americans have no tolerance for pedophiles. Some recent examples include the weird fake doctor/patient Hickfield from the Phoenix Wright games, in the Japanese version he more blatantly leers at Pearl, who is something like eight years old. For the localizations, they dialed that back so at least he creeps on women that are adults. In Danganronpa Another Episode, Haiji makes a casual reference that he likes little girls, which was translated accurately. It seems like it's supposed to come off as a joke because it's never mentioned again but instead he's just ends up as a pedo, and an even worse character than he already is. There's plenty of wiggle room to argue whether the localizer's choices are good ones - sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't - but with their goal being to create a sellable commercial product, they should absolutely be able to adjust it as necessary.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 23, 2016 15:36:51 GMT -5
it's always either outrage Is it really though? I'm finding lately that someone has "opinion on issue" and people that disagree with that opinion frame it as outrage, because only emotionally exagerrated people who can't think straight get outraged and therefore that means that opinion is wrong. Said outrage is then commodified pretty much everywhere, especially on business that thrive on social media, on all sides of the political spectrum. There's also a mistake that someone on Twitter gets mad about something and that voice is framed as being a whole voice of a movement. Yeah, I think someone getting super mad about scientist's shirt is kind of silly but that doesn't mean that there isn't an issue with women in STEM, which was the root of the complaint to begin with. For a recent example, someone I know on Twitter took a picture of ear plugs that were marketed separately towards men and women. He thought it was stupidly hilarious and posted it, the tweet went viral, and then people were claiming there was "outrage" by it, undoubtedly part of the game of Telephone that viral social media has become. This is something I feel strongly about because looking at gender and sexual representation is something any good critic should be aware. You don't need to be a feminist critic to see some of the dumb stuff that video games tend to do, constantly, that does more than just affect representation but weakens other qualities. I'm going to pick on Hideo Kojima for a bit: in Snatcher, you can have a heartfelt conversation with your estranged ex-wife, and then flash your junk to the underage daughter of your dead partner. In Metal Gear Solid, you hear a stirring death speech from a women whose massive cleavage is exposed, despite the fact that you're in the arctic. In both of these examples, it harms the storytelling and world design, sacrificed in favor of stupid jokes and an unnecessarily sexualized costume, and perpetuates a stereotype that games are only made for teenage boys. This doesn't mean sexualized costumes are always bad, but it's just completely inappropriate in this scenario. Highlighting this is not "outrage", even though it's constantly framed as such, nor does it have to do with anything regarding sexual morality. There's the suggestion that these elements should not be criticized because it's too "political" which is ridiculous. It's effectively an argument for worse video game writing.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 23, 2016 11:10:07 GMT -5
There's a wide, wide, wide difference between congressional hearings and calls for games to be legally regulated because they might incite kids to murder people, versus a wave of criticism that says "maybe we should represent women better in our games". someone decided that a tight or skimpy outfit is sexism A tight and skimpy outfit, in isolation, is not a problem. Tight and skimpy outfits, when pervasive, are an issue. This issue of "sides" really clouds the debate. The idea that it's just small crowd of critics that are demanding these changes and publishers are caving them are patently false. Every criticism I've heard brought up regarding gender representation is the same thing I've heard from women gamers - not people on the internet, people I've interacted with and am friends with - for the past fifteen years. The "other side" are not uptight, moral guardians, they're regular people who are irritated that the marketplace only barely considers them a target audience.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 23, 2016 8:30:08 GMT -5
Basically, equivocating anti-violence crusaders with calls for better sexual representation is completely wrong. I see that point brought up a lot elsewhere it and it's one of those false equivalences that really rankles my nerves.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 21, 2016 22:43:44 GMT -5
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 21, 2016 16:31:08 GMT -5
I don't remember any complaints about specifically Mortal Kombat (9?) being sexist with its character designs, but this is around the same time we had stuff like the announcement that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 wouldn't be coming to the west because of the 'political climate' or whatever over here. Which ironically made this the first time anyone cared about the games one way or another. There was also some "sexualized" pose in Overwatch that was removed due to a single complaint, and probably other stuff. What's interesting is that this movement has in many ways succeeded where the anti-violence crusaders failed, even though their numbers are even smaller. This is an incredibly clueless post. This is a sensitive topic and I expect posters here to come in some knowledge of what they're talking about.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 20, 2016 18:52:47 GMT -5
From the Namco X Capcom article.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 19, 2016 8:47:43 GMT -5
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