Kaden

Kaden

@Kaden

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Kaden
@Kaden

Haraiva on twitter made a post and then deleted it about orientalism in "cozy/wholesome" games specificially about fetishizing and infantilizing japan.

They went on to say that just because something is cutsey and charming doesnt mean that it isnt a form of racism. Celebratory intent doesnt negate harm and appropriation.

Its a real shame they had to delete it because they got harassed. i think is completely correct and this conversation needs to be more in the public conscious. Ive been seeing some of it in ttrpgs vis a vis 'ghibli aesthetic', but i'd like to see more of it esp within ""wholesome"" games discussions.

This is especialy relevant given there are 2 different games made by different teams that are using japan as a backdrop all while using fake kana. There is genuinly no reason for this other than fetishization.

Edit/Amendment: I want to acknowledge that orientalism is an issue throughout all genres of games, but for the purposes of this post I was focusing soley on those listed as "cozy" or "wholesome"

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Kaden
@Kaden

Inkonbini and little kitty big city, though i read on a reddit ama for the latter that the game dev chose japan partly because they are interested in city/urban planning but the fake kana is still a bit sus

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Aerginous
@Aerginous

Looking at it I agree their website is misleading about how japanese the team is, particularly how they seem to be avoiding specific credit. But I don't think it's useful to have the 'japaneseness' of its authors be a factor in how problematic the game will be.

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Kaden
@Kaden

even if the game itself is wonderful it doesn't exist in a vacuum and we should still look at in conversation with larger trends of foreigners co-opting cultures that aren't theirs due to false idolization

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ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

I think that RPS review does a rather admirable job of demonstrating in great detail just why this kinda fetishisation is just ... fuckin' weird man.

I was going to call InKonbini "pure calcified nostalgia", but in this case, it's nostalgia for a representation, the image of a konbini preserved in a decades-old videogame. I find this eerie. There are also some familiar broader questions to ask about the ethics or, at least, cringeiness of romanticising roles that tend to be underpaid and precarious. I've never been to Japan or set foot in a konbini, but I've worked in various supermarkets, newsagents and department stores, and while I enjoyed aspects of the job and made good friends in the process, the idea of, say, a Japanese developer releasing a game called Tesco Janitor: Shifts Of The Heart makes me crinkle at the edges.

Or should I also bring up the part later on where the dev admits he got kicked out of a shop after talking his way into a job interview and using it to snap pictures of the inside of the store?

These are people's lives, being romanticized and propped up for the vague nostalgic fetishism of some weeb who got way too into a game about forklift driving as a child. Something tells me we wouldn't even be having this conversation at all if it were about his day job selling magazine subscriptions at a call center in rural Ohio.

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Aerginous
@Aerginous

Yeah, but my point is his behavior is only incidentally tied to him being a foreigner. Like, I'm from a country full of nationalist idiots with godawful behavior about what their 'culture' means. I don't think they have any more right to say what my culture is about than any foreigner who appreciates it. Any other way of looking at it is just identitarian 'culture purity' ethnonationalist horseshit.

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dismallyOriented
@dismallyOriented

Which makes sense - what a Japanese person would identify as the core aesthetic features of kanji/kana would be different than a white person who's less familiar with the language or sees the symbols for characters without having greater context for them. What would be nonsense is instead a comprehensible system that can be remixed.

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aliengeo
@aliengeo

Related: there's a game by an LGBT Japanese dev about transmisogyny in Japan that regularly gets stereotyped as "cozy" when the subject matter REALLY isn't. You can only reach that conclusion if you aren't engaging with the text

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Ligana5
@Ligana5

Ah... yeah it's not a cozy game at all. Not in the slightest. It just has a cutesy art style because... that's the art style of its developer. It's not trying to be cozy at all, or present things in a soft manner. That's just how the game looks, and folks are seriously misrepresenting it.

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haraiva
@haraiva

all good! i didnt realise it was being talked about on here. i didnt really get harassed per se but i could feel the weird defensive responses coming from a mile away and people were already overstepping a little bit in my mentions so i did my habitual thing and went "actually you cant have this" LMAO.

also something i'd stress is that while the original thought was spurred by a game categorised as "wholesome" (inkonbini), this is criticism that applies to all indie games. like, you can see this in horror games a lot. or anything that has to do with "cyberpunk" aesthetics.

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