Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
Tomodachi Life, a game that's been on my mind for one reason or another for the better part of 2014, will be released at midnight tonight. While I'll be buying it, my plans for what to do once I have have changed dramatically over the past couple months.
There's a very good chance that this will be the last post I make about Tomodachi Life. What's more, even though the game integrates screenshots and image sharing in a similar fashion to Animal Crossing: New Leaf (a feature I've lauded in the past and would love to see included in every 3DS game) I'm planning to use it very sparingly. Why? Well...
When Nintendo first began to tease their localized release of Tomodachi Life, I was excited. Very excited. Excited enough to pick up a Japanese copy of the first game in the series, Tomodachi Collection for the Nintendo DS, in the hopes of informing myself so I could offer a more complete perspective on Tomodachi Life once it was in my hands.
I put more than 30 hours into Tomodachi Collection before Nintendo of America released their tone-deaf response to the #Miiquality campaign that had been pushing for same-sex relationships to be patched into the localized version of the game or, at the very least, considered for the next game. Long story short: The answer was "no," and not a particularly sensitive "no" either. Many people who had previously been disappointed but still interested in Tomodachi Life found the statement from NOA insulting. It really only made things worse. The apology that soon followed promised proper consideration of LGBTQ players in the next game in the series, but for some it was too little too late.
Although I've decided to buy Tomodachi Life in spite of my own conflicted feelings about Nintendo's fumbled handling of the #Miiquality campaign, quite a few of my friends are choosing not to. I respect that choice a great deal, because it's not one that I had the guts to make myself. I know many of them had been looking forward to the game just as much as I was, if not moreso. I've been on the other side of this equation before; I've decided not to buy something I wanted because of a moral or ethical conflict, and that's been a slippery slope. It can be incredibly tempting to buckle and buy into something you don't necessarily want, especially when your friends are enjoying it right in front of you.
The whole point of Tomodachi Life is to make your friends, to watch wacky things unfold, to laugh, and to share. "Look at this! Look at what you did in my game!" You're meant to say, attaching a screenshot to a tweet, a Facebook post, an email, or a text. In this case, I can't help but be aware of how insensitive that would be, salting the wound and punishing people for making the choice I didn't. Even worse, the idea that my sharing might encourage one of my friends to slip themselves -- to buy in even though they had decided not to for entirely valid reasons -- turns my stomach. I've been in that position too, and regretted the purchase almost immediately afterwards.
And that's what's going to be in the back of my mind whenever I play, whenever I take a screenshot, whenever I think about blogging or tweeting my experiences in Tomodachi Life. I just don't think that will put me in the sharing mood.
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