Nintendo has decided to issue a second official statement on a rather sensitive issue, after doing a less-than-stellar job of explaining their controversial decision first time around. For those of you out of the loop, a Nintendo-developed game by the name of Tomodachi Life (think a simplified version of The Sims set in Mii-verse) allows your characters to marry – providing they’re straight. This upset a subset of gamers who campaigned for what they called ‘Miiquality’, or rather to allow gay couples within Tomodachi Life to marry.
Nintendo attempted to explain the problem away by stating,“Nintendo never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of ‘Tomodachi Life’,” flubbed a representative, “The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation. We hope that all of our fans will see that ‘Tomodachi Life’ was intended to be a whimsical and quirky game, and that we were absolutely not trying to provide social commentary.”
Whimsical intentions or not, understandably those upset were not placated by Nintendo’s response. So it’s decided to have another crack. The second statement goes as follows: “We apologize for disappointing many people by failing to include same-sex relationships in Tomodachi Life. 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.
“We pledge that if we create a next installment in the Tomodachi series, we will strive to design a game-play experience from the ground up that is more inclusive, and better represents all players.”
So there you go. All cleared up… sort of. We’re going to choose to believe Nintendo on both of these accounts, mostly because there’s a strong chance that it genuinely was something which slipped their mind. And also because we don’t want to think of one of the world’s most beloved family videogame developers as queer-bashing bigots. You can make your own mind up, we suppose.
