On the heels of yesterday’s discussion about Kathleen Kennedy departing Lucasfilm the website Geeks & Gamers posted an article about Nintendo Of America’s new president and Chief Operating Officer Devon Pritchard, who is taking over for Doug Bowser. (Yes, yes, everyone makes that joke, including himself.) I don’t know a whole lot about his time in the big chair so I can’t speak to it, but Pritchard’s comments have both the article’s writer, Martin Montanaro, and the website’s founder and main video contributor/stream host, Jeremy Griggs concerned in light of the direction the video game industry has gone, following Hollywood’s cultural trends. I usually stay out of the culture war stuff, but this does affect storytelling and ties in too closely to last night’s article because they and apparently other critics have used this to call Pritchard “Kathleen Kennedy 2.0”.

At issue are remarks Pritchard made in a pre-recorded speech to the New York Game Awards, an awards show I didn’t even know existed since the big Video Game Awards are usually the only one I hear of and all of the issues that have come up with that event in the last few years. Frankly, even that I only know for announcements like the long-awaited return of Mega Man. Awards shows are worthless these days. Back on topic: even the Geeks & Gamers contributors mention that it’s not the words themselves in a bubble but more like the history of what the words have been from other gaming studios and the overall storytelling industry in television/streaming, comics, and movies that raise certain red flags. We do not live in a bubble and history has made many of the geek community who have seen the alteration and bastardization of the stories and characters they love in the hands of the SEECA crowd (for newcomers, that would be Snobs, Elitists, Egotists, Corporatists, and Activists–an acronym I came up with recently).

Should they be worried, or are we skirting the walls of paranoia in seeing the baddies behind every tree? This isn’t a BW Vs article because they kind of have a point to the degree that using it would be more branding than actually arguing against the article. However, I worry about extremism as much from my side as the people who have ruined so many franchises out of self-interest and chasing the “cool kids” at the expense of the geeks they always looked down upon in high school. I don’t necessary disagree with Geeks & Gamers on this, but being a bit more “outsider” on the backstage stuff I want to approach with a cooler head and explain why people more into the “inside baseball” perspective versus BW’s usual approach of looking at the end product have understandable concerns. I have some, too.

We should start by looking at Pritchard’s actual comments. I can’t coax the clean clip from YouTube, though I have seen that G&G aren’t the only ones concerned based on the few video titles already coming. So I have to use the video from Culture Crave on X-Twitter. Hopefully this embeds right. As of this writing, I have to change “X” to “twitter” in the URL to get the embed to work because it’s still kind of a mess.

Montanaro admitted that the words themselves seem harmless, but…

While the language sounds inclusive on the surface, many fans argue that similar messaging has historically preceded major creative and cultural shifts at entertainment companies — shifts that often resulted in alienating core audiences. That’s where the comparison to Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm comes in.

From here I’ll post the video by Griggs on the Geeks & Gamers YouTube channel. He’s more willing to swear than I am so just a heads-up to my usuals, but he’s kind of upset. We’ll go into why in a moment from my point of view but let’s hear his own words for proper context.

The problem phrase is “everyone deserves a chance to do meaningful and creative work in games and storytelling” and that “every dream matters”. Sounds harmless, right? Why shouldn’t every person get their dream? Well, Griggs makes it clear in the video that the line should be clarified, that everyone who wants to make good video games has the right to make games. Legally and technically any idiot can grab some kind of freebie game making software and make a game. If I had the patience I could do it. Would they be insults to some of my old Reviewers Unknown colleagues who make video games now? Probably. My deal is making comics and the occasional prose story. I’m not a game maker, but I do care about storytelling in any media format as both creator and fan. That’s what G&G’s contributors are trying to make clear: that too many in the storytelling industry aren’t.

The Corporatists don’t care about the story, they care about the money. Look at the whole situation with Stop Killing Games. The servers cost money and so does making the game available to be run by fans because they won’t get that money. Doesn’t explain those games who shouldn’t NEED to be online because they’re a singular story experience, but that’s a whole other topic. The corporations aren’t paying attention to what’s going on, just demanding features the games don’t need but are popular in other games like multiplayer maps, or help them to make more money like loot crates and DLC that are just unnecessary or should be. Returning to topic, they also listen to the WRONG consulting firms. One could question listening to any consulting firm given how they’ve come up with the dumbest things (the whole Q5 situation with The Real Ghostbusters on ABC comes to mind) pretty much everywhere you go. However, video games has one particular boogeyman that even Egon Spangler would have a hard time with:

SWEET BABY INC!

One of the downsides of writing is not being able to use the right “scream” clip from Freakazoid unless someone else uploaded it.

Yes, the consulting firm so full of extremist activist mentality that Steam users have curated playlists of games they’ve worked on, sure that the sociopolitical nonsense will take over the story writing and has ruined franchise will dominate. More often than not (if there even is a not) they’re right. There is a point of view that the message is more important, though that “message” is usual done through heavy-handed stereotypes that are supposed to represent “everybody” of that group but comes off so much like an insult that even non-activists in those groups are offended. When creators use lines like “everyone deserves their own story”, this is usually what they mean.

There are two reasons for that. One is what I call “The One Story To Rule Them All”, the idea that if you have the right amount of everything you will make a story so perfect that every human being on the planet who sees/reads/plays/hears it will praise it as the best thing ever and nobody will top it. This is usually the domain of the egotists, and when the activists know how to mess with the egotists…well, ego, it can lead to bad stories by people more interested in their standing (the whole “right side of history” nonsense) than in the fans of a work their elitist attitude already looks down upon. Hollywood, and those with the same mindset in games and comics, haven’t left high school and still look down on the geeky kids and the things they want, while still demanding everything popular be for them or about their worldview. So “them all” usually means the people they really want to impress, the “cool kids” if you will. Those of us who already love what’s there are out in the cold because they don’t matter, the dirty rebels.

In the activists’ case, even if they won’t watch, read, or play it they still want it to reflect their view of the world, usually a cynical stereotype ridden playground of their part of New York and California. They’ll even alter other countries media through dubs and subtitles to make that happen, which we’ll come back to because it’s the only place Pritchard could influence since so many of Nintendo’s first party content comes from Japan.

The other reason is the quota system. See, for the people who usually use the “everybody deserves” bit that’s not really what they mean in practice no matter what they mean personally. Like I said, anybody can make a video game. It’s rather easy. The problem is that “everybody” is usually determined by them with percentages. You need [X] number of women, [X] number of minorities, sexual orientations, et cetera to be considered “balanced” and “representing the world we live in”. Allegedly. Remember…

…this cracker box is the creative team for Assassin’s Creed: Shadows that took the first Japanese protagonist, who also happened to be the first female protagonist in the franchise, and insisted it needed the one black man in samurai lore as a player character. I think I see one possibly Asian woman in the second row who might not even be Japanese, but no black people. Nobody had a problem with the first woman and wanted to play in Japan for years, but the black samurai who wasn’t a full samurai in real life was out of place and took away from the assassin style gameplay of the franchise that tossed out the futuristic alt character because nobody wanted to play him. (He was white, by the way.) Maybe the French company couldn’t find a Japanese or black person to help make the game…which is the point. I’m all for encouraging women and minorities to become gamemakers if they really want to. The problem is…they have to want to.

To fill the quota they’ll bring in mediocre creators and rather than start them on something easy (if AAA developers even make such things) they have to have the big, flashy spot to show off how “diverse” they are. This is where you get the term “DEI hire”, someone who is not up to snuff no matter how much they actually love making games, though could be by going through the system the same way the white guy did to build qualifications but because they need to have the right percentage of (insert group here) they drop the poor sap into the deep end of the pool before they learned how to swim. Others are just there to fulfill some mythical role of filling the quota and don’t really care about making games, making the ones that do care look bad in the process. That not only hurts the end product, it hurts the creator who now has a stain on their record because they weren’t ready. One of the RU colleagues I mentioned is a black woman who makes her own games. The other’s a white dude. I haven’t kept up with everybody lately because of my own distractions, but they have a passion for game design and started as game reviewers. I don’t know anybody else from the old team that wants to make games, though at least one wants to be a filmmaker and a few of us are into making comics or art. They should all be allowed to enter the field, but because they want to make good games not because of what they are in the current demographics. Montero makes this case in the article.

Critics argue that phrases like “everyone belongs” and “everyone deserves to be here” have become shorthand for a corporate mindset that prioritizes ideological messaging over audience trust. In other industries, that approach has often led to dismissing longtime fans as obstacles rather than stakeholders.

In the commentary surrounding Pritchard’s speech, critics warned that this type of language frequently functions as coded messaging — signaling a shift away from serving existing fans and toward redefining who the product is for.

For Nintendo fans, this is a particularly sensitive issue. Nintendo has long been viewed as one of the last major publishers relatively insulated from the cultural and ideological battles that have consumed film and television.

Other game studios out of Japan, however, including third party Nintendo console game makers, have not. Some games will be censored for the West not because they target a different age group but because some activist group who don’t play video games complain about cleavage or language, or someone on the translation team decided the crossdresser has to be trans because stereotypes are a lazy way to represent and entire group at the expense of individuals. Japanese media has guys who have no problem being guys but prefer women’s clothing, or in the case of one fighting game character has a backstory where his parents wanted a girl and forced him into the role. So he beats people up in a mixed fighting style tournament dressed as a nun. Fighting games are weird, man. Another game has you potentially playing as a kangaroo fighting a dude with a tiger head. Or I could be mixing games. Drag queens may be gay but this is like saying they’re all transgender as well.

While Nintendo hasn’t yet become the cultural battleground that Star Wars, for example, has turned into, this backlash didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Nintendo of America has faced criticism in recent years over localization decisions, content changes, and messaging perceived as out of step with Nintendo’s Japanese leadership.

While it is true that Nintendo’s core game development remains firmly rooted in Japan, fans remain wary of the growing influence of Western corporate leadership — especially when that leadership adopts language more commonly associated with Hollywood executives.

Some defenders have pointed out that Nintendo of America doesn’t control game development itself. That may be true, but perception matters, and first impressions tend to stick.

And that’s why this isn’t a BW Vs article. The perception throughout the storytelling industry, especially in the geekier circles who still suffer the points of view they did in high school (look at Steve Urkel or The Big Bang Theory as “representation” of geek culture), is that the SECCA crowd are going to change things fans like into things the snobs, egotists, elitists, and activists want…because they do it all the time. The popular thing must “belong” to the cool kids. It’s how you get what’s going on with Star Trek right now. It’s why Japanese creators more and more are saying they need to keep the “Japanese flavor” of the media they produce, knowing Western fans love most of those differences.

Sometimes it’s not just the usual crowd. Mainline comics are no longer as kid-friendly as they used to be because someone insisted that things “grow with us”, a mindset that would have ruined Sesame Street. Video games have also taken older properties and grimdarked them up because someone didn’t want the “baby” games and wanted the big name games to change to what they like. Ninja Gaiden feels like two separate franchises that share a main character. These are the same people who look down on casual gamers, especially the smartphone app gamers. Remember when they got mad that the old DOS game franchise Commander Keen was coming back on smartphones, the perfect platform for maintaining that style of gameplay mechanics in the 2000s? It’s just that the more politically minded ones get the most flack.

So are Pritchard’s critics jumping the gun? Yes. Do they have reason to? Also yes. History does show a pattern of things people like being stripped of those things to play to a new audience who might not even be interested, chasing away fans who are even part of the demographics they claim to be after because they preferred the way it was and didn’t need to be bogged down in lazy stereotypes pretending to be “proper representation” made by people elevated for what group they were a part of rather than their skill as if they could never earn that spot on their own without the “good white people” to give it to them, or “fix” the game for them when it wasn’t broken.

It may turn out to be a misreading of what she means, though if she listens to the wrong people she may end up falling into the group that calls such critics “sexist” or other form of bigotry, a popular move to use activists as a talking point “meatshield” suckers to hide their terrible decisions. The Geeks & Gamers crew will happily admit to being wrong, and probably want to be. They became an info source because I know they want good media and have no issue with good people who want and deserve to be there regardless of race, gender, or other demographics we use to compartmentalize the human race. (Easier to control the masses if you separate them and set them against each other.) As Griggs said in the video, the open mind is no longer an option because trust has been so eroded in video games and across the multimedia landscape. Trust has to be earned, and I hope she does that. I want her to be good at the job and for Nintendo during her watch to make good games with good stories without listening to the wrong people as to what their game should look like in the West versus Japan. It’s just harder and harder to assume the best in the current landscape. Like Leon says in my comics, sometimes it’s better to be pleasantly surprised than horribly disappointed.