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Jerichoholic wrote: »

There was absolutely no outrage over Catherine when it came out years ago.

Here's the thing: there's not a whole lot of it now either (also: there are circa 2011 critiques of the game that highlight such concerns). There's a small subset of people concerned about these issues in relations to Catherine, and a smaller subset again 'outraged' over it.

This falls into the trap of many of the gaming 'outrages' blown out of proportion. This is the Internet: there's always going to be a small amount of people outraged about something - take those complaining about playable women in Battlefield 1 ("something something historical accuracy something something"). That's one of the consequences of social media. Equally, there's going to be people who'll get outraged about the outrage, even if there's not even much outrage in the first place - this is the model many of the furious 'anti-SJW' YouTube and blogger types peddle. Every small twitter spat or semi-busy ResetEra thread is fair game. Many of these are the same sort of people who, incidentally, pull a rager whenever a game has any vaguely progressive message in it.

I had a look at the ResetEra page about the Catherine controversy. It comes across as legitimate criticism taken a few steps too far by one crusading poster. The poster in question highlights that they got 50 members - 50 out of a site that right at this second has more than 4,500 members online - to sign a petition to add it to a banned list of games on the site (it wasn't added to the list of banned games). That is so farcically low it barely warrants commenting on, but no surprise the whole thing has been disproportionately signal-boosted by a different brand of outrage merchants. For a more extreme examples of this effect, there's the Cuphead racism 'controversy' or the Doom trailer 'controversy' which weren't controversies at all. But there were angry gamers who needed content to rattle their viewer/readership:



One the big problems with the whole 'outrage culture' is that actual criticism and concerns are dismissed as mere outrage. There are legitimate concerns to be levelled at Atlus over the way they handle gay and trans characters - some of their writing is hilariously, cringe-level bad in that respect (there's two gay characters that show up in Persona 5 who are basically straight out of a Carry On film, at best), and easily something I can see people being turned off by especially if they're more directly impacted by these things. 'Cultural differences' doesn't magically wave away any clunky handling of these things (I mean, Japan is the country that gave us one of the great gay films of the 1960s with Funeral Parade of Roses).

If people want to discuss and critique these things, that's very often a good thing - not every criticism = 'outrage'! There are always 'bad takes' as well, exponentially so when anyone can throw up any old ****e online. But, sadly, there's a subset of people out there who believe any criticism of any given game is beyond the pale.

I try to stay away from the whole identity politics / culture war side of things these days, because honestly it's a shortcut to a headache. But always important to stress that the outrage culture flows both ways - for every person outraged about the representation of trans characters in a game, there's another outraged about the outrage, and then there's an outrage merchant to rant about it online for an audience eager for more outrage. So it goes.