There’s been much brouhaha over the attempt by woke editors and publishing houses to sanitize the works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to try to make them more amenable to modern audiences. Leftists pore over pages of text to scour out any words or phrases that could conceivably cause offense to a fragile generation.
The world of gaming is also facing this censorious tide, but with an added level of woke shenanigans. Since many popular video games come from foreign markets such as Japan or South Korea, social justice-minded translators are literally changing the scripts of international games to push their own propaganda.
Importing a game from a foreign market often requires two steps: translation and localization. Translation is simply taking the foreign word and finding its closest English equivalent. But what happens when a translator encounters a joke that doesn’t make sense when literally translated to English?
That’s where a localizer steps in and attempts to massage jarring cultural differences into something more comprehensible. And it’s here where the left can do the most damage.
Removing Gender
“Fire Emblem Engage,” the newest game in the long-running Fire Emblem series, received criticism from gamers after it was revealed the localization team removed all language referring to gender and sex from the game, and changed dialogue that could theoretically be construed as offensive.
Bounding into Comics reported, “Fire Emblem Engage avoids mentioning gender when players choose a male or female player character. Instead, they choose their ‘form.’”
And one Twitter user documented how a scene where one character asks another on a date and for their type was changed to asking who their best friend was, likely over concerns that the original text was sexist.
This isn’t the first time the Fire Emblem series has gotten the woke treatment from localizers who think they can improve the text.
“Fire Emblem: Three Houses,” released in 2019, had several jokes cut, including a gay joke about a man in drag. Censors likely cut this one because it mocked the sacred cow of the LGBT hierarchy.
Like the attempt to censor Dahl in the name of modern sensibilities, so too is the push for linguistic changes in gaming. The woke scolds think they can make a better script than the original game creators and thus feel they have a moral duty to meddle with it.
There is a somewhat humorous dimension that exists when the radical left insists they can write better than the foreigners making these games.
Leftist Cultural Relativism or Superiority?
Leftists insist in a form of cultural relativism, that no culture is superior to another and that everyone is special, unique, and valid in their own way. Does that kumbaya mentality not seemingly fly in the face of the blatant disregard displayed by these woke puritans for foreign source material?
The reality is these terminally online idiots think there is in fact a better culture than all the foreign ones: their own. And we must be dragged along into it, kicking and screaming if necessary.
At the end of the day, all the mental dissonance displayed by the radical left doesn’t matter. They’re still infesting the gaming sphere and altering it to suit their twisted ends.
Much like with Dahl, there is inherent value to maintaining the text envisioned by the creators of these games. Activist editors do these works a great disservice by inserting their own politics into another person’s story.
Slim Recourse
There’s slim recourse for gamers who just want to enjoy a game unmolested by leftist propaganda, as there’s no easily accessible text to reference instead. Efforts to create fan-made translations and localizations are few and far between, and many face legal challenges as they exist in a murky realm of copyright. Short of learning a foreign language to escape woke nonsense in our escapism, there seems to be little we can do.
Therefore, the best solution is to tie the cause of the fed-up gamer to the greater movement against woke meddling. Censored games are just like censored books, and should be defended with the same ferocity.
As with Dahl, so too with Nintendo.
Douglas Blair is a producer and special correspondent with “O’Connor Tonight” on the Salem News Channel.
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