Has Nintendo Gone Woke?

Writing In Code

This whole trend is little more than a gigantic exercise in solipsistic self-projection of some people’s own twisted sense of sexual inner self out onto wholly unrelated things like videogames, in an attempt to selfishly ruin them for the normal masses, just like the pink radical Russell T. Davies has done to Doctor Who on TV. Thankfully, unlike the more woke-worshipping BBC, Nintendo has yet to hand over the reins of its biggest franchises to militant queer activists like Davies… or has it? 

Many ostensibly ideologically neutral games which appear on Nintendo’s modern consoles may sadly contain an unavoidable element of wokeness within their very nature of being. High-end titles today cost many millions to create, so developers often cut costs and time by making use of generic licensed ‘world-building’ development-software, like the various iterations of Unreal Engine, made by Epic Games, which allows coders to create the in-game physics, lighting and suchlike for their titles more easily and efficiently than by coding them up from scratch.

As you would expect, access to the latest versions of Unreal Engine is to be made available for use by developers of Switch 2 games too: 

Unfortunately, the creators of the aptly-named Unreal Engine appear to be rather woke themselves. When the latest version of the software launched in 2022, they provided guidance for game-makers about “Inclusive Word Choice” to use when stringing together lines of code: “When you work in the Unreal Engine codebase, strive at all times to be respectful, inclusive and professional in your use of language.”

Unreal Demands

And what kind of “inclusive language” did coders now need to adopt when programming their games? Language like the following:

Racial, ethnic and religious inclusiveness

• • Do not use metaphors or similes that reinforce stereotypes. This includes those that contrast black and white, such as blacklist/whitelist.
  • Do not use words that refer to historical trauma or lived experience of discrimination. This includes slave, master and nuke.

Overloaded Words

• • Many terms that we use for their technical meanings also have other uses outside of technology. For example: abort, execute or native. When you use words like these, always be precise and examine the context in which they appear.

Its Dictionaries of Newspeak on hand, Epic Fail provided coders with lists of alternative, less ‘offensive’ vocabulary to make use of:

Word List

The following list identifies some terminology that we have used in the Unreal codebase in the past, but that we believe should be replaced with better alternatives.

Blacklist

Alternatives: deny list, block list, exclude list, avoid list, unapproved list, forbidden list, permission list

Whitelist

Alternatives: allow list, include list, trust list, safe list, prefer list, approved list, permission list

Master

Alternatives: primary, source, controller, template, reference, main, leader, original, base

Slave

Alternatives: secondary, replica, agent, follower, worker, cluster node, locked, linked, synchronised

As per usual with such ‘guidance’, it turned out to in fact be seemingly compulsory: “Following the coding standards is mandatory,” the ‘guidance’ document says, thus revealing itself to not be mere ‘guidance’ at all, but a document of enforced ideological fealty.

Even if you were an avowedly anti-woke videogame company, who pumped out nothing but games about sinking migrant boats, if you wanted to program them using Unreal Engine – and if you’re a smaller company on a budget, you may have little other realistic financial choice – then you would be forced by Epic’s rules into unwilling ideological compliance with an ideology you do not agree with as a simple condition of continuing to do business.

Or at least this is how the matter was presented at the time; some sceptical commentators say the restrictions only apply to Epic Games coders themselves, and the company has no technical means of enforcing any of this on their outside customers, having no legal means of accessing their actual code-bases. Not being a coder myself, I simply don’t know: but, once again, the ‘guidance’ document does specifically say such language is “mandatory”, so Epic does at least appear to aspire to restrict users’ language like this. 

How many of us who work with computers are pushed into similar states of complicity with such demands every day, without ever knowing it? For all I know, the underlying code running even the Daily Sceptic website might operate under similar politically restrictive linguistic criteria too!

One of the specific conditions of writing Unreal Engine code is directly related to transgender ideology, in terms of the ever-contentious topic of pronouns:

Gender inclusiveness

• • Refer to hypothetical people using the pronouns they, them, and their, even in the singular.
  • When you refer to anything that is not a person, always use it and its. For example: a module, plugin, function, client, server, or any other software or hardware component.

Do not assign a gender to anything that doesn’t have one.

• • Do not use collective nouns like guys that assume gender.
  • Avoid colloquial phrases that contain arbitrary genders, like ‘a poor man‘s X’.

As even the world’s biggest and most profitable gaming company Nintendo is sometimes driven to make use of Unreal Engine when publishing its own games, it is not impossible, I suppose, that one day Link will be forced to become cross-gender in terms of his underlying base-level programming whether Eiji Aonuma wants him to be or not, then?

Perhaps Epic will mandate that Nintendo’s next future console shall have to be called the Nintendo Gender-Switch.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

The post Has Nintendo Gone Woke? first appeared on modernity.