The term’s historical baggage lives on today

interesting article for consideration from Polygon writer Kazuma Hashimoto. here’s the opening:

In February, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sat down in an interview with YouTuber SkillUp as part of a tour to promote the next installment in the Final Fantasy series. During the interview, Yoshida expressed his distaste for a term that had effectively become its own subgenre of video game, though not by choice. “For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said. He stated that the first time both he and his contemporaries heard the term, they felt as though it was discriminatory, and that there was a long period of time when it was being used negatively against Japanese-developed games. That term? “JRPG.”

  • sandriver@beehaw.orgEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    Honestly feels like a bit of a gross misuse of the word “othering” given what material horrors are associated with the process. Especially bitter coming from Mr Naoki “economics justifies transphobia” Yoshida.

    I feel like there’s an important point in the valence of the word shifting as the American games industry and its colluders in the gaming press started trying to cut foreign and indie developers out. I think I completely missed out on the process of the word becoming pejorative, because I was mostly playing Nintendo and retro games during that era and not really talking about them online outside of people that also liked those kinds of games.

    I do think it’s interesting and sad though that negative valence can be attached to an entire region, and specifically a region outside “the West”. “Slavjank” would be another example; meanwhile the endless litany of very poor quality games coming out of the UK in the 80’s and 90’s was never given a simple and catchy term…

    But that leads to a point that there’s also something to be said that valence can be contextual. “Jank” means different things to different people and can be meant appreciatively or pejoratively.

    Within my friends with the same background and from the same (console) generation as me, and who like the same kinds of game as me, there is definitely a subgenre of RPG with a high degree of mechanical depth and novelty, typically made in Japan, that we crave more of; so some kind of catchy subgenre term is useful.

    Half serious but I think the real solution is to start describing mechanically over-streamlined Hollywood wannabes as WRPGs.