The Mono Blue Prison

journalist gets real yakuza members to play yakuza 3 and asks for their opinions on its authenticity

“What’s with all the fucking gaijin in this area?” “Dude, don’t say that, use gaikokujin, it’s nicer.” “Oh, shit, right. What’s with all the fucking gaikokujin in this area?”

“The breaded pork cutlet bento box is like mega power. More than ramen. That’s accurate.”

all of them start dragging kiryu for his shitty cheap shirt for five minutes

“Shooting people sends a message.” “So does shooting anything.”

if you’ve been trained to to dislike yourself for enjoying anything due to years of being told you’re annoying clap your hands 👏👏👏

if I listed out every particular instance that was met with negativity enough for me to stop feeling comfortable talking about it, this comic would be like 50 panels.

In my case, I’ve missed out on so many experiences because of this. I had given up trying to make people see the things I like aren’t a waste of time. But I’m slowly trying to claim them back.

why even stop there lets keep this awful finger train goin

It comes down to a bunch of things:

1) As with “bad” cards, is it something we are able to not do? If it has to happen, players complaining isn’t going to stop it.

2) Is it the only viable path? Introducing Standard wasn’t popular, but there were forces that were going to destroy Magic if we didn’t act, so we didn’t have much choice but to weather through the complaints.

3) Is it something that we feel the audience doesn’t understand? Yes, changing the rules (Sixth Edition, Magic 2010, etc.) got negative reaction, but change tends to upset people and there was literally no way for players to understand the new thing without experiencing it. We had confidence that once they experienced it, they’d like it and they did.

4) Is there a long term gain that players don’t understand? Sometimes we’re doing something that takes time to pay off and we weather complaints until we reach the new state.

The rotation wasn’t #1, we could not do it. It wasn’t #2, we had other business options. It ended up not being #3 because players understand rotations and their dislike of them wasn’t because it was a new thing they didn’t understand.

#4 is the one we hoped to hang our hat on, but research showed that we overvalued the positivity of change to the environment and undervalued the negativity of people not being able to play the same deck for a long period of time. It turns out many players have more negative associations with rotations than positive. They understand they have to happen, but they want them to happen at the slowest rate possible.