PokeFacism

The loose use of the word censorship bothers me. Maybe it was when students started using it in Philosophy Class to refer to things like teachers providing content lists, but something set me off about people using it to refer to things like forum moderation, marking rubrics, or language filters.

Pokemon XY differs from earlier Pokemon games in that you can’t name your pokemon rude words the same way you used to be able to. Fox has called her Mister Mime ‘Fuckhead’ every game generation, only to find that she couldn’t this time. She occasionally called her Cloyster ‘Cunt.’ This generation, you can’t do that. In the most literal sense, you can call this censorship. It is a private business setting rules for what can and can’t be discussed in their medium. It is censorship but at the same scale as scratching your nose is a form of killing. What has raised more ire is that the word censorship was also censored.

This seems pretty reasonable to me. They want to censor rude words, and then naturally, people are going to whine about that. Banning the word censorship makes it harder to discuss this topic, which inhibits conversations that, essentially, boil down to Nintendo doesn’t want me to talk about death and rude bits around four year olds. How dare they. If you’re the kind of person who gets mad about words being blocked in a pokemon game, you’re either not creative enough to think of ways to abuse them, or don’t care that much about social forum abuse.