Gaming: why Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 doesn't travel well
The absence of a Western release of the latest in the salacious and scantily clad beach volleyball series has caused controversy – but such sensitivity isn’t censorship
Ten years ago, Japanese video game publisher Tecmo had a brilliant money-spinning idea. It decided to take the female characters from its successful fighting game series Dead or Alive and put them into a beach volleyball simulation set on a tropical island. There would be a lot of bikinis and, thanks to a graphics engine that was then at the cutting edge, a lot of bounce physics. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball sold hundreds of thousands of copies. A new gaming franchise was born.
But now that same franchise is in trouble. Kind of.
In November, a community moderator on the Dead or Alive Facebook page was answering questions about the possibility of a Western release for Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, the latest title in the series. The staff member informed fans that an official release was unlikely outside of Japan and Asia, and when pushed on the reasoning wrote: “Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry? We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly we have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision. Thank you.”
In other words, it seemed to some that Koei Tecmo’s decision not to release the game in the West was due to fears of a feminist backlash. This seemed to be confirmed later when a moderator on Koei Tecmo Europe’s Twitter account, added support for the statement.
Unsurprisingly, the minor revelation was leapt on both by fans of the series and by libertarian cultural critics, who quickly blamed “social justice warriors”for inhibiting freedom of speech (and bikini wear) thanks to their incessant hand-wringing over sexism in the games industry. Internet forums and gaming Subreddits enthusiastically linked the “announcement”with Nintendo’s recent decision to change some of the skimpy outfits in Wii U titles Xenoblade Chronicles X and Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water for Western release. To some, it was a sure sign that authoritarian lefties were imposing their killjoy values on the industry.
It’s also not one guided purely by fears of a moral backlash. There is a historic awareness that Western markets aren’t as exposed to the mass of anime and manga that heavily inform gaming content in Japan, and which comfortably embrace many seijin (adult) subgenres that often seem weird beyond the domestic market. Indeed, when games like Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball are appraised in the West, it tends to take place beyond the context of Japan’s wider otaku culture – a culture of somewhat obsessive fandom. “The women in DoA belong in a particular niche – it’s the characters themselves that are popular,”argues sociologist Casey Brienza, who has written extensively on manga and anime. “There’s a huge culture around what are called ‘character goods’ – things like Hello Kitty – which become multiplied across different media, from comics to action figures.
