This Wednesday, former Nintendo spokesperson and marketing specialist Alison Rapp announced on Twitter that her employment at the Japanese gaming titan had been “terminated.”
This tweet seemed like the conclusion to a long and drawn-out series of controversies surrounding Rapp and Nintendo. But in fact, the announcement would set off a new whirlwind of discussion and debate on the Internet concerning employer and employee ethics, as well as the ethics of Internet denizens themselves.
It’s easy to chalk up this tumultuous affair to a simple Internet faction war, with clearly defined sides railing against one another. However, doing so blinds us to the fact that the Rapp case is much more convoluted than would appear at a first glance. Doing so also runs the risk of erecting a phantom enemy against which gamers can rally, which is what got Rapp, Nintendo, and various camps on the Internet caught in this morass in the first place. Intertwined in this mess is what Kotaku has dubbed “gaming’s culture war,” though as we shall see, it would be myopic to reduce Rapp’s strange story to a mere episode in the Internet’s endless debate on sexual representation in games.
To get a better picture on why no one party is simply in the ‘right’ or in the ‘wrong,’ we must delve into Rapp’s history with Nintendo. The question of whether any of these parties made foolish decisions, and how they could have been handled better if so, shall be left up to the reader.
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Alison Rapp began working for Nintendo’s North American product development division, Nintendo Treehouse, two and a half years ago. Until this February, her presence at Nintendo’s wasn’t particularly known to the public at large, though a series of tweets Rapp made yesterday implies that her relationship with her employers was rather contentious from the beginning:
Nintendo fans (and plenty of bystanders) might recall how this January, mayhem erupted on the Internet over the removal of – among other things – “gay conversion” scene and a “petting minigame” in Fire Emblem: Fates. Frustrated with the removal of the sexual content in question, angry Internet denizens lashed out at Nintendo and sought scapegoats to blame for their censorship woes.
Unfortunately, things already get shadowy around this point in our story. As is with almost anything having to do with protest and vigilantism on the Internet, there are often twisting layers and corridors within a single story that go far deeper than we may ever fathom. In Rapp’s case, she suddenly found herself under fire from host of Twitter accounts. Other individuals, like infamous Internet troll and hacker weev, encouraged others on the Neo-Nazi blog Daily Stormer to directly bombard Nintendo with complaints about Rapp’s “pro-pedo” stance.
The aforementioned pedophelia accusations stem from a single tweet Rapp made back in 2011, which expressed her anger over a case in which man was arrested when burglars found traces of child pornography in his house. The tweet in question referred to a thesis paper Rapp had written during her college career on social perceptions of child pornography in Western cultures. In summary, the paper criticizes child porn crackdowns and calls for more secure, Japan-inspired measures against the exploitation of children. You can read a fragment of her thesis here.
As can be seen from the responses to her tweet on Twitter, the essay and her stance on child pornography caused an outrage on Twitter and beyond.
So how, then, did Rapp’s college thesis paper become conflated with video game censorship? There is, of course, no single answer. Many Internet users point fingers at the Gamergate movement, which has historically entangled itself in issues of video game censorship and has lashed out at video game and media critics who lambast the video game industry for its treatment of women.
Others claim that it was not Gamergate itself that instigated the attacks, but rather what seems to be a splinter group called Revolt:
A Google search brings up no stories or archives on this Revolt group. Perhaps it is a private IRC channel, like those embedded within the famous AnonOps network? We cannot say, though if any readers would like to comment on the matter, please do so in the comments section below.
In response to Welch’s tweet, one user states that the attacks were either instigated or exacerbated by The Wayne Foundation founder and anti-human trafficking activist Jamie Walton, who was contacted by a certain John Kelly beforehand.
Still others cite 4chan’s political subforum, /pol/, for instigating the attacks. Any evidence of such plotting, though, has disappeared into the 404 nether.
In any case, we cannot definitively say whether Rapp – a marketing specialist who seems to have gone by several different job titles – had a hand in making the reviled changes to Fire Emblem: Fates. Reports from sites such as Kotaku have said she did not partake in any translation or localization work for the game.
This convoluted chain of events demonstrates one fact: Internet activist groups – and the individuals and communities who agree with or critique them – are not the hiveminded entities that the media often depicts. They typically embody spiraling labyrinths of like-minded groups, each with their own (often conflicting) methods of getting things done. It would be unjust, then, to point all fingers at one particular source of who-done-it when it comes to Rapp’s case.
While the subject deserves plenty of its own articles and books, we must return to Rapp’s tale and connect the final dots that lead to her termination at Nintendo.
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At this point in the story, Nintendo itself had not commented on the ire Rapp was drawing from angry Internet hordes. In fact, it wasn’t until after Rapp had publicly announced her departure from Nintendo yesterday that the company released the following statement to Polygon:
Though Ms. Rapp’s termination follows her being the subject of criticism from certain groups via social media several weeks ago, the two are absolutely not related. Nintendo is a company committed to fostering inclusion and diversity in both our company and the broader video game industry and we firmly reject the harassment of individuals based on gender, race or personal beliefs. We wish Ms. Rapp well in her future endeavors.
Late yesterday evening, Rapp confirmed Nintendo’s comment. In this tweet, she gave the reason for her termination: to help pay off her student loans, Rapp had begun pursuing a second career under an anonymous handle.
In the below series of tweets, Rapp states that the reason behind her termination was due to her second job breaching her contract with Nintendo, and not because of the moonlighting itself:
While moonlighting is allowed by Nintendo, the company “didn’t like” Rapp’s particular brand of moonlighting. What that second career entailed is best left to the winds of the Internet.
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Even after her departure, many unanswered questions surrounding Rapp’s termination persist. Had her previous controversial actions – and the associated trolling campaigns that accompanied them – caused Nintendo to reach a boiling point, with the moonlighting episode being the final straw in her Nintendo career? For what reasons had Nintendo remained silent during the previous trolling saga? We can only say that this chapter in Rapp, Nintendo, and the Internet’s life is far from over, and that discussion (as well as trolling) over the matter will only intensify over time.
Though the actual reason for Rapp’s termination lies in her former second career, the Rapp case will inevitably become woven into the fabric of a constantly expanding web of social and ethical debates in the gaming world. Ideas on the Internet, after all, take on lives of their own when they are imbued with the perceptions of countless individuals – regardless of how those actions might have actually occurred.
In any case, Rapp has not departed from Nintendo wrathfully.
All we, and every party involved, can do now is to learn from the past and look toward the future.