This week sees the launch of Nintendo’s brand-new videogame console the Switch 2, which should be a moment of celebration for gaming-fans, but has instead caused much controversy. The chief complaints so far are about the absurdly high price of some of the new games (£75 for Mario Kart World) and the fact that, bizarrely, some of the game-cards don’t have any actual games on them, thus enraging fans who like to own physical copies of their games. Another worry for gamers of late, though, is that Nintendo might be about to go woke.

Last month the President of Nintendo of America, the amusingly named Doug Bowser (King Bowser being the arch-enemy of Super Mario in the long-running Nintendo platform-game series) gave an interview to a Brazilian newspaper, extolling the supposed many virtues of diversity in the face of President Trump’s continued rhetorical assault on corporate DEI schemes across America. As Nintendo prepared to launch its Switch 2 worldwide, a cry went up from certain DEI-sceptical gamers to their favourite company: please, Nintendon’t go woke too!

Console Gaming Is Not PC Gaming

Fortunately, Nintendo realises any such political path would be likely commercial suicide. There have been a number of high-profile cases of excessively politically correct, high-budget, Western videogames flopping recently, and Nintendo’s home-country of Japan is not anywhere as badly infected with the woke mind virus as the West is, meaning the company’s corporate overlords sensibly steer away from flooding their games with pro-Leftist propaganda in most instances.

The words of Nintendo’s Western upper-management class like Doug Bowser are basically for show: polite, meaningless words to satisfy the more Left-wing members of their customer-base and staff. Nintendo’s US wing does have crappy DEI-related pages on its website, promising it is an equal opportunities employers for gays, women and blacks, but, such is the compulsory nature of modern-day equalities laws, so today is the BNP, I suppose.

Yet these facts have not prevented various activist pseudo-journalists in the progressive media from desperately claiming otherwise, simply because they want Nintendo going Lefty to be true. I used to write for a normal, wholly apolitical gaming website myself, but such outlets are rare indeed these days, with the post-2010s gaming press being notoriously Left-wing in its output.

You may think videogames unimportant trivia, but they are the biggest media entertainment business in the world, and thus ripe for transformation into propaganda aimed at the young. If Nintendo could be made to appear to have turned woke, just like Disney, this would represent a significant prize for the Left.

Tenuous Links

For example, the Business Section of the ITN website each week runs a ‘Good News’ section about the best ‘feel-good’ news from the corporate world, which in 2024 ran the following oh-so-delighted paragraph:

The video game giant Nintendo this week announced that it is looking to appoint three more women to its board of directors. The company was founded in 1889 [as a producer of playing cards], but it wasn’t until 2020 that the company appointed its first female board member. If approved, the appointments of Eiko Osawa, Keiko Akashi and Miyoko Demay will take effect from June 26th. Although the gaming industry has historically been male-dominated, Nintendo has made significant strides in promoting gender diversity, with high-profile women at Nintendo including Aya Kyogoku, the Director of Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and Eiji Aonuma, the producer of the Zelda series.

Except this isn’t quite true. Anyone who actually knows anything about videogames will know full well that Eiji Aonuma, a very famous developer, is in fact an adult human male. Was the ITN hack ill-informed here, or just lying?

Ideologically invested journalists are bad enough at making out Nintendo is woke when it isn’t, but some of the company’s online fanbase is even worse, particularly the queer element of it: see my previous pieces here and here for some particularly egregious examples, including a mad New York schoolteacher who told her class that Super Mario’s green cartoon dinosaur chum Yoshi was somehow not a dinosaur at all but a “trans man” who had just undergone breast-removal surgery, whilst Mario’s habitual damsel-in-distress Princess Peach was “a massive cis lesbian”.

Eiji Aonuma himself (or herself, in ITN’s erroneous opinion) would be equally surprised to hear that Link, the sword-wielding elfin Hero of Time in the Nintendo franchise Aonuma is most associated with, The Legend of Zelda, is a “non-binary, trans icon”, despite being every bit as biologically male as Aonuma himself is, in every single game Link has starred in since the very first one on the 8-bit NES/Famicom console back in 1986.

As Link is an elf, he does admittedly look a little bit fey and feminine, which has led some trans-obsessive gamers to label him as an ‘egg-cracker’ – a queer term for someone or something which allows them to ‘crack open’ the ‘egg’ of their true inner selves and reveal them as being the opposite of their ‘incorrectly assigned’ birth-sex. Hence, Link is a genderqueer. This must be true, even US national public service broadcaster PBS (their rough BBC equivalent) has said so, when reporting on the launch of the latest Zelda title back in 2023.

Tingle Tangle

Supposedly, say queer fans, Eiji Aonuma himself has confirmed Link is trans – except, of course, he really hasn’t. It is just that, as the franchise has both male and female players, Aonuma didn’t want to put off the latter by making him an excessively muscly figure like Conan the Barbarian: 

I wanted Link to be gender-neutral. I wanted the player to think, ‘Maybe Link is a boy or a girl.’ If you saw Link as a guy, he’d have more of a feminine touch; or vice versa, if you related to Link as a girl, it was with more of a masculine aspect.

But that definitely didn’t mean Link was literally a transsexual, Aonuma explained, it was a purely commercial decision to extend the number of potential players:

As far as gender goes, Link is definitely a male, but I wanted to create a character where anybody would be able to relate to the character. So, that’s why I think the rumour went around that Link could be a female because maybe the users were able to relate in that way.

Likewise, another frequently-seen elf-character in the Zelda series, a green-clad midget named Tingle, is often acclaimed by the online queer-crowd as being Nintendo’s “gayest character”, primarily because he prances around the magical Kingdom of Hyrule looking and acting like this:

But, just as certain highly camp gentlemen like Frank Spencer are actually married to full-blown biological females with names like Betty, so Tingle too is actually straight as the blade of the Master Sword. “He’s not gay. He’s just an odd person,” Aonuma has clarified about the fat little fairy. Not as odd as some of his more deluded online fans are.

Writing In Code

This whole trend is little more than a gigantic exercise in solipsistic self-projection of some people’s own twisted sense of sexual inner self out onto wholly unrelated things like videogames, in an attempt to selfishly ruin them for the normal masses, just like the pink radical Russell T. Davies has done to Doctor Who on TV. Thankfully, unlike the more woke-worshipping BBC, Nintendo has yet to hand over the reins of its biggest franchises to militant queer activists like Davies… or has it? 

Many ostensibly ideologically neutral games which appear on Nintendo’s modern consoles may sadly contain an unavoidable element of wokeness within their very nature of being. High-end titles today cost many millions to create, so developers often cut costs and time by making use of generic licensed ‘world-building’ development-software, like the various iterations of Unreal Engine, made by Epic Games, which allows coders to create the in-game physics, lighting and suchlike for their titles more easily and efficiently than by coding them up from scratch.

As you would expect, access to the latest versions of Unreal Engine is to be made available for use by developers of Switch 2 games too: 

Unfortunately, the creators of the aptly-named Unreal Engine appear to be rather woke themselves. When the latest version of the software launched in 2022, they provided guidance for game-makers about “Inclusive Word Choice” to use when stringing together lines of code: “When you work in the Unreal Engine codebase, strive at all times to be respectful, inclusive and professional in your use of language.”

Unreal Demands

And what kind of “inclusive language” did coders now need to adopt when programming their games? Language like the following:

Racial, ethnic and religious inclusiveness

• Do not use metaphors or similes that reinforce stereotypes. This includes those that contrast black and white, such as blacklist/whitelist.
• Do not use words that refer to historical trauma or lived experience of discrimination. This includes slave, master and nuke.

Overloaded Words

• Many terms that we use for their technical meanings also have other uses outside of technology. For example: abort, execute or native. When you use words like these, always be precise and examine the context in which they appear.

Its Dictionaries of Newspeak on hand, Epic Fail provided coders with lists of alternative, less ‘offensive’ vocabulary to make use of:

Word List

The following list identifies some terminology that we have used in the Unreal codebase in the past, but that we believe should be replaced with better alternatives.

Blacklist

Alternatives: deny list, block list, exclude list, avoid list, unapproved list, forbidden list, permission list

Whitelist

Alternatives: allow list, include list, trust list, safe list, prefer list, approved list, permission list

Master

Alternatives: primary, source, controller, template, reference, main, leader, original, base

Slave

Alternatives: secondary, replica, agent, follower, worker, cluster node, locked, linked, synchronised

As per usual with such ‘guidance’, it turned out to in fact be seemingly compulsory: “Following the coding standards is mandatory,” the ‘guidance’ document says, thus revealing itself to not be mere ‘guidance’ at all, but a document of enforced ideological fealty.

Even if you were an avowedly anti-woke videogame company, who pumped out nothing but games about sinking migrant boats, if you wanted to program them using Unreal Engine – and if you’re a smaller company on a budget, you may have little other realistic financial choice – then you would be forced by Epic’s rules into unwilling ideological compliance with an ideology you do not agree with as a simple condition of continuing to do business.

Or at least this is how the matter was presented at the time; some sceptical commentators say the restrictions only apply to Epic Games coders themselves, and the company has no technical means of enforcing any of this on their outside customers, having no legal means of accessing their actual code-bases. Not being a coder myself, I simply don’t know: but, once again, the ‘guidance’ document does specifically say such language is “mandatory”, so Epic does at least appear to aspire to restrict users’ language like this. 

How many of us who work with computers are pushed into similar states of complicity with such demands every day, without ever knowing it? For all I know, the underlying code running even the Daily Sceptic website might operate under similar politically restrictive linguistic criteria too!

One of the specific conditions of writing Unreal Engine code is directly related to transgender ideology, in terms of the ever-contentious topic of pronouns:

Gender inclusiveness

• Refer to hypothetical people using the pronouns they, them, and their, even in the singular.
• When you refer to anything that is not a person, always use it and its. For example: a module, plugin, function, client, server, or any other software or hardware component.

Do not assign a gender to anything that doesn’t have one.

• Do not use collective nouns like guys that assume gender.
• Avoid colloquial phrases that contain arbitrary genders, like ‘a poor man‘s X’.

As even the world’s biggest and most profitable gaming company Nintendo is sometimes driven to make use of Unreal Engine when publishing its own games, it is not impossible, I suppose, that one day Link will be forced to become cross-gender in terms of his underlying base-level programming whether Eiji Aonuma wants him to be or not, then?

Perhaps Epic will mandate that Nintendo’s next future console shall have to be called the Nintendo Gender-Switch.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.