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.
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.