I grew up with three parents: Mom, Dad, and Nintendo.
My mother and father were great—kept me out of trouble, let me earn trust, and gave me some slack on the leash.
Nintendo, on the other hand, has always been the stereotypical helicopter parent.
And still is.
When I moved out of my Mom and Dad’s house, I took my Nintendo games with me. Along with them, I brought some overbearing restrictions along for the ride.
I got my own place to live, my own car to ride, and my own job to cover my bills. That’s what we call “adulting.” Unfortunately, I still feel like a kid when I try to play online and use the limited internet services built into Nintendo systems.
This company from Japan thinks it’s their job to raise me. It’s not, and it never was.
If Nintendo wants to provide a parental control app—great. The one for Switch has some neat features. That needs to be the end of their responsibilities, so parents can do the rest.
It would sure be nice to talk to my friends… or even my competitors if I want to!
Scott
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This is always going to be a problem for Nintendo. It is one of the problems that arises when you spent your last two console generations as being the “Family Friendly” system with games like Wii Sports and Nintendo Land. I’m actually still surprised some M-rated games like The Binding of Isaac and Doom are on the Switch.
But for a long time, Nintendo’s bread and butter were families and marketing to children. That is why that even during the lean Wii U years, it still had a respectible showing during the holiday season because of the Moms and Dads buying “Nintendo” for their children. They are petrified of some kind of controversy that taints that reputation because if a scandal occured and scared away Mom, there would go their business. Remember how quickly they dropped the sending messages in the Swapnote app on the 3DS when it was revealed that some guy in Japan was using it to send dirty pics and messages to randoms? Nintendo in the middle of a bad controversy would hit harder because it’s the company of Mario and Pikachu, as opposed to a Sony or a Microsoft.
With the Switch, they seem to be marketing more towards teens and young adults, and I hope that opens the door to them stepping into the 20th Century as far as their online networking. That would mean dropping stupid friend codes of the 3DS and Switch, and allowing for real chat in gaming without some dumb app that is not user friendly. But since there was a lot of uncertainty about how the Switch would do, I wonder if some of these would even be possible since it seems like it was made during the time in which they wanted to be safe for kids.
This does not bode well when it comes to games when compared to the PS4 and Xbox One crowd because the Switch version will always be gimped in the communications area to stay safe for families. It definitely should be the parent’s responsibility to partent their kids, but as we all know, what should be the norm is not, and some angry soccer mom could cause a lot of problems for a family friendly company.
I’m hoping that Nintendo can fix some things because you can tell the Switch was launched with that old thinking of protecting the kids. There isn’t even a way to send a message to a friend online, which is a step back from even the Wii U. But that is one of the things as Nintendo fans I think we will always have to deal with on some level. I’m used to it because I remember the censored port of Mortal Kombat from the SNES days, but, as much as I love Nintendo, its one area that I will always wish was playing out differently than it does.