Geek Culture
Logan Paul’s Suicide Forest Video Paints American Tourists as Jackasses
The famous YouTube vlogger Logan Paul (I honestly never heard of him before now) recently made headlines for posting a video where he reacts to finding a dead body in the Aokigahara forest, a forest at the base of Mount Fuji that has earned the nickname “the suicide forest.” Paul’s actions may have tarnished Japanese/American relations.
For a bit of context, Logan Paul visited (and as far as I can tell, is still visiting) Japan shortly before the end of 2017 and created a series of vlogs doing whatever the heck he wants. Play fighting with a friend in the middle of a busy street? Yep. Dressing up in a kimono and bamboo hat while dancing and acting like a racist caricature? Yep again. Hitching rides (without permission) on trucks and making a fool of himself at Shinto shrines? Yep. Basically, Paul does everything in his power to come across as a clown and, for lack of a better term, a jerk. But, then he decided to record his jaunt into Aokigahara forest, at which point he found a dead body and recorded his reactions. There’s being culturally tone deaf, and then there’s being cruel and insensitive. Paul’s video is both.
While Paul’s original video has been taken down, JhbTeam was kind enough to post a recap of the video, which is full of Paul smiling and treating the whole situation as a joke.
https://twitter.com/JhbTeam/status/948003235310157824
Paul’s reactions are reminiscent of PewDiePie, except instead of intentionally overreacting to a video game where everything is fake and nobody can get hurt, Paul laughs at a real hanging corpse. As you might imagine, the Internet’s reaction was swift and unsympathetic. Many called him out on his insensitive behavior, including famed YouTuber Michael Sundman, aka. Gaijin Goombah.
For those of you who don’t know, Michael Sundman has spent the past several years as a member of the YouTube channel The Game Theorists alongside channel founder Matthew Patrick/MatPat. Sundman specializes in breaking down allusions and references to various cultures in video games, especially Japanese culture, not because he is a “weeaboo,” but because he spent several years as an English teacher in Japan. During his time there, Sundman learned about and gained a lot of respect for Japanese culture, especially cultural norms, one of which is privacy. The Japanese take privacy far more seriously than even American citizens. In his video, Sundman mentions anecdotal experiences where he wasn’t allowed to record himself playing Japanese arcade games due to Japanese privacy laws and how a friend who took a picture of the famous Shibuya Crossing that just so happened to include a man cheating on his wife was sued. And lost. If a photograph that is innocuous to Americans elicits the desire to pursue legal action, it doesn’t take much to imagine how poorly the Japanese public will react to a video of people essentially laughing at someone who committed suicide.
While Logan Paul has released an apology for his actions, the damage has already been done. Apparently he was treading on thin ice before the Aokigahara forest video, but his actions in the forest are beyond disrespectful in any culture. The six-million plus views only make the situation worse, as they will no doubt color how the Japanese view Americans. Sundman postfaces his video with a statement that Logan stands a good chance of being banned from Japan, which seems like a very likely possibility.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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