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https://www.patreon.com/posts/everything-once-73616074The Kamiya of It All
Shortly after the videos, Kamiya posted his tweet, and began blocking people left and right that replied and quote-retweeted to dunk on him. This resulted in a lot of people pushing even harder to attack him for what Taylor named and shamed him for: mistreating workers as a financial fatcat and as a Twitter asshole. Eventually, Twitter locked his account because the sheer amount of replies and blocking convinced the algorithm he must have been hacked.
I’ve been following Kamiya on Twitter for a long time. As a director, he made a lot of games I like a lot, like Devil May Cry, Resident Evil 2, Okami, and Bayonetta. Early on, he would respond to every single person that tweeted at him with a question. He liked using it to practice his english, he said. The account was mostly questions about Resident Evil 1.5, what kind of ice cream Bayonetta likes, and him showing off retro games and his modest little apartment.
Around 2012, a years-long wave of harassment from console warriors started bubbling up. It was mostly over Bayonetta 2, but a surprising amount also came from talking about other video games. He said he wanted to make Star Fox, which lead to constant tagging of him every time fans begged for a new game. He posted that he thinks God of War should influence Devil May Cry 5, which lead to people calling him a race traitor, a washed-up hack, and a bald fuck.
In 2019, I saw Kamiya lounging on a couch in a back room at GDC, and I sat down and talked to him. PR did not want it to be an on-the-record interview, so we just chatted a bit with a mutual friend acting as a translator. I asked Kamiya about his Twitter account and if he disliked interacting with the trolls so much, why doesn’t he just delete Twitter for his mental health.
“Because then they’d win,” he told me.
The actual man is polite and meek, a far cry from his Twitter persona. He just wants to talk about Japanese sentai heroes and TG-16 games. But years of harassment have clearly made him combat-ready whenever he logs on to Twitter. Which, honestly, I get. At some point — and that point is probably over 10,000 followers — Twitter can become a genuinely hostile place.
It’s very hard to express to people how it feels to wake up to Tweets from people you have never met but who genuinely, truly believe that they hate you with every fiber of their being. You don’t know what it’s like to post engagement pictures and see people making fun of your fiancee’s teeth on one of the happiest days of your lives together. Most people live under the radar and while I’m not saying every aspect of having a large following is bad, the considerations of what it does to your mental health absolutely have to be acknowledged.
When the Taylor situation broke, so did Kamiya, to an extent. He has “rules” about tweeting at him in english as he says that’s where most of the harassment comes from, but he’s always still answered questions in english. This time, though, he put up every shield he had, including aggressive ones. And that just made people angrier with him.
Which, again, if I were getting tweets like this, I’d go on a rampage, too.
There's a relatively famous picture of a teenage Kamiya posing next to his mother. A Resetera user posted this picture in the thread about Taylor's accusations, stating that it was no wonder that Kamiya's mother ran away when he was younger.
A lot of people felt justified at the time how they interacted or viewed Kamiya’s flameout on Twitter. As someone that has met him, I was kind of upset by it. Maybe he should have just shut up and let PlatinumGames handle it with a statement rather than letting it explode on him, but the glee in which I saw people root for the explosion gave me pause.
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One thing I haven’t talked about is the social sleuthing that went on combing through Taylor’s social media accounts after all this blew up. People found that she was following a lot of problematic people on Twitter including the Trump family, had a difficult time showing support for trans rights and not actually doing it, and really seemed to buy into Blue Lives Matter rhetoric. The reason I’m not talking about that is I don’t think it factors into the labor discussion.
What it does factor into is that I think she probably sucks. It factors into the idea that the same people who sell MAGA-labeled gold bills to idiots also realize those skills work on emotional pleas to an audience that is expecting outrage. So she can fuck off all the way into space for that stuff.
