There's something fishy about Mr. Gohan

by Justin Ho

Mr. Gohan is entitled to his opinions, however the manner which he has crafted his editorial has me raising my eyebrow. Mr. Gohan's general attitude towards the roles which violence and females in RPGs distinctly appears to be of a different nature to the general population of video gamers. It would be of some educational value to analyze Mr. Gohan's editorial closely in the manner which he iterates his points and implements them.

The arguments posed by Mr. Gohan and the stances he takes on RPGs seems quite unfounded and even more so outdated. Though the origin of his insight is unknown to us, it is safe to assume that he has intermittent contact with society and that his personal views are not the result of isolation, therefore his radical perceptions cannot be the result of the lack of knowledge of today's social biases and the reasoning behind them--if he owns a playstation, he must own a TV that is indefinitely connected to the "outside world" and thus he must be quite aware of today's social biases (his presence on the internet would also support this).

The choice of Mr. Gohan's topics are clearly of a controversial nature--especially his arguments on the role of females in RPGs and the implications of violence as a result of video-games seems to be off from the points of views of many gamers. Mr. Gohan is clearly leading his readers on. By the responses generated so far, all of them disagree with Mr. Gohan's perspectives. Even most of the counter-arguments posed by these rebuttals were predictable and expected-- Michael Greenhut's comment that "[He] received around one hundred editorial rebuttals to Mr. Gohan...there were so many long, thorough and powerful responses that sometimes it came down to just randomly picking one over the other. [He] also tried to pick the most well-rounded responses in a sea of uniform disagreement to Mr. Gohan, which wasn't easy," perfectly coincides with this point. A person with a good judge of today's biases in society would have easily predicted such a strong rebuttal and I believe that Mr. Gohan is such a person--he withheld his e-mail address from the general public fearing or anticipating a strong response, even though its inclusion is standard practice with the submission of an editorial. Michael Greenhut's comment that "Several people have requested Mr. Gohan's e-mail address, and by request [he] can't give it out," also supports this point. In addition, as a side note "Gohan" means rice in Japanese and it is not a common last name-- I have checked the Metro Vancouver White Pages Directory (which has over several million names catalogued) in search of any person with the last name "Gohan" and I have found none and I encourage others to check their directory listing to verify this. This leads me to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that that "Stephan Gohan" is an alias and not a name. I do not believe that any person with an intelligent mind would place their real name on an editorial of this caliber and the usage of an alias would be the safe thing to do. Mr. Gohan is an educated and intelligent person, thus pleading ignorance to the content of his editorial cannot be an excuse for him, which leads me to draw the conclusion that the creation of this editorial was deliberate as I will discuss next.

Mr. Gohan's hidden identity and knowledge of today's social biases is an enigma-- with Mr. Gohan's understanding of today's society to this degree, I find it hard to believe that a person this level of intellect would go out and publish such a controversial editorial-- it appears that there is a hidden motive behind this editorial. Analyzing the diction and support utilized in Mr. Gohan's editorial, is it clear that he is not encouraging an objective discussion, but rather he is encouraging an emotional and strong response to his editorial. Phrases used in Mr. Gohan's editorial such as "sad truth," "sloth-like plot freaks," "a sick joke created by selfish atheists," all paint a very biased portrait of RPGs without providing support behind making these statements. Even Mr. Gohan's statistical comment that "...not any less than 40% agreeing with me on this...Realism is evil" is unfounded-- he doesn't support his claim with the source of his data. In addition Mr. Gohan's claim that "[he] stud[ies] advertising and its effects on the mind," is unsupported, it is also hard to believe that he is an expert on advertising in context to his editorial. The derogatory phrases that he uses and the excessive usage of capital letters and the supporting points he provides for many of his arguments are inappropriate as they do nothing to support any arguments posed, but they instill a repulsive resentment by the reader against his editorial. To top this off, Mr. Gohan dares the reader to respond with his concluding comment "And for those of you against me, I dare you to even try and rebut every single one of my points. It may seem easy, but in the end I doubt you'll get far." It is clear that Mr. Gohan is invoking strong emotions of resentment towards his editorial as Morboriel Parthenos, the author of the rebuttal entitled "Some Thoughts from a Female Gamer," stated that she was "incredibly, deeply saddened I was to read such unbelievably sexist, bigoted remarks." Mr. Gohan, apparently, did a good job of instilling strong a response to his editorial.

In short, my analysis of Mr. Gohan's intelligence, "social sense," his arguments without proper evidence or support and the strong and biased manner that he presents his editorial is very suspicious. Thus it leads me to believe that this editorial was engineered in a manner to entice people to respond to it. However, the ends that this editorial is trying to reach is unknown and completely up to speculation. I hypothesize that it could do with the recent connection that the media has made between video-games and violence. The responses generated by this editorial may well be the proof that the level of awareness and the intelligence of video-gamers is at a sufficient level that video-games are not influencing people to cause violence in today's society. However, this is only speculation and a tangent to the argument-- what is Mr. Gohan up to?

Original Editorial: Why RPGs Should be Severely Censored and Devoid of Character Development