BBC’s Watchdog program has recently featured Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training for DS, as it has come under fire from certain English Northerners as “discriminating.” The game’s voice recognition apparently can’t understand what Northern people are saying, probably because of all the Lancashire hotpot and traditional ale they’ve stuffed in their mouths beforehand.
Manchester radio presenter Michelle Livesey was on the show to complain about the game, which she got for Christmas. “Basically you have to say the different colors that flash up on the screen as quickly as possible,” she explained. “I’m saying, blue, blue, blue and it’s saying no, even though it was blue. Then it got to yellow. I’m going, ‘yeller’ and everyone’s saying to me you need to be a bit posher. You need to say, ‘yellow’ and as soon as I did, it picked it up.”
Presenter Nicky Campbell went on record as saying that the game “clearly discriminated” against Northern as well as Scottish people because it doesn’t understand their accents. Fact of the matter is though, I’ll be buggered if I can understand Northern and Scottish accents half the time, let alone a machine that’s programmed to understand words that are PROPERLY pronounced. At the risk of being offensive, I think that a word spelled and properly spoken in a certain way should not have to account for people who can’t (read: won’t) say the word right. It’s “yellow,” not “yeller,” and there’s also nothing in the game about people saying “eh up duck, gimme some chuckie egg down t’Rover’s Return.”
The game’s manual, as pointed out by Nintendo, clearly states that you should pronounce words carefully and avoid using strong accents. A videogame cannot feasibly account for every single weird pronunciation of every single word. Due to the small number of complaints Nintendo has actually had about this case, it seems that most people can swallow the hotpot before they speak, but for the small group who can’t, go get some diction lessons before you cry and moan about discrimination. It’s not like we can understand your complaints anyway.
