say 'oh it is brilliant'. Then Gears of War comes out and apparently it's the worst written narrative in a game ever. I'll take Gears of War over Bayonetta any time. It's patronising to say, "oh those Japanese stories, they don't really mean what they're doing". You feel there isn't a fair universal standard? I just think the simple question should be; is the story any good? These questions and answers indicate that Hutchinson feels that there exists a global universal standard for good storytelling, poseable in the form of "a simple question" that applies to all cultural products. He also implies that Japanese developers are not particularly good at achieving that standard, and that game journalists exhibit a "subtle racism" for not evaluating the Japanese games' stories under the same rubric that they would evaluate the story of a Western game. I would argue that it is not the games press in aggregate that is advancing the racist notion here, but Hutchinson himself: that it is indeed racist, and somewhat tragically imperialistic, to assume that one's Western tradition (Hutchinson possesses a master's degree in "English / Writing", according to his LinkedIn profile) can universally answer the question he poses: "Is the story any good?" His answer appears to exhibit ignorance of the existence of non-Western storytelling -- a tradition of literature that emphasizes very different qualities than the kind one might be exposed to in, say, a Los Angeles screenwriting workshop. To talk in this manner is to express