A spirit monkey that is very hairy and gets engulfed in rage

February 1, 2018 5:23 PM

In 2017, a US board game studio launched a crowdfunding campaign for a game named Rising Sun, set in feudal Japan and involving battles between mythological monsters. The campaign was successful, unlocking numerous stretch goals in the form of exclusive monsters. One of those, which made it into the game, was the Kōtahi, a fearsome monkeylike demon. Only after the game went out, a Japanese user noticed that there is no such creature in Japanese folklore. It turned out that “Kōtahi” was not actually Japanese, but instead Maori, and was the name of a guy in New Zealand, a friend of whose edited the Wikipedia list of legendary creatures from Japan as a joke, defining his friend as “a Manawa Bradford, a spirit monkey that is very hairy and gets engulfed in rage”.
posted by acb (19 comments total)

Research: it’s not just Wikipedia, guys.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:26 PM on February 1, 2018 [9 favorites]

oh man I love it when shit like this happens
posted by GuyZero at 5:44 PM on February 1, 2018 [9 favorites]

I suspect Grendel was the name of a drinking buddy of some tenth-century poet. And Grendel's mom was mean.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:07 PM on February 1, 2018 [8 favorites]

When you pledge a Kickstarter campaign you are hoping to get a rare piece of gold, but this story exceeded my expectations.
posted by meinvt at 8:44 PM on February 1, 2018

UPDATE: 1/25/18 CMON commented back to me: “We have been in contact with Kotahi, and him and his friend will be receiving copies of the game, including the Kickstarter extras to ensure they get the Kotahi miniature.”

Good on CMON.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:49 PM on February 1, 2018 [9 favorites]

Okay but I still believe in Kwyjibo
posted by Monochrome at 10:04 PM on February 1, 2018 [8 favorites]

I guess you can forgive them for falling for given there are macrons in both Japanese and Māori romanizations.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 10:56 PM on February 1, 2018

That list of Wikipedia hoaxes is hilarious.
posted by rhizome at 1:06 AM on February 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Has anyone ever managed to smuggle a fake hoax into the "list of Wikipedia hoaxes" wikipedia page?

Equiring minds want to know.
posted by cstross at 2:07 AM on February 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

The Wikipedia hoax list is great. Most of them I can kind of see where someone might make up the page, but some of them are unfathomable. Like who would be making a bar bet on the president of the world bank between 1980-1985?
posted by Literaryhero at 3:19 AM on February 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

So, once upon a time, when the world was young and green and the gods had just sent the young Wikipedia to walk among the children of men, I created a page - still my one and only - for the parish I grew up in. These days, such things have a reasonably standard format and everywhere has one, but mine was one of the first and it's been fun to see it grow and shrink and become one of thousands of its peers.

One day a handful of years ago, my parents rang me up and said 'It's very odd, but there's this 19th century vicar mentioned in the parish Wikipedia page, but nobody knows anything about him'. And indeed, there was a story about a colourful cleric, a friend of Lord Byron (who visited him from time to time), fiery sermonizer and general eccentric intellectual. Not the sort to escape local lore, let alone with a connection to such a well-explored subject as Byron.

So, I did a bit of research and built a decent case for the edits page that this guy was entirely fictional, not in the Crockford's of the time, not on the church 'past vicars' board (which goes back to around the 13th c) , whose surname doesn't seem to exist, etc, and told my parents. "Who do we see about getting the entry edited?" they asked. "You do it yourself," I said, seeing this as a chance to spread the word. "Oh, we couldn't do that. It's Wikipedia!" - and I couldn't convince them otherwise.

I had to do it. It was a bit of a shame, it was an inventive, amusing and well-constructed hoax and it seemed a pity to delete it but I comforted myself with the knowledge that it would still exit in the purgatory of the edits page. (Of course, the edit argument I was expecting never happened, whoever perpetrated the thing was happy to just see it recognised.) I subsequently learned that the non-existent vicar had been widely discussed in the parish and while everyone thought it probably wasn't true, significant doubt existed 'because it's Wikipedia' and nobody felt 'allowed' to do anything about it. Because I was a journalist and computer whiz, apparently, I could.

So I'm pretty convinced that this is how gods come into existence anyway. Not enough journalists.
posted by Devonian at 4:52 AM on February 2, 2018 [27 favorites]

See also (er... listen also?) the recent episode of Important if True where they discuss how a minor bit of wiki vandalism led major movie websites to helpfully let you know that the 2005 bomb "House of Wax" also has the alternate title "Wax House, Baby!"
posted by backseatpilot at 5:46 AM on February 2, 2018

Now I'm starting to wonder if FUCKYOUBRIAN is a Japanese monster, either.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:21 AM on February 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

This is also the game with an extremely questionable map of Japan.

I don't know, seems like if you're setting your game in a culture you're not familiar with you should do slightly more research than Wikipedia. I don't think this is like offensive or anything, but it's certainly lazy.
posted by thefoxgod at 1:51 PM on February 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

I use Wikipedia to find interesting names and do light basic research, but if I were looking into something integral to a project of mine I'd uh, at least buy a book or something?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:26 PM on February 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm reminded of the metafilter discussion a couple of years ago about a wikipedia entry for a magic show, that may or may not have run on the AFN in Japan in the 60s. We really could not determine if it was a very elaborate hoax, a real show someone had started uploading stuff for, or something in between.
posted by tavella at 3:02 PM on February 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Aha, found it. Magic Mansion.
posted by tavella at 3:08 PM on February 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I once had a problem while writing a smart phone app, serializing data via SMS to an overseas server... The unique IMEI number for the phone was being rejected as the wrong length.
I emailed them, citing multiple sources - including the GSM consortium that originally wrote the spec - to prove I was sending the correct data. They came back with a link to a Wikipedia page which, upon inspection, was wrong.

So, I clicked "edit" and corrected the error, then emailed back to point out that even their link agreed with me. They were perplexed, fixed the software at their end, and all was good.
posted by CynicalKnight at 11:22 AM on February 3, 2018 [11 favorites]

Does the game include a giant enemy crab?
posted by euphorb at 11:56 AM on February 3, 2018