So by now you’ve heard of the whole Mordhau situation. The Triternion dev at Mordhau have been extremely poor at handling toxic behavior in their games and in their official forums, choosing to allow forums such as “Post your Kniggas” to stay up and running, making this claim that “it’s one of the oldest forums so they didn’t want to take it down” excuse. However that aside, this whole ordeal has revealed a very interesting and somewhat underlining problem that we’re facing today.
The guys at Mordhau had plans to include some new features that will allow players to create females and other races in the game. I couldn’t find a post that implied that they were being forced to do this by a loud minority, so from what I could gather, this may have been a choice of their own. If not, then I’ve already made my stance clear on this in my Historical Accuracy/Authenticity & Narratives Debate In Gaming When It Comes To Diversity – Why Is This Such A Difficult Subject To Grasps For Most People? blog. Read that to get an idea of the mindset I have about all of this.
The Triternion devs at Mordhau made it clear in one of their statements that they already acknowledged that they can’t please everyone and are fully aware that no matter what decision they make, it’s going to piss off some people. My problem with this statement is that it kind off contradicts with their action. They’re not taking a firm stance on anything. This “filter option” to hide the female gender and other races is the most cop out, and plain idiotic idea that I have seen a game dev try to implement into their game in order to please everyone. You don’t get to be a middle man in this case, you either buckle down and stand by your vision in recreating a historically accurate (or as close to it as possible) game that you want or you add the option to let player create who they want and stand by it. It’s that simple.
What I really wanted to discuss today though is the reaction to all of this and how it’s growing into something of a problem. You see, one of the many reasons why I believe the devs at Mordhau won’t crack down on their somewhat toxic community is quite simple, they allegedly know who their demographic are all about. If a Triternion dev can enter into a forum called “Post your Kniggas” and have no problem with that sort of language, it already should shows you what their stances are when it comes to certain types of languages.
Although, it can be said that we don’t know who actually created the forum in the first place. I mean, if the guy was black, are we really going to get mad at everyone for participating in that forum? If he’s white, then that’s a different case. Whoever did make that group used the nigga, instead of nigger so at least their not fucked up like that. They’re cautious of the word they used and are aware that Nigga is a term used for “my guy/bro/friend by a portion of the African American community (believe it or not, not ALL African Americans use nigga in their vocabulary). I won’t get into debate about who can and can’t use the word. Both words in my opinion should have phased out of existence by now but that’s not the world we’re living in now.
It not rocket-science. They don’t want to crack down on it, because they want to create an open area in which people can say whatever they want. And if you complain about it, you’ll just be labeled an SJW and be done with. It’s more of a retaliation and a rebellion to everyone being labeled racist, sexist and whatever else we’ve come up it in the last decade.
Still, the claim of them not wanting to censor their player base is fair and within their rights to do so. It’s their platform, their game, their website. I mean, I hate to admit it but freedom of speech works if you’re in a private section or at home. When people complain that places like Twitter and Facebook are stifling their “freedom of speech”, they don’t seem to realize that these companies are privately owned, and therefore do have the right to remove any talk they don’t like, similarly to how Triternion have created their own platform and have the right to policed it however way they want. Of course, I acknowledge that they’ve taken that privilege to the extremes as of late, but it’s still within their rights.
This is something I learned very recently in my journey to understanding how to protect and practice freedom of speech. My real concern is that this crusade to fight for freedom of speech are being used by certain groups of people with a clear alternative motives. People who want to spread their corrupt ideology behind the curtains of “It’s my God given right!” and it’s something we need to pay even more close attention to it if we don’t want a certain era to come back. I mean look at the Unite the Right rally for exaple. You’re trying to tell me that this rally was held to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue and NOT what they guy stood for? Yeah, really pay attention to what people do, not say. It’s very clear when you look into Mordhau’s forums and steam community that people have hiding behind their false claims of censorship to REALLY voice out their opinion.
All I asked is to keep a close eye on what a person is saying. Let me know what you guys think of this whole ordeal.
