I think most of us can agree that punching Nazis is a good thing. Hell, a lot of great video games are based on that same premise. That’s why it was strange when a State of Decay 2 The player found that the game gives the characters a negative effect for having removed the trash in their pre-apocalypse life.
At the State of Decay 2, the open-world zombie game launched by Undead Labs and Microsoft Studios in 2018, each survivor you recruit comes equipped with random features that reflect what they did before the outbreak and the effects that these lived experiences have on your personality. Survivors may, for example, have “Fear of Rats”, which makes them professional in pest control, providing a bonus for their maximum food storage.
Steam Marines 2 developer Yik-Sian James Seow took State of Decay 2 on sale in January, and quickly assemble a long conversation on Twitter about his time with the game. But last week, he noticed something strange: one of his survivors appeared to be getting a negative personality effect from the “Drilled Nazis” trait. Under the flavor text, the game explained that expelling skinheads from a local show in a previous life indicated that the character was generally “irritable with other people” rather than, you know, just doing the right thing in that setting.
“This would be a very bad way of discovering the State of Decay 2 developers are cool with the Nazis, ”Seow wrote, starting a multi-day tweet spree by asking Undead Labs and Microsoft Studios about the feature. He was eventually blocked by the officer State of decay account, that the studio now says was caused by a false positive in your “social listening software” after the flood of harassment you received after offering public support for Black History Month.
At the subsequent tweets shared yesterday, Undead Labs explained that the “drilled Nazis” trait was never meant to be presented in a totally negative light, as it also gives survivors a greater fighting experience and makes them “more likely to argue passionately for their beliefs” that was accidentally changed with the addition of new game mechanics.
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“When the moral system arrived, it simplified our original concept of nuances of ‘characters arguing for their beliefs’ into a basic negative moral effect, representing discord in the community,” wrote Undead Labs. “So today, that trait has a positive skill bonus and red text on the UI due to the likelihood of discussion. It has been like this for years and we never realized how confusing it looks until tonight (it’s not common, and we have over 1300 features). “
Undead Labs plans to rectify this problem in a future hotfix, removing the negative effect currently associated with the “Punched Nazis” trait, turning it into a positive personality indicator that it should always be. The survivors will still have a boost in their fighting experience, but they will rightly not be seen as a hindrance by the community for having faced white supremacists.
As is usually the case in these situations, Seow himself was on the other side of a hate campaign by players who prefer to defend the rights of the Nazis than look at the hatred that has been allowed to foment in their communities and root it out for a long time. Establishing a safe and welcoming society requires us to be intolerant of intolerance, and if you can’t even do that in a video game, well, don’t let the door slam in your ass when you leave.