Modern Warfare has an issue with players using racist usernames. For anyone who has ever played a multiplayer game, it may be no big surprise a massive influx of users using racial slurs as their moniker has occurred in the last week. Although this has been a problem in Modern Warfare since launch, the protests brought on by the murder of George Floyd have brought things to a head.
Thankfully, Infinity Ward has finally decided to address the problem with racist usernames directly. In a tweet, the studio stated:
— Infinity Ward (@InfinityWard) June 3, 2020
“There is no place for racist content in our game. This is an effort we began with launch, and we need to do a better job. We’re issuing thousands of daily bans of racist and hate-oriented names. But we know we have to do more — and we are:
- Adding additional resource to monitor and ID racist content
- Adding additional in-game reporting systems to increase the number of bans by hour
- Adding filters and greater restrictions on name changes
- Evaluating in-game improvements to make it easier to report offenses
- Increasing permanent bans to root out repeat offenders
We apologize to our players. This is our commitment to you, our fans, thank you.”
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Of course, this decision didn’t come in a vacuum. A thread was started yesterday in the Modern Warfare subreddit concerning racist names that garnered over 1,700 comments and 13,000 upvotes. Though that discussion represents a small portion of Modern Warfare‘s player base, it shows the issue is prevalent enough for a large group to speak out against it.
Of course, the large amount of players using racist names in Call of Duty is just one part of a continuing issue in gaming. A not-insignificant amount of people are going out of their way to register accounts just to get a rise out of people. Trolling has been a prolific issue in gaming since I first played a game online over two decades ago. The question is, with games like Modern Warfare having gargantuan player counts and limited moderating staff, have things gone out of control?
