This show was recommended to me recently and though I’ve not been obsessed with it, it’s been watchable. Just got to episode 3 and long story short they run an MMO company and it’s come to their attention that there are a bunch of nazis who play their game. The episode culminated in them making a private server just for the nazis. This is a widely agreed upon solution and it does not seem solely motivated by “evil money man”. I thought maybe I had missed some nuance so I looked it up and there’s an article (linked below) where the writers of the show seemingly pat themselves on the back for coming up with such a fair and balanced solution.
Am I missing something here? Have I gone too woke? The community is still filled with nazis who will likely still be engaging in online and offline activities related to the game. You as a company have seemingly no desire to distance yourself from that kind of community? The issue with nazis is not just that they’re mean to people in your video game and giving them their own private Nazi clubhouse does not seem like the solution. There’s that popular story about how a bar will slowly become a Nazi bar and I just don’t know why that’s not a concern for the writers of the show or the team in universe. This is not an always sunny type show where the people are supposed to be bad or incompetent and the whole episode rubbed me the wrong way. Has anyone seen the show? When I looked at other discussions online people were actively saying this was their favorite episode?
Article with the commentary: https://decider.com/2020/02/12/mythic-quest-dinner-party/
McElhenney joked that he thinks his server-banning plan may be able to work in real life. “You know what? That’s what we gotta do. Let’s get Zuckerberg on the phone!”
So I think the primary thing this episode is referencing is the idea that for some online games the solution to cheaters is to put them all together.
I think Titanfall back in 2014 was the first game to do this,
Isolating the Nazis is a good first step. If they’re isolated they can’t spread hatred, although it probably does create an echo chamber which isn’t great. I don’t think the show explores the idea that of course these players would eventually figure out they’ve been isolated. It’s one thing when you’re playing a 10 minute shooter, it’s another when you’re playing an MMO. Eventually they’re going to figure it out.
But let’s say we do have a server full of Nazis and they are stuck playing with each other. That’s the Nazi bar scenario. If you’re the bartender, do you really want to run a Nazi bar? No, not really.
It’s a good temporary solution, but ultimately you’d want to ban and remove them from your game and community at large.
Interesting parallel with the cheaters. Based on author commentary it really did seem like they wanted to talk about free speech and hate groups, but I can see how they drew inspiration from that.
I haven’t watched past the episode I referenced, but I wonder if they will encounter a cheating issue later and how they might deal with that. Thanks for the insight!