By Eincrou
The release of multi-platform zombie brawler Dead Island on September 6 has been contentious and controversial. The initial reason for the ire of gamers playing the PC release through the Valve Corporation’s Steam content distribution system were technical problems rendering it nearly unplayable. Players also had the bizarre ability to press the “Y” key, thus allowing them to fly and pass through terrain as if they were the brain-eaters’ incorporeal cousins.
The open PC platform allows for clever and resourceful consumers to investigate, modify, and fix games on their own. Gamers quickly discovered that the release distributed through Steam was in fact an incomplete development build which still had debugging tools enabled. Developer Techland acknowledged this and quickly released a Day 1 patch to remove these tools.
However, fans eager to make the game playable had not waited for the official patch. Dozens of knowledgeable gamers were already scouring the game files to find fixes to the various issues impairing their enjoyment of the game.
One gamer found some surprising code hidden within a file inside an archive named ‘Data0.pak.’ He posted his findings to a thread on Steam’s Dead Island forum, which now now seems to have been deleted. I saw the thread when it was created on September 8, which described where the line of code was. I was able to find it in my own copy of the game by using a source code editor.
A file named “default_player_setup.scr” lists the skills of all four playable characters. Purna, a woman who is a former officer of the Sydney police department, has on line 174: “Skill(“FeministWhorePurna”);”
Gaming site Kotaku was able to receive comments on this line of code from both developer Techland and publisher Deep Silver.
An e-mail from Blazej Krakowiak, Techland’s International Brand Manager, stated, “The line in question was something a programmer considered a private joke. The skill naturally has a completely different in-game name and the script reference was also changed.”
The in-game name of the skill is Gender Wars and it allows Purna to deal additional damage to male zombies. And no — of course neither of the two male characters has an ability allowing them to deal additional damage to female zombies. The vast majority of violent video games have zero females the player can kill. Zombie games are one of the few that do, in keeping with the lore that some magic or virus has indiscriminately transformed the civilian population into undead monsters.
Krakowiak went on to say, “We deeply regret that fact and we apologize to all our customers or anyone who might have been offended by that inappropriate expression.”
It’s not clear who would be offended by a single line of debug code hidden within a file deep inside a compressed archive, but we can be sure of who would be offended by the Gender Wars ability as it appears front-and-center in the game itself. Listen carefully enough and you might be able to hear the wind rustling leaves. As expected, nobody even notices the irony that men should be the ones feeling offense.
Krakowiak ended his email to Kotaku with, “The person responsible for this unfortunate situation will face professional consequences for violating the professional standards and beliefs Techland stands for.”
Apparently Techland’s professional intentions are not only to avoid offending feminists and their sympathizers, but also to pay homage to the mythical “gender war.” Giving the skill this name plays into the fantastical notion that, in pursuit of justice and their rights, women have fought a dangerous war with men in the same manner Purna drives heavy pipes into male zombies’ heads. To the extent that there has been a war between the sexes, a woman felling a zombie in 30% fewer blows doesn’t symbolize or represent the true history at all.
A more appropriate function of the Gender Wars ability would be to have it summon a legion of supplicating white-knights and manginas to fight the zombies as she sits back and watches. Also accurate would be if, upon use, male zombies started fighting among themselves in a vain attempt to remain the last ‘man’ standing and gain Purna’s affection.
Publisher Deep Silver made it clear in their response to Kotaku that: “These unfortunate actions were of one individual… [sic]” The man (while undisclosed, it is safe to say a man is responsible) who wrote this line of code reveals his way of thinking by giving the ability this name.
Most of the other skill names in the file are not the exact titles that appear in-game. Rather, they are descriptive of their functions. This means this programmer was presented with the concept of an ability for a female character allowing her to deal extra damage to male zombies.
His thought process connected the idea of a woman hurting men to feminism; an idea that is strongly suppressed in the mainstream. The addition of “whore” could be in jest, as Krakowiak suggested, but it is also possible is that it was an intentional dissent from the common wisdom that feminism is morally unassailable.
These circumstances are certainly unprofessional from the perspective of the developer, publisher and the man who did the coding. However, this incident highlights how an arguably misandric character skill can pass without notice in a male-dominated hobby, even though it is clearly and directly linked to the object of controversy.
