I want to take a moment to talk about the THQ Nordic situation. Or more specifically, the response to this situation. Or, even more specifically, the lack of a response to this situation.
I'm not going to go too into what the THQ Nordic situation- there's a great thread on Era you can go to for that. But the very condensed TL;DR is, THQ Nordic decided to host an AMA on 8Chan, which is an uglier cousin of 4Chan, comprised of people who found 4Chan to be too restrictive. 8Chan has been known to organize swatting, doxxing, GamerGate bile, and host child porn; the latter was so bad that Google even delisted them temporarily in 2015.
We can argue THQN didn't know what they were getting into (which, it's your fucking job to vet your platforms before you associate with them), but once they announced the AMA, they were a) told what the site is, and b) when they started the AMA, were greeted with Nazi rhetoric and child porn, both of which they endorsed and parroted.
The worst part to me is their Twitter account. For a minute, let us consider the reality of today's society where somehow, white supremacist and Nazi rhetoric is actually normalized enough that people will defend it for "free speech", but even the most vile alt-righter won't ever endorse pedophilia or child-porn. Or so you'd think, but in spite of being told that 8Chan is a website used to host child porn content (which THQN didn't need to be told, given they were participating in objectification of "lolis" themselves), they proceeded to leave the link to that website up on their Twitter account for 15 hours. Even after issuing an apology, they did not take that link down. It took, to my knowledge, Shannon Loftis of Xbox very specifically calling them out for that link to be taken down.
And now, here's my issue: this is a bad look for THQ Nordic.They signal boosted, and kept a link to, a child porn site for 15 hours. They engaged in pedophilic, white supremacist, and pro-Nazi rhetoric. Even after their "apology", they did not take their link to said child porn hosting site down.
The amazing part? There has been a resounding shrug from the gaming media over this.
Most sites have flat out not covered it. Some did, and downplayed the issue to the point of absurdity (like Kotaku). To my knowledge, only Waypoint, Games Radar, and Game Informer have actually called THQ Nordic out on this, and Jim Sterling on YouTube. GameSpot? IGN? Polygon? VG247? DualShockers? Destructoid? USGamer? Eurogamer? Most of these outlets project themselves as progressive, and they have either not covered the issue at all, or completely downplayed it (Kotaku's article actually almost makes me wish that they hadn't bothered at all).
The gaming industry just doesn't care. It didn't care. We were already at a point where racism, transphobia, homophobia, bigotry, and Nazism was actually normalized. Now we are at a point where a publisher can endorse and explicitly post content that sexually objectifies prepubescent children, and the gaming media will just look the other way.
Fuck.
I'm not going to go too into what the THQ Nordic situation- there's a great thread on Era you can go to for that. But the very condensed TL;DR is, THQ Nordic decided to host an AMA on 8Chan, which is an uglier cousin of 4Chan, comprised of people who found 4Chan to be too restrictive. 8Chan has been known to organize swatting, doxxing, GamerGate bile, and host child porn; the latter was so bad that Google even delisted them temporarily in 2015.
We can argue THQN didn't know what they were getting into (which, it's your fucking job to vet your platforms before you associate with them), but once they announced the AMA, they were a) told what the site is, and b) when they started the AMA, were greeted with Nazi rhetoric and child porn, both of which they endorsed and parroted.
The worst part to me is their Twitter account. For a minute, let us consider the reality of today's society where somehow, white supremacist and Nazi rhetoric is actually normalized enough that people will defend it for "free speech", but even the most vile alt-righter won't ever endorse pedophilia or child-porn. Or so you'd think, but in spite of being told that 8Chan is a website used to host child porn content (which THQN didn't need to be told, given they were participating in objectification of "lolis" themselves), they proceeded to leave the link to that website up on their Twitter account for 15 hours. Even after issuing an apology, they did not take that link down. It took, to my knowledge, Shannon Loftis of Xbox very specifically calling them out for that link to be taken down.
And now, here's my issue: this is a bad look for THQ Nordic.They signal boosted, and kept a link to, a child porn site for 15 hours. They engaged in pedophilic, white supremacist, and pro-Nazi rhetoric. Even after their "apology", they did not take their link to said child porn hosting site down.
The amazing part? There has been a resounding shrug from the gaming media over this.
Most sites have flat out not covered it. Some did, and downplayed the issue to the point of absurdity (like Kotaku). To my knowledge, only Waypoint, Games Radar, and Game Informer have actually called THQ Nordic out on this, and Jim Sterling on YouTube. GameSpot? IGN? Polygon? VG247? DualShockers? Destructoid? USGamer? Eurogamer? Most of these outlets project themselves as progressive, and they have either not covered the issue at all, or completely downplayed it (Kotaku's article actually almost makes me wish that they hadn't bothered at all).
The gaming industry just doesn't care. It didn't care. We were already at a point where racism, transphobia, homophobia, bigotry, and Nazism was actually normalized. Now we are at a point where a publisher can endorse and explicitly post content that sexually objectifies prepubescent children, and the gaming media will just look the other way.
Fuck.
