Dead Island studio under fire after 'disturbing' blunder
The creators of Dead Island have promised to reprimand the “rogue” developer who spliced the phrase ‘feminist whore’ within the game’s code.
It was discovered that a female character in action horror game, called Purna, had one of her individual skills entitled “*FeministWh*rePurna” within the game’s code.
The internal script name was not meant to be seen by the public, but was exposed due to a mistake in publishing.
“The person responsible for this unfortunate situation will face professional consequences,” a spokesperson for Poland studio Techland told blog site TraceyJohn.
The developer in question has violated professional standards and company beliefs, Techland said.
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"We deeply regret this and apologise to all our customers or anyone who might have been offended by that inappropriate expression,” the spokesperson added.
The game’s profanity was discovered after Techland mistakenly released a dev-build of Dead Island on Steam, instead of issuing a final commercial release.
Customers had access to large quantities of the game’s code which they could manipulate.
Brand manager Blazej Krakowiak said he was sure everyone at Techland is disturbed by the line of code.
“I can only express my sincerest apologies for this incident and assure you that whoever acted so irresponsibly did not represent the views and opinions of Techland,” Krakowiak told Eurogamer.
Why is this only happening now? I find it hard to believe that through QA testing, years of development and such, nobody happened to notice this until it was accidentally put on Steam. Sounds to me like Techland are trying to save face and use the developer as a scapegoat.
QA testing doesn't look at game code to pick up anything like this.
Maybe one day when we all grow up and the world gets over itself we will be able to make jokes again. Come on really a developer was more than likely joking around with his friends put this in the source code (which only mistakenly got published) and now the fires of hell are going to consume us all.
The human race is doomed to die a horrible death by stupid people that cannot take a joke!!
de wildt, i couldn`t agree more.
Whilst I can agree that really, there's no need for that language/terminology to be used, I do think it's getting a bit too much media attention.
You work on a game for several years, and running internal jokes ARE going to make it into the code, they have with every code base I've seen. Fair enough, it's a big mistake that anyone saw it, but the developer that added it probably added it never thought a non-release version would get out, where the name was still in there, and probably never thought anyone would extract their archives and open every obscure file in there!
Hopefully people will cut them some slack and this will blow over pretty quickly.
[quote]Brand manager Blazej Krakowiak said he was sure everyone at Techland is disturbed by the line of code.[/quote]
Yes, I'm pretty sure they didn't sleep that night, and now they are all on depression leave because of it.
This is a sad dayt. Does anybody really care? Most of the target customers will be like "LOL, what's all the fuss about?". Seriously, who is offended? I doubt even my gran would be offended. As others have said, they screwed up and released the code and are now trying to either draw the attention away from that or perhaps even keep their own game in the gaming news to boost sales. ;)
A game studio should be a professional workplace. How do you think profane derision of a political view many people self-identify as holding affects the tone of a studio? I agree that it's likely other members of the team were in on the "joke" (coders see each other's work all the time) and that Techland seem set to make just one individual a scapegoat, but generally I applaud their response as exemplary.
The reason it matters is that some devs obviously still can't see that this kind of cowardly jab isn't actually the light-hearted "we're all in on it" sort of joke that feminists are well able to "take." Rather it is a faceless jab in the back (as intended). The failure of some fellow devs to see that this is totally inappropriate in the work place just amplifies the hostility conveyed by the original sentiment, when Techland actually approached the problem appropriately. It's 2011 folks. Can we laugh at your jokes about feminism to our faces already?
Right, the coder gets punched in the face because the publisher screwed up and made his scrip available to the public somehow. Logic much?
"Right, the coder gets punched in the face because the publisher screwed up and made his scrip available to the public somehow."
The coder should never have acted so unprofessionally in the first place. A supposed professional can't just slip in sexist (or racist, or homophobic) comments or scripts 'for the lols' into their work just because they think that people aren't going to see it.
I'd agree that it should have been caught and removed a lot earlier though, most developers and publishers have regular code reviews and strict guidelines about commenting and naming conventions that prevent this sort of thing from happening.
"...most developers and publishers have regular code reviews and strict guidelines..."
You have clearly never worked in the games industry, then. A minority of game developers have code reviews; absolutely zero publishers have code reviews.
Surely the bigger issue for Techland is the fact that they somehow managed to publish all of their source code??!
"Feminist whore" is neither sexist, nor racist, nor homophobic. "Feminism" is an ideology: people can opt out of it; and “whore" as an insult can be applied to people of either gender, race and sexual preferences.
"Due to a mistake in publishing, the internal script name was not meant to be seen by the public": this means that without that mistake, the internal script would have been meant to be seen by the public.
Thanks for the spot, Amai
So let me get this straight, its ok to make a simulation of the end of the world where thousands maybe millions of people are dead, you shoot people and drink booze at the same time decapitate people, theres arms legs and guts everywhere, canabilisim, theres tons of profanity, basicly every bit of human decency is lost as entertainment in the game, and its all done just to make money for some rich ass hats, but now we must punish some poor sob who worked long hours in some office and got paid shit in return for a simply using the term feminist whore to name a script that does something that actually makes sense given what the script does, and was just a joke. REally??
lol
"You have clearly never worked in the games industry, then. A minority of game developers have code reviews; absolutely zero publishers have code reviews."
I do work in the games industry, have done for years. Every studio I've worked in has had code reviews and 'reminders' to coders about naming of variables and 'appropriate' commenting, and a few of the publishers we've worked with have also given guidelines. I guess this situation demonstrates why.
That said, I think the dodgy AI that makes NPCs walk around in endless circles on escort quests is more of an issue with Dead Island than dodgy variable names.
"So let me get this straight, its ok to make a simulation of the end of the world where thousands maybe millions of people are dead, you shoot people and drink booze at the same time decapitate people, theres arms legs and guts everywhere, canabilisim"
That's a fictional world. Unless I'm mistaken, there's never been a large scale zombie epidemic. Sadly, sexism has been and still is a very real problem, and saying it's a joke doesn't make the 'feminist whore' any more acceptable than if the coder had named a variable 'punchy nigger'.
Really who cares.
That must have been for us here in the USA that are too damn politically correct these days.
I once had a programmer friend who used four letter words in most of is variable names.
(He did get in trouble though one time)
If anyone should be in trouble is the fool who released the debug/dev build.
And that build was basically unplayable anyhow.
I don't see anyone really playing the game with out the patch.
Come on people of the USA, lighten up.
You take your self way to seriously if this offends you.
And since when are people not entitled to their own opinion? When can't people express them self in any way they want (as long as it's not physically harming anyone et al).
After all these very freedoms our country with it's Constitution is about.
It's "you", not "them".
sad reflection on any industry if anyone, over the age of 15, really thinks that's a joke...grow up, it's not. seriously, women can be ok once you get over your fear ;)
