I already mentioned this on Discord, but I don't really feel comfortable with adding the names of actual murderers onto the server. As if the actual act of murdering someone wasn't bad enough, many of these creatures engaged in other heinous crimes - pedophilia, rape, necrophilia, and cannibalism.
Call me an old man if you want, but I'm already quite concerned about the youth of this country. School and other mass shootings dominate the headlines every day. In a span of just over a month this year, the US had
at least 50 mass shootings. I get that the game mode is inherently violent - the whole objective is to stab or shoot the other players. And that perhaps is leading to the whole
desensitization to violence that we have seen, largely since the growing influence of the internet. I remember that there even used to be a Reddit community where people could watch others literally perish before their eyes. It managed to remain in existence on one of the most popular forum websites in existence until it was eventually
taken down in 2019. And if that wasn't bad enough, the community of 400,000 frequently
tried to justify its existence and heavily
criticized the decision to shut it down.
It's not normal to have people watching others die for any reason. These were real people. Parents, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and friends of someone else. It's exploitive and morally wrong. The circumstances of their death should remain private, not shown to thousands of random people over the internet.
Within a similar vein, though perhaps not as extreme, is having the names of actual murderers as an integral part of our game mode.
There are several reasons why I believe this to be the case.
First of all, it is disrespectful to the victims of the crimes. While the chances that the relative of a Jeffrey Dahmer victim will join our server are admittedly slim, that's not the point. A crime victim need not be related to us to deserve our respect.
Second, it trivializes their crimes. We cannot become numb to the impact that their actions had on others. These are mass murderers. They ended the lives of other human beings. That must always remain on the forefront when someone reads their name.
We've seen how dismissing horrific crimes has worked out in the past. The Holocaust, which led to the deaths of millions of Jewish people across Europe, would not have occurred
without the participation of hundreds of thousands of Nazis and other collaborators. In their world, mass murder was something that was just
considered part of their routine. But this was not limited to those directly involved in the genocide. Many of those on the sidelines were also affected - those who should have been horrified upon first learning about these crimes. And they likely were. But those initial perceptions often did not last. If they had, the genocide would not have continued for
as long as it did. Instead, a transformation in the behavior of these otherwise average people took place as a result of seeing the repetitive nature of these crimes and the uniformity in which they occurred. For them, it simply became part of their normal life. This is not a concept unique to wartime Europe, either. Such attitudes have also been observed in
Bosnia and
Rwanda, countries in which separate genocidal actions occurred in the 1990s. It took
foreign intervention to stop the genocide in Bosnia. In Rwanda, one of the few civilians to make efforts to help those being targeted in the genocide was considered worthy of a
Hollywood film. This mass violence was facilitated by both those directly involved, and the ordinary citizens who failed to intervene to stop the crimes. They remained largely silent because they had become desensitized to the violence.
With mass murderers, our generation of internet users increasingly appears
more concerned with the "kill count" of an attack or murderer rather than focusing on the emotional and psychological impact that such crimes will have on the victims and their families. This has been
called a dehumanized perception, which has been defined as the "failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person." And such a perception is often a prerequisite for the commission of genocide, torture, and various other atrocities.
Finally, adding the names of actual murderers or other terrorists comes across to me as a form of venerating these creatures. By raising their names to a position of prominence on our server, we would be conveying the idea that their actions are worthy of recognition. They are not. Causing the deaths of many other people should not qualify someone as being consequential. They deserve no sort of online homage on our server.
I do not want our server to be a place that contributes to the desensitization to violence, a place where our players become numb to the wrongful nature of these criminals. Again, while the game is inherently violent, we need not bring it closer to something like the role-playing video game that
attempted to recreate the shooting that occurred at Columbine High School. No, we need not do anything that would have an additional hand in the rise of extremism occurring in the United States and abroad.
We should do what we can to keep this as a game. And the most important aspect of a game is that it be fun. We already advance this objective with things like player models, which makes it so you are not stabbing another player, but rather a Doritos bag. Therefore, I think we should ensure that the names that we add be those that are amusing and fun. I also believe that would include removing the names that others have found to be problematic.
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