Less than three days after Sony launched Spider-Man Remastered on PC, a homophobic troll with way too much time on their hands uploaded a mod that removes all the Pride flags from the game. It (unsurprisingly) did not go over too well, and even got the modder banned.
The popular Insomniac Games title, which was until now a PlayStation exclusive, features an open-world recreation of New York City that’s chock-full of intricate details. Several Pride flags are located atop town hall buildings, as well as in the West Village.
With the PC launch comes the chance for players to design and share mods to alter the characters and/or environment, as one user did when he replaced all the rainbow flags with the American flag in a mod titled “Non-Newtonian New York.” Comments on the Nexus Mods page soon flooded in, with a mixture of antigay hate and folks calling out the homophobia.
“Why hasn’t this garbage been taken down and why are the Nexus staff so quiet about it?” questioned one commenter. “I’m starting to think they’re OK with this.”
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Luckily, they were not OK with it.
The mod remained live for less than 24 hours. Nexus Mods confirmed to We Got This Covered that ‘Non-Newtonian New York’ has been removed, and that its creator has been banned from the platform.
A spokesperson for the site said that the mod creator “is no longer welcome on Nexus.”
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bachy
I suspect there is a huge overlap between the gamer community and the incel community.
Jon in Canada
There most definitely is.
dude451
It always amuses me that there’s no strength in the pride community – 1 modder decides to do something silly that only 0.1% of the people will actually use and everyone loses their mind and doesn’t have the strength to just ignore him….
Cranks
Dude451- you’re right, we’re not gonna ignore people like this anymore. We’re too strong now so we don’t have to. Why are you so weak that a digital flag bothers you so much? Why was the modder so fragile he wasted so much time to change such a tiny thing because he was so pressed about it?
TomG
It seems to me that it is the game’s fault. They shouldn’t have one that allows the users to modify anything. It’s not like Linux where it’s all open source, but the Microsoft platform.
otttovan
Game modding has a long and mostly benign or beneficial history, and gave rise to a bunch of popular games, and occasionally entire genres of game. Portal, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress all started out as amateur mods of Half Life. The MOBA genre started as an amateur mod of Warcraft 3, and Auto-Chess started as an amateur mod of a MOBA. Modding is a great way to learn video game coding, and many professional game designers got their start making mods for games. This is like saying that we shouldn’t have comments on this site because some people are transphobic or racist in the comments.
eddie43341
I would definitely use the mod. To each their own . I would never be mean to these people but regular people also have a right to disagree with being gay. But I’m sure my comment will be deleted or something if you don’t affirm their way of life you are silenced.
Cranks
We’re ‘regular’ people too. You’re really that upset about a digital flag, though? It has no effect on your life. Jeebus.