Sometimes when you leave too much creative freedom to the players it can quickly degenerate. Proof of this is what is currently happening on the famous Garry’s Mod.
His video game is filled with nostalgics of Nazism and this developer can’t take it anymore. This is the famous Garry’s Mod. For the record this game on Steam is a graphical toolkit that used to be a build mod for Half-Life 2, created by Garry Newman in December 2004. Since 2006 it is a full-fledged game that has thousands of active players. It’s very simple, the sandbox title allows all the madness with in particular the possibility of creating content on the Second World War. So far so good, but very quickly servers began to establish a morbid fascination for Nazism with roleplaying at the limit of legality (explicit promotion of the Third Reich).
Far too many Nazis for the taste of the game creator Garry’s Mod
It is in a long tweet quite explanatory that the creator of Garry’s Mod, Garry Newman wanted to put things right. In particular, he is worried about the presence of RP players in certain servers who seem to be much more than just players.
It seems some of them really like Nazis outside of the game too..
If someone is running a WW2 RPG server and getting donations, and that bunch of regular hardcore gamers really like Nazi stuff… That’s a problem.
We obviously don’t want to ban all WWII-themed games, but we do want to get rid of the celebration of Nazis.
The man explains in particular that part of the game has been in a gray area for some time now and that it is time to do something. Without forbidding the mods on the Second World War which have a lot of success within the community. Newman also insists that any action he takes should not be seen as a loss of freedom or an arbitrary attack on players.
It’s not mind control.
He just wants to make his game a safer and less illicit area. He also specifies that he has shut down problematic servers.
Racism on the line
The problem is not so much to use Nazi soldier skins for RP (which can already be considered problematic in itself) but rather to perform RP actions while demonstrating his fascination with the Nazi regime. For example, on the Reddit devoted to certain servers, there is a whole gallery of screenshots with evocative and particularly dubious captions such as “Two SA officers abusing a homeless man” or “Citizen caught breaking curfew pleads with German soldiersemands”. And you only have to take a look at YouTube to see even some players reciting the SS oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler perfectly and in order. In short, it was high time to act against this type of content.
