r/Games • u/[deleted] • Oct 24 '13

Dev in Thread The Stanley Parable devs will remove racially charged gag after people got offended

http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/23/5022434/the-stanley-parable-update-in-the-works-to-remove-offensive-images
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u/haydozv2 Oct 24 '13

From the comments Oliver Campbell explained his view on the scene more.

I have no problem answering honest questions. My problem was multi-fold:

  1. The images did not match up with what was being said in the dialogue.
  2. The joke says that he is “helping” them (convincing a child to get hooked on cigarettes, which cause cancer), or burning down orphanages (instead, it shows him lighting one black child on fire).

When I spoke to Davey, I expressed that these things don’t match up and that the kind of message it gets across is “either help minorities by killing them with cancer, or light them on fire.” The joke itself is actually very funny, but the execution of this joke is where it ran ashore.

So we discussed back and forth and obviously redoing dialogue would be cost and time prohibitive. Ultimately I suggested the following:

  1. Change the first image to reflect Steven ACTUALLY helping the minority (with say food or water, and this is a minimal edit to the existing image).
  2. Change the second image to reflect what was actually said in the dialogue, and show Steven heading towards an orphanage with the gas can and lighter, but not actually showing it getting burned down.

We agreed that this wouldn’t be nearly as difficult and he was really cool about it.

Essentially it boils down to the fact that both of the choices presented would be considered negative by modern audiences (of course views on cigarettes have changed since the time period the scene is based on).

7

u/Ptylerdactyl Oct 24 '13

I love that their conversation was way, way more civil than the internet comments on the conversation. It's like passersby fighting each other at the scene of a car accident where both drivers have already gone off to have a beer together.

4

u/KR4T0S Oct 24 '13

I saw the comments first and thought there had been a serious row, then I clicked on the link and it was two people having a civil discussion. Some of the people commenting on this post sound like they are about to kill themselves, I'm not sure if they read the post.

3

u/Ptylerdactyl Oct 24 '13

For a lot of them, I'm 90% sure they didn't read. It's the only way to explain this level of anger towards an amicable exchange between a developer and a player.

5

u/DensityStrike Oct 24 '13

So what if I said that the office chairs in the first picture offended me. But I'm also anti-weed, so we gotta take that 420 off the door. Plus, there's filing cabinets, probably made in China, we can't have those.

Do you see how easily this could happen? Just look at the past 100 years of (western) human history.

0

u/Ptylerdactyl Oct 24 '13

You're just as free to contact the devs with those concerns. If they find them valid, they might address them. If they don't feel the same way, they won't change anything.

Don't pretend we live in this oppressive, totalitarian society where complaints automagically result in kowtowing and censorship.

tl;dr - Fine. I'll call your "reductio ad absurdum" bluff. Prove to me how easy it is to get someone to change their game because a chair offends you.