Note: The following is satire.
Electronic Arts is Beta testing it’s new video game Battlefield V. The game is a first person shooter in which players fight in World War II, but in order to keep the game from becoming “toxic,” EA is banning the use of the word Nazi during online game chat.
The Nazi ban raises several questions for gamers. Like: Why are you shooting at all those German people? And: What have they ever done to you?
When asked these questions during online chat, players responded with answers such as, “It’s because they are,” and “Those lousy Krauts are all a bunch of,” which seemed highly unsatisfactory given the appalling level of violence. One gamer said he was killing the Germans because their leader was “literally Hitler,” but this just seemed like the usual left-wing hyperbole. After all, what’s wrong with Hitler being literally Hitler as long as he’s not a Nazi? And if he is a Nazi, no one could say.
There are other controversial issues with the game. For instance, some players complained Battlefield V allowed gamers to play as women soldiers fighting on the front lines, which they said was not realistic. But while Entertainment Arts said they would not remove the women soldiers, they did agree to make the game more realistic by having them lose every battle to the superior all-male German army — which they’re fighting for no discernible reason.
Further investigation revealed that the ban on the word Nazi was the idea of EA Game Developer Hockme Dimwitz, who previously contributed to the George W. Bush administration by naming the War on Terror. Dimwitz told reporters, “Bush wanted to call it the War on radical Islam or the War on Any Damn SOB Who Can’t Worship God Like A Civilized Human Being, but I thought War on Terror would be less toxic by depriving the entire conflict of any comprehensible motive.”
Battlefield V will soon be available in stores to anyone who wants to kill Germans for no apparent reason. So it should be a popular game.
Correction: A previous version of this satirical article incorrectly named Entertainment Arts as the company that produced the game; the company is Electronic Arts.