Infinity Ward Cracks Down on Racism in Call of Duty

Recent events have drawn some pretty stark attention to the fact that racism is still a problem in this country. Sure, there are other issues on trial here, from ineffective leadership to “cop culture” to defaulting to brutality, but racism is still at the core of everything going on here, which is part of the reason why so many studios and publishers have been putting up black squares on social media and retweeting “Black Lives Matter”.

Very few of them, at least so far, have done anything beyond the social media circuit, but at least one is trying to put their promises into practice: Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward, who just said over Twitter that they will start cracking down on racism on their games like never before.

The tweet reads as follows:
 

“There is no place for racist content in our game. This is an effort we began with launch and we need to do a better job. We’re issuing thousands of daily bans of racist and hate-oriented names. But we know we have to do more – and we are:

• Adding addition resources to monitor and ID racist content
• Adding additional in-game reporting systems to increase the number of bans by hour
• Adding filters and greater restrictions on name changes
• Evaluation in-game improvements to make it easier to report offensives
• Increasing permanent bans to root out repeat offenders

We apologize to our players. This is our commitment to you, our fans, thank you.”

What strikes me about this tweet is that it actually leads and concludes with an apology, which makes sense. This is the kind of thing Infinity Ward should have been doing before there were riots in the street, so it makes sense to me that they should apologize for only being spurred to action now.

Still, better late than never. And I certainly hope that other developers follow this example. Enough is enough, and while Video Games are one of the least important areas that need fixing right now – it still needs fixing.

And it should go without saying none of this goodwill goes towards their publisher, Activision-Blizzard, who can eat a pile of rocks.