You won't find the 'Feminist Wh*re' skill in the final version of Dead Island

by Ben Gilbert on Sep 8th 2011 1:13PM

When Dead Island arrived on Steam in North America, it wasn't exactly what the game's developer and publisher intended on releasing. Rather, it was a pre-release dev build, meaning many folks encountered bugs or were unable to play the game altogether. Moreover, some PC users have been able to do rather ... interesting things with the early build, and one even spotted a somewhat disturbing skill name that didn't end up in the final game: "Feminist Wh*re".

One of Dead Island's playable characters, Purna, was apparently allotted a skill at one point that was dubbed "Feminist Whore", though it only shows up in the source code (in the "default_player_setup" file). It's possible that the skill eventually ended up as "Gender Wars," though that's just us taking an educated guess.

Publisher Deep Silver, issued this response: "These unfortunate actions were of one individual at developer company Techland and do not in any way represent the views of publishing company Deep Silver." Further, developer Techland stated: "It obviously violates professional and ethical standards at Techland and should never have happened. We're investigating this right now and we'll issue a statement later. For now, I can only express my sincerest apologies for this incident and assure you that whoever acted so irresponsibly did not represent the views and opinions of Techland. I'm equally sure that aside from the author of that unfortunate line of code, everyone at the office is as disturbed by this as you are."

[Thanks, Spencer.]

Source: Steam Forums, Tracey John, Eurogamer

Tags: dead-island, deep-silver, feminist-whore, misogyny, pc, secretly-jerks, skills, source-code, steam, techland

Reader Comments (113)

Someone was involved in a bitter divorce.

@LaughingTarget More likely the programmer was just a misogynist, and probably a virgin. More common among gamers than you might think.

@Faceless Troll

That hardly seems plausible. A quick google reveals that brothels are legal in Poland, where Techland is based, so obviously a misogynistic developer wouldn't have to remain a virgin unless they chose to do so. I mean, come on. Misogynists are the cornerstone to the sex trade.

@LaughingTarget
I wonder what the skill does....

@Rubbishy Me

+15% damage vs males. The title definitely made it sound more interesting than it was.

@LaughingTarget

Somebody a gonna get hurt...

I guess they changed it to avoid being sued by Feminist Whore, the all-girl punk band.

Quick, is there a patch to fix this?

@CaptainProtonX
Downlaod the release version?
Pretty sure Steam fixed it by now.

"Disturbed"? Hardly. You made a game where the trailer was a morbid depiction of a loving family being, literally, ripped apart by the living dead trying to eat their flesh. A little girl flew out of a window and smashed against the ground, staring dead-eyed at the camera.

If you can handle that, you can handle "Feminist Whore". It wouldn't cause a significant outrage in GTA, so who cares in this instance?

@FuzzyPierce Well said.

@wrongThinker

Not really.

How is a horror game the same as someone being called a whore, just by virtue of being a girl in their video game. If it's no big deal they should just take the leap and call all the girls in their video game bitches. I mean, its a zombie game, so who would care, right? Clearly if you're into the horror genre then calling women derogatory terms must be something your okay with. It's almost the same thing~!

Stupid women, this wouldn't be such a big deal if they'd stop demanding to be treated with the same level of respect you'd give someone who didn't have a vagina. How dare they!

@bizzomephisto

Thank you for helping me prove my point.

@FuzzyPierce
"everyone at the office is as disturbed by this as you are."

Is it just me or did they leave that last line intentionally open?

What If I find that skill name a grand ranking of "meh" on my disturbed list? Turns out everyone in their office does too!

@FuzzyPierce

You're twisting my words, and your own

I brought that up to illustrate how ludicrous your argument was, (your argument being that people who enjoy the horror/zombie genre shouldn't be offended by such things, because of how violent it is, so whats the big deal)

I never meant to imply that they should or would do that, but if we take your argument to that extreme it falls apart. yes, I know it would never happen, but if it did? Don't be offended people, it's just a zombie game/flick

my argument in response to you is certainly a case of Reductio ad absurdum, but while some won't understand it, I don't think it is ineffective in this case.

@bizzomephisto

"I see you've already unlocked said skill...."

BUUUUURRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!

@FuzzyPierce
What you say is true, up to a point. In GTA4 they don't ever expect the player to respect the characters in the game equally. Some characters are obviously there to be liked, disliked, or controversial.

Giving a skill called "feminist whore" to a female in a game where there is little context for the player to expect that kind of insult is rather off putting. I am disappointed it got that far into the process (unless the rouge developer story is true).

@Draugdraugr

I'm with you on this.

Also, those that responded to Draug, I am disappoint. A circle jerk of ignorance full of fifteen year olds.

@bizzomephisto

"I see you've already unlocked said skill.... "

SCORCHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@serge808

guess my post got "moderated"

hahaha

Someone might be job hunting come Friday afternoon.. of course it is post launch so they probably are already laid off.

@tk421242

"Deep Silver" will be "Deep Six" pretty soon at this rate.

@CaptainProtonX
Wouldn't it be "Shallow Silver"?

What's the big deal, everyone's mad about something..... Should of left it in the game. It's artistic expression and a lot of games suck because people are to worried about their image or being political correct. I would of loved to pump tons of points into my feminist wh*re skill

@joer22784

I'm sure it was never meant to be in the game at all and it was just someone bored and naming the skill in the source code as something silly for amusement, not because of artistic ends.

@Heisenberg This. And why should they leave something offensive in for "art". That isn't art, that's just a bunch of crap. It's the name of something in a skill tree, not a damn cutscene.

And they're already being blasted enough, if they leave it in the game all hell will break loose.

It would be really tasteless if that were the actual skill name, but considering that only shows up in the source code on a pre-release build that was never meant to be released in the first place, only someone who is morbidly bored with nothing to do would have been able to find it.

@Heisenberg and who are you to decide what is tasteful and what is not?

@joer22784

I am the arbiter.

@joer22784

Who cares if it is in some file in some part of the game that wasn't even meant to be released? This is one of the sillier things I've ever seen people get upset about with respect to a game. It would be one thing if it were in the actual game but the fact that it is in some file that ~0 people are ever going to naturally come across is ridiculous.

@Miketor

Wrong reply there. To actually reply to joer22784: I think a feminist whore would certainly have a taste to her.

@Heisenberg
You know the score?

@joer22784

To answer seriously? I am the person who laughs at offensive jokes, but am wise enough to know that not everyone shares the same sense of humor as me and that repeating said offensive jokes to everyone I meet is not a good idea.

I see many people here on joystiq hold a liberal view point that isn't based in any mature and realistic understanding of how the world works. You can't just say "eff the world I'm doing what I feel like!" when it comes to big projects like these, maybe indie titles, but not big studio projects.

wait that is disturbing ? sounds fantastic

We apologize to any Whores who were offended.

Let's get all PC and up in arms about this!!!

Seriously, who cares?

@iceveiled

No doubt...if it was commented out in the code....its for a reason.

@iceveiled ... Feminists and misogynistic whores?

Honestly I don't think it's that big a deal, considering that it wasn't meant to be in the final code anyway (I know I tend to use rather lurid names in programs I'm testing out, especially if it's slow going with the coding). It's embarrassing for the company to have accidentally published it, though - it was almost certainly nothing more than a dumb in-office joke, and wasn't trying to be all "ooh, offensively artistic/artistically offensive!"

Oh, and whining about political correctness is dumb; be honest about it and just complain that you don't think it's okay for people to get annoyed when you act like a prick. (I know I do!)

How incredibly stupid, they shouldn't apologize for something that ISN'T IN THE GAME. Although people that are offended by this will ignore that fact and just be upset at the potential of it.

@I am a machineee

It shows that people there don't treat women with respect and that they are most likely a group of misogynist pigs.

@JamesBE

Oh shut up.

It was a little joke that a bored programmer probably made to entertain himself while falling asleep at his desk at 2 o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon. It has nothing to do with "respect". Chances are he went home to his wife whom he respects more than anyone else in the world afterwards.

I respect the heck out of my elders, but that doesn't mean that if I were programming a spell in a game that made the target shorter and slower I wouldn't temporarily name it the "old fart spell" just for kicks. A little harmless joke doesn't actually say anything about how I feel about old people, since I pretty much believe that the generation that's old right now commands way more respect than our generation ever will.

That's the problem with you people. You spend too much time whining and complaining about little harmless jokes and sayings and too little focusing on, you know, the people who *actually* mistreat women or whatever "target" you've chosen to get on your soap box about on that particular day.

@Vcize

Given that we're laregely post "greatest generation" you're going to have to fill me in on what the following generations of currently old people did other than decide to wantonly begin destroying the planet with no regard for the future.

@Vcize

Calling an old person an 'old fart' doesn't carry with it the baggage of the very real bigotry and latent sexism so prevalent in the world today like saying 'feminist wh*re' does.

Somehow I doubt any gamers, even female gamers are offended. Most games involve murdering hundreds of people. I'm more offended that they feel the needed to protect me from the word "whore". They're lucky I wasn't the developer. I'd call the skill "PMS "

@Aculeus

More lucky than you can imagine.

Shame it did not go into final version. Sounds accurate.

@That One Guy In this case, what it sounds like is what it probably is. I work in the games biz and one person could absolutely do this. If it was referred to something in debug code that's entirely different from an approved decision by the whole team.

That said, I don't think this is particularly offensive in a game where living people are consumed by dead people...

How does this violate "professional and ethical standards"?
I get it... It's offensive to women who consider themselves activists for women's rights, who may not actually be prostitutes.
But what about all the hookers who also consider themselves to be feminists? A completely liberated women might be fine with taking money from sucker johns for a few meaningless sex acts.
Besides, this wouldn't be the first time some developer used risqué terms to describe Achievements/Trophies. I'm not misogynistic, but I can find the humor in the juxtaposition of disparate imagery.
At the very least, this is nowhere near as offensive as the way the majority of women are portrayed in most action video games, probably including this one. Shirt perpetually halfway unbuttoned? Check. Witty one-liners laced with innuendo? Double-check.
Yeah, those corporate heads were so quick to spin the story, they didn't even stop to realize that anybody who would care is not even going to purchase their product in the first place!

@JonahStein - You don't have to be a woman to be a feminist. For instance, I am a feminist.

Look, gaming is not the domain of rational, progressive treatment of female characters or players, but this really is one of the smaller incidents, considering it was only in the pre-Alpha code and not the final release. Much worse are the awful, systemized tropes of patriarchal domination that exist in most games (and media, for that matter).

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Dead Island

You won't find the 'Feminist Wh*re' skill in the final version of Dead Island

Reader Comments (113)

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:17PM LaughingTarget said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 2:04PM Faceless Troll said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 2:37PM freaparn said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 3:49PM Rubbishy Me said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 4:03PM freaparn said

Posted: Sep 11th 2011 3:15AM kentuckyfried said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:20PM Perfidious Sinn said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:21PM CaptainProtonX said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:38PM mcnichoj said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:21PM FuzzyPierce said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:41PM wrongThinker said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 2:15PM Draugdraugr said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 2:45PM Draugdraugr said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 3:03PM Daverator said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 3:38PM Draugdraugr said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 5:00PM JasonA said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 6:15PM Lerkero said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 6:55PM Haizeus said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 8:00PM serge808 said

Posted: Sep 9th 2011 12:38PM bizzomephisto said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:22PM phillibuster said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:27PM tk421242 said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:28PM CaptainProtonX said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:49PM iceytoa1 said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:27PM joer22784 said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:28PM Heisenberg said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 3:15PM OrangeGamer said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:27PM Heisenberg said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:37PM joer22784 said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:41PM Heisenberg said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:45PM Miketor said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:48PM Miketor said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:48PM StClair said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:59PM Heisenberg said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:27PM MassiveGG said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:27PM nbinney said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:29PM iceveiled said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:36PM ShadowXIII said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:45PM Mutagenaric said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:33PM I am a machineee said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 2:43PM JamesBE said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 3:16PM Vcize said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 4:31PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 6:58PM Haizeus said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:38PM Aculeus said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:58PM Miketor said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:38PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:38PM wrongThinker said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 1:40PM JonahStein said

Posted: Sep 8th 2011 2:03PM MatthewBlackwell said

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