Infinity Ward, developers of Call of Duty and the more recent Call of Duty Modern Warfare and its battle royale component, Warzone, have promised to take a stand against racism. The company announced its new initiative on Twitter.
In the statement, Infinity Ward says it will add new monitoring and reporting systems to identify and deal with racist content, add new filters and other in-game improvements, and increase permanent bans to “root out” offenders.
The full statement is below:
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 additional resources to monitor and ID racist content
- Addition additional in-game reporting systems to increase the number of bans by hour
- Adding filters and greater restrictions on name changes
- Evalutating in-game improvements to make it easier to report offenses
- Increasing permanent bans to root out repeat offenders
We apologize to our players. This is our commitment to you, our fans, thank you.
— Infinity Ward (@InfinityWard) June 3, 2020
Toxic and racist content isn’t new in online games, and it’s something that the Call of Duty community has grappled with for some time.
An AI study from The Clutch ranked Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Black Ops among the five most toxic gaming communities on Reddit. And while those communities didn’t rank high for racist content in the “Identity Hate” category, a recent Reddit thread highlighted numerous IDs containing racial slurs.
Ultimately, it is a step in the right direction to ridding CoD‘s multiplayer modes of such harmful content.
