After Sony finally released Marvel's Spider-Man for PC, modders have jumped at the opportunity to add their own amazing creative touches to the game, like mods that increase New York City's draw distance and mods that make Spider-Man creator Stan Lee into the webslinger. But with Spider-Man now on PC, modding tools can get in the hands of the wrong people.
The designers at Insomniac Games built a New York City with the ideals of diversity and inclusivity in mind. As in real life, the city has murals that show off the personality of the people that live there and Pride flags in various places that LGBTQ+ individuals can feel accepted. One PC modder felt slighted by the inclusion and diversity of the city in Marvel's Spider-Man and created a mod with the intent of erasing the Pride flags from the game.
A user on the PC Mod platform NexusMods uploaded a Marvel's Spider-Man mod that would replace the city's Pride flags and murals with American flags. As reported by PC Gamer, an investigation by the admins of NexusMods found that the mod was created by an existing user with a sockpuppet account (an alternate account mostly used to make statements someone would not normally say on their primary account) under the name of "Mike Hawk." Admins then traced the account back to its original owner and banned both accounts. A similar mod was also uploaded to another mod site, ModDB, where it was also removed.
In a blog post, the admins detailed the circumstances that led to the outright ban after some community uproar. It cited that the sockpuppet account was purposefully made in an attempt to troll and start discourse. NexusMods stated that because there were steps to not only be hateful, but circumvent real punishment by making the sockpuppet account, it escalated to a full account ban against the original user. NexusMods made a zero-tolerance statement against the creation of mods with the intent of erasing diversity and inclusion artwork in any game. The site also stated that any other users that found its removal of the mod and the account ban as an overreach could also no longer use its service and pointed towards its "delete account" link.
"We've now explained our stance and we won't be providing a platform for you to distort our position in order to feed an irrational and paranoid narrative. You can do that elsewhere, where we won't care enough to read it. If this policy upsets you, if we've broken some moral code of conduct as a business that you can't accept, then please, delete your account (bottom option) and move on, as we will."
Marvel's Spider-Man coming to PC has been highly requested ever since Sony launched its PlayStation PC arm. Keeping such divisive mods on modding platforms is antithetical to the spirit of Stan Lee and his creation. NexusMods sending such a strong message the first time around builds toward making gaming an inviting place for marginalized groups.
Marvel's Spider-Man is now available on PC, PS4, and PS5.
Source: PC Gamer