Someone Said a Bad Word

11. 11. 2022

Someone Said a Bad Word

IN recent news about Minecraft, it was recently discovered that a translator who actually ended up being a troll, somehow managed to submit a racial slur into the main menu of Minecraft. As you all know, the normal menu screen that gives the option to play single player just says “single player”. But thanks to some unimagined troll who decided to use an opportunity for a good joke to take it somewhere unnecessarily nasty, the button temporally said “You are a N*****”

Jens Bergensten, who has recently been promoted the head developer of Minecraft, apologized on about the incident by blaming some “prankster” who is obscured by a legion of volunteer translators who have been working on the game. Jens Tweeted “Sorry about that =( I thought I had banned that user.”

Obviously, this translation is no longer in the game. In fact, the forum thread that had pointed out this offensive message has also been taken offline.

There are two interesting things that we can learn from all of this. The first is that there is very little oversight from Mojang on the translation of new languages into the game. The second is that trolling can be fun, but one should never take it to the realm of the nasty.