Developer of high school shooting simulator Active Shooter has been booted off of Steam but latest events have taken an even more sinister turn. Following IndieGoGo's takedown of the game's crowdfunding page, PayPal has blocked his account.
There's an old saying that goes, I may not agree with you, but I'll fight for your right to say it. As you can see, it's a saying that has no place in a modern world, especially in the land of free because what started off as censorship has quickly turned into bona fide violation of human rights.
Let me first clear the air here - I couldn't care less about Active Shooter, neither as a game or this week's outrage material. Furthermore, the dev had nothing to do with the massacre he's being associated with. How did we get to misdirect emotional pain into aggression? How do we justify it? More importantly, why?
Much of it has to do with the faceless nature of a company called Revived Games but let's put things into perspective. Anton Makarevskiy, 21 year old Russian developer of Active Shooter has been booted off of Steam. Not willing to give up on the game, he took to IndieGoGo crowdfunding, only to see it removed too, with no explanation.
Once he started distributing Active Shooter via his site, in came PayPal and blocked his account, with one of the most preposterous of excuses that I've ever heard. PayPal insists that their "services are not used to accept payments for activities that promote violence".
There's absolutely no way that an institution of PayPal's magnitude doesn't have a lawyer, because he'd have told them they ain't got a legal leg to stand on here. The large majority of games on the market is actually built around violence. So this is not a legal thing, obviously. Either way, it's their company and they can ban or block anyone they like, but something doesn't quite sit right with us considering that a lot of doors are being slammed shut in front of the young dev's proverbial nose.
You know this as well as I - the only reason this is allowed to stand has to do with Makarevskiy not being a US citizen. Had he been one, human rights advocates surely would've torn IndieGoGo and PayPal a new one. What can Makervskiy do? Post on forums, right? Is this justice?
Revived Games
I've honestly had enough of these psychopathic moral justifications, whereby someone else's emotional pain is used as justification to boss everyone around and even attack their livelihood. This is a 21 year old kid for god's sake, has everyone gone mad? How did we get to the point where the entire world considers itself a victim, while beating and chucking rocks at an individual?
Can't we just not download his game and close this chapter already?
AltChar will reach out to Anton Makarevskiy for a comment on the entire situation and get back to you soon, because apparently no one else will.
