Ubisoft is Removing 'Ableist' Language from Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
By Kenneth Shepard - Fanbyte
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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla has come under fire for some ableist language in one of its character descriptions, referring to a burn victim as “disfigured” in-game.
The use of the term was pointed out on Twitter by Courtney Craven, the founder of Can I Play That?, a site dedicated to issues of accessibility and ableism in the games industry, where they called the use of the word disfigured as “absolutely unacceptable.”
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In a response tweet, the official Assassin’s Creed account apologized on behalf of the development team, and said that the phrasing would be changed in a future patch.
Issues like this come up fairly frequently in all media, not just video games, but recently Spiritfarer developer ThunderLotus also came under some controversy for an entire storyline dedicated to a character viewing death as an escape from their wheelchair. The studio issued an apology and said it would be working with the writing team to re-examine and alter the character in question to not perpetuate these kinds of views.
“We understand that we unwittingly perpetuated ideas and language that have traditionally been used to exclude and discriminate against people with disabilities, while reinforcing ableist views of what they should find empowering. This directly undermines the empathetic spirit that we wished to infuse into every aspect of the game, and we regret this failure.”
