This lesson is being learned this week by Creecher Virpio, an EVE Online player who was running an election to become one of the next members of the game’s Council of Stellar Management. We say “was,” because extremely racist comments attributed to the player were unearthed from over a half-year ago.
In response to this revelation, CCP announced that Creecher was to be disqualified: “We have decided to exercise our discretion to remove candidate Creecher Virpio from the ballot in accordance with our internal guidelines due to chat logs which surfaced recently and would have resulted in exclusion during the background check period.”
For his part, Creecher posted an apology to the community for his comments and promised to do better while urging other players to do the same. “The unfortunate truth is that casual racism and edginess are all too rampant in our community,” he said. “I’m not sure how it happened, but at some point words that used to draw gasp are now commonplace in memes, conversation, and discourse, and we have all as a community been desensitized to them.”
