5 Stories That Prove Gaming Has The Dumbest Scandals

5

A YouTuber Comes Back Three Years After Faking His Death

A weird thing about YouTube personalities is that we have no idea who the hell most of these people are. That account posting funny gameplay videos could belong to a Vietnamese grandma, or a dog who learned to use a computer, or someone dealing with a terminal illness. The latter, unfortunately, seemed to be the case with Sketchek, a popular YouTuber making Team Fortress 2 videos.

In 2015, Sketchek announced he had about a year left to live, due to some sort of disease ("a problem with my nervous system"). So he'd understandably decided to spend his final days doing something other than recording himself playing video games. He dropped one last video ...

... and vanished. Fans, teammates, and random people on the internet mourned him. Team Fortress 2's developers even named a new ability after him. Years later, fans were still leaving comments under his old videos just to say how sad they were that he was dead. But don't worry, he got better!

-- Jesus, 33 CE

Wow, did he beat his illness?! Nope, because he never had it. As Sketchek confessed in a February 2019 video, he decided to fake his death because he'd grown bored of TF2 and gaming in general, and none of his other ideas for a final video were attention-grabbing enough. A "best of" montage simply doesn't have the same punch as making your fans admit they cried, you know?

He decided to un-kill himself after three and a half years because he'd started missing the game, and also to say sorry for the whole "making thousands of people feel shitty for absolutely no good reason" thing. Hey, we've all been there, buddy.

Fans took this turn of events ... disturbingly well. It's 2019. "My favorite YouTuber is no longer dead" is what passes for normal now.

4

A "Sixth-Grader" E-Sports Star Turns Out To Be In High School

No matter how good you are at a game, somewhere in the world is a little kid ready to end you. There's no better example of this than RizArt, a Japanese grade-schooler who drew international attention last November when he broke the Fortnite world record for kills. Usually people with over 30 kills get their own Netflix series and a film starring Zac Efron, but all RizArt got was 100,000 new YouTube subscribers and an invitation to a $500,000 Fortnite tournament. He was fully set up to be the poster child for 12-year-olds trying to convince mom that gaming all day is a good career move.

3

PUBG Developers Remove Accidental Nudity, Gamers Lose Their Shit

The characters in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds aren't really intended to look sexy, as evidenced by the fact that there's a Jared Leto Joker costume. That changed when players noticed the female character model had suddenly gone from having a smooth, Barbie-style bathing suit area to something distractingly realistic.

PUBG CorporationIn the name of authenticity, the Joker character now shoots used condoms.

Game developer (and PUBG player) Jennifer Scheurle politely pointed out the change on Twitter, and the game's director was quick to say that it was a mistake caused by the use of an old model made by an artist from outside the studio. It's weird that an old model would pop up again out of nowhere, but we find it hard to believe that no players had so much as glanced at a female character's crotch in several months. The devs then quickly, and without any sort of friction, reverted to the more discreet model. Pretty cool to have the community talk about a problem that was then swiftly solved, and that was that ... until the sweatiest part of the internet caught wind of it.

Twitter"Acting like an adult?! WTF?"

Reddit"I'd love to know who was actually angered by this." Uh, you.

2

Metal Gear Solid Fans Mistake A Real Person For Viral Marketing

In 2015, a neurosurgeon named Sergio Canavero claimed he would become the first doctor to successfully conduct a human head transplant. And it would totally happen by the year 2017, just you wait! Crazy as that already sounds, everything can be made crazier with the addition of gamers. It all started when someone noticed an uncanny resemblance between Dr. Canavero and a doctor seen in the trailer for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

IB Times, Konami Digital Entertainment, via NeoGAF.comNo one tell them about Kurt Russell.

1

"Bully Hunters" Goes From Noble Idea To Embarrassing Mess

The concept behind the Bully Hunters seemed sound. It would be a group of elite female gamers devoted to tracking down and schooling the dickwads who harass others in online games. Add a sassy robot mascot, and that's a hit '90s TV series. The idea was that you could ask for help through their website, and a Hunter would join your game and utterly annihilate the harassers. Then everyone starts clapping, the bullies abandon their evil ways, and the Bully Hunter logs off into the sunset.

Of course, that's not how it worked in real life.

Let's start with the fact that the first thing you see in their stream is a giant ASCII dick.

Their first (and only) livestream was supposed to show real examples of the Bully Hunters helping casual players, but viewers quickly realized it was all staged. There was a Q&A with two psychologists about online harassment, but it wasn't clear how this project would do anything to mitigate the problem. Is it fun to humiliate bullies? Hell yeah. But remember that most men who harass women in online games are already shitty players. You're only leaving them angrier and more frustrated, and they'll take that out on someone else.