I remember the controversy over dropping Truth, Justice and the American Way. But that was just the beginning.

This story involves Spider Man: Remastered, a game for Sony video game consoles that recently came to the personal computer. PCs have a vibrant modding community, much of which is based around a site known as ‘Nexus’. While the game’s fictional depiction of New York City contained the inevitable ‘Pride’ flags, a ‘modder’ on that site reportedly figured out how to trigger an alternate graphic used in Muslim countries that would get rid of the flag. And he replaced the Pride flags with American flags.

Anyone downloading the ‘mod’ would be able to replace all the ‘Pride’ flags with the Stars and Stripes. 

Since Spider Man: Remastered is a single-player game, it’s an individual choice and nothing they did would have any impact on anyone else playing the game.

Despite hosting a variety of violent and sexual mods, Nexus, the modding site, responded by banning the ‘modder’ declaring that sort of thing isn’t welcome here. The ban however has only made the mod more popular and it’s being distributed across a variety of sites.

While it’s been a while since Gamergate hit the scene, the struggle between the social justice elites and gamers has never actually gone away. Gaming journalism has become much less relevant since, but at the same time corporate wokeness has become more rigidly policed. 

And the one thing you can’t do in even the most violent games, as Rockstar’s GTA 6 series and its studios are reportedly being remade to be sensitive and politically correct, is be proud of being an American.