Shaun Himmerick, producer on Mortal Kombat X, is the latest games industry professional to step away from Twitter after receiving threats against his family.
On march 26, Himmerick retweeted this message he received, after which he changed his Twitter handle to “come on people”:
(WARNING: NSFW language)
He then explains his decision in more detail:
So to be clear. The reason I don’t want to do this twitter anymore is not fans asking for characters or hints or whatever. I get that ->
— come on people (@lover_of_tacos) March 27, 2015
That is passion and love for the Mortal Kombat and I also have that. So I get it. No problem. I’m glad people care about their favorites ->
— come on people (@lover_of_tacos) March 27, 2015
I used to be thick skinned enough for the random personal attacks. I’m a big boy I can handle it. I’ve been in my share of fights. ->
— come on people (@lover_of_tacos) March 27, 2015
However I cannot deal with the threats of violence to my wife and now young daughter. threats of sexual violence are even more disturbing ->
— come on people (@lover_of_tacos) March 27, 2015
You wanna fight me for Any reason. I’m probably willing to go, verbally or physically. I can hold my own. But threats on my ladies? No
— come on people (@lover_of_tacos) March 27, 2015
Seems like the offending tweet was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Himmerick, who hasn’t Tweeted since Friday (but has left his account active).
He’s the latest in what’s becoming a long line of games industry professionals who have left Twitter, their jobs and even their homes over threats they have received over the social network service.
A few years ago this might have been a bad career move for Himmerick — gotta get that social media engagement! — but today? Fuck it. Walk away, dude, and don’t come back. I know more and more people who are leaving Twitter because it’s simply not worth the hassle anymore, whether they’re receiving threats like these or are just sick of the community’s hostility and negative vibe in general.
The service was created to give people a means to share their thoughts, but if all those thoughts are going to amount in this business are threats made against the people making and talking about video games, then we may as well burn it all down and start over.
Comments
54 responses to “Mortal Kombat Producer Walks Away From Twitter Over Family Threats”
Absolutely sickening. Release the details of this fool online. Name and shame this idiot.
Release his details…then we will go around and bang his missus and punch his pet dog!
…..oh wait…..
LOL as long as you don’t get it the other way around, at least buy his dog dinner first if you do…
lmao…
unless of course it hurts his feelings more to do it the other way around.
Picking up a can of Pal today
Dont forget to spray your butt with extra doggy scent…
In the original US version and the one posted on Facebook, the twitter handle wasnt censored.
WHy bother censoring it now? Vile people need to be exposed for their behaviour (although chances are the abuse he would get would be pretty borderline depraved)
Need to design an app that detects stupid, offensive and threatening posts on social media and then triggers the smartphone to violently self destruct. Hopefully fatally.
OS feature, can’t be removed.
I just solved internet commenting…. at least from mobile devices.
Offensive and Threatening, absolutely. But if my phone self-destructed when I posted something stupid on social media, I would have looked like Two-Face years ago 😛
9-10ths of Kotaku would…
TRUTH! The negativity and viciousness of the Twitter crowd is extremely bad these days. What happened to the days of sharing cat videos? I miss those days.
This is why I stay of ‘personal’ social media, and really only come to news sites like this.
I’m with you. I don’t use Twitter or Facebook or anything really at all, and I don’t plan to. I’ve got a LinkedIn profile but that’s purely for professional contacts.
Twitter need to start implementing bans on people who write clearly offensive and threatening tweets.
It’s just not acceptable behaviour and these people won’t learn unless they are punished.
but but but but but mah free speach yo!
Freedom of Speech is not Freedom from Consequence, people have the right to not listen and eject you from places.
Not much point, though. As long as it’s free to create an account they’ll just set up a new one and carry on as before.
Better than nothing. Some people care about their follower count and whatever other social capital they’ve accrued against their handle. People will just create burner accounts to send their flames and shit, it’s true, but the more inconvenient you can make it…
Yeah. Futile, still… but better than nothing.
I’m all for anonymity on the internet…. until you do something like this. Then you’re just a fking idiot who deserves RL penalties.
which has always been the problem with the online world.
Real life penalties rarely spill over from the digital.
ive been saying this about social media and twitter in genral. its just not worth it. yeah your giving everyone a voice, but then again do we really need to hear everyone opinion 100% of the time? its as the old saying goes. Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one but that doesnt mean we want to hear it.
Another plus if twitter, tumblr and instagram went the way of the dodo would be that there would be a shitload less moral outrage, less gamergate, less kony 2012, less bullshit over who say what to whom, less stuff taken out of context etc.
the outrage and death threat machine kicked into overdrive with the comming of twitter and tumblr and even facebook and myspace
If only everyone thought like you did thyco =P
You could say that the root cause of all of this is the internet itself!
Twitter, Tumbler, Facebook, MySpace and even the Internet itself are just tools for people to communicate in various ways. And even if they are discontinued others will pop up to take their place.
Blaming these tools instead of the people who use them for this purpose will not solve the problem. The problem is with and will always be with the people themselves.
Give a loudspeaker to the morons of the world and you get to listen to gibberish all day no matter how much you try to get away from it. Would it be easier to put the morons out of their misery or to do away with the loudspeaker all together? People will always be aggressive rude self indulgent imbeciles. We can’t change that. We can however regulate how the loudspeaker is used.
Hence my earlier comment above about banning.
Banning will do next to nothing to regulate idiots; they’ll find new ways to use the loudspeaker. What you can do is create a degree of accountability. Have people register their ID’s with social media so that they can be held responsible to the things they say. If you have a passport or a driver’s license linked to your stupid idiotic thoughts you’re going to be less likely to put them out there.
Now instead of spending time pulling my idea apart; my only goal is to make people more accountable for the things they say and do. As you would in real life. Any regulations social media can implement to enforce that would have the same desired result. People would stop acting like assholes when they realize they can be identified as an asshole.
I don’t disagree with you on that point at all, sorry if I gave you that impression.
My point was that stopping the social networks wouldn’t stop the idiots.
You will never stop everything, but what you can do is REDUCE the amount. Remember trolls and the like existed on the net well before the net became mainstream, but one it became mainstream the amount of troll increased by a massive margin to the point that we are basically seeing articles like these at least once a week, where before it would of been once every 6moths to a year.
Its like the lock on the front door, it will stop 99% of all people from entering your house, but it wont stop a determind criminal.
My inner liberal (little L) really wants to find fault with this – privacy, Liberty, blah blah, but I actually think this is regulatory gold. Fuck the whole ‘save metadata’ crap, let’s just put our foot down and say “You see that fucker over there, John Smith, making death threats? He’s the reason you can’t have nice things without restrictions.”
If the system your proposing allows me to keep my anonymous pseudonym until I start threatening people and than have myself revealed to the appropriate authorities, I can actually get behind it. Sort of an Anonymous only if you behave method.
Seriously though, instagram? It’s probably the only positive social media platform. Negativity doesn’t get you anywhere on instagram. No matter how fake it is, it is definitely overwhelmingly positive.
yeah but hashtags….
Didn’t KONY end in a display of public masturbation (or was I imagining that!)
I’ve always wondered if society is getting dumber, more violent, less tolerant or are we as a society just getting more exposed to it due to (mainly) the internet.
I still haven’t made my mind up but I’m leaning more towards “people have always been complete garbage generally…. we just hear more about them now”.
It’s getting much harder to avoid trolls these days. You actively have to TRY to not see something perverted, offensive etc… online.
That being said, the problem is getting worse with online advertising, clickbait, opinions and means of communication given to every man and his dog, celebrity worship etc…
I don’t really see a solution. Ban people on one platform, they’ll move to another. Mandatory castration is illegal….
I’ve never understood social media and to be completely honest I never will. The whole concept of putting your personal and private experiences out on display for the whole world to see, comment and judge on just boggles my mind.
I think in theory, it’s up there for friends and family to see. Nothing wrong with sharing some holiday happy snaps with grandma or organizing a board game night with mates.
Some people just want to show off, stir shit, beg for attention, troll others etc….
I think at its inception that was what it was meant to be; however almost all social media has evolved into this sickening twisted marketing campaign that anyone can sign up for and be given the opportunity to stand on a soap box and voice their opinion over.
Once again there is a way to revert that to what you describe it as; tighten the hell out of privacy laws and make it impossible for companies to profiteer off people’s personal experiences without their consent.
The ease by which a person can find out information about a stranger scares the shit out of me; and people volunteer this degree of transparency?? If grandma wants to look at holiday happy snaps I’ll mail them to her or even better sit down with her and go through them with her; if I want to organize a board game night I’ll drop an e-mail, text or call the peeps I think would be interested.
Social media hasn’t made it easier to be intimate or to connect with people; as far as I’m concerned it’s take the soul out of it. It takes the human out of human interaction =\
Once again I will state I am personally incredibly biased against social media and I appreciate that the majority of the world enjoys access to this invention; it might seem old fashioned and I’m probably the last of a dying breed but I prefer real human contact to anything facebook, instagram, twitter or snapchat could give me. Yes I know I’ll probably end up dying alone too =P
Facebook has kept me connected with my friends, even the ones I don’t have the time or energy to actually seek out and make contact. I’m sick of people going on about how social media is going to be the end of civilisation! The fact is, 99% of social media use is interesting personal information shared between friends. As long as you take a few basic steps to protect your privacy, social media is usually nothing but a positive experience.
Anonymous dickheads in comment sections like me on the other hand, they should all bugger off 😉
I can relate to what you’re saying because when I was in college this was exactly what I’d use facebook for; to keep in touch with people I wasn’t able to communicate with easily or quickly. Maybe it’s a side effect of aging but as I’ve grown older I value my small circle of friends a lot more than a 20-30 people I was acquaintances with. The 4-5 people I keep in regular contact with know me on a level that none of the people I used to keep in touch with over facebook did and they’ve been there for me in more meaningful ways than anyone else I’ve ever known in my life.
If the price for ease of access to people I occassionally kept in touch with and barely added anything of substance to my life is the commercialization of my privacy I’m happy to sacrifice that and cherish and keep close the people I value.
That said I do appreciate how people genuinely use social media and I can appreciate its value for a younger generation; but me personally I’ve grown into a very old soul in the span of a few years =]
The self-promotion angle that Twitter takes is a big part of why I don’t give it much space in my life. I’ll check it when notified, then go looking through the last day’s worth of thoughts from my friends, but I keep my following list down mostly to people I actually know. But that seems to be an uncommon use, looking at everyone else’s list of things/people they follow.
You! What’re you doing on TAY?! You’re in Japan!! =O
Hi.
The internet. Giving idiots a voice since Malcolm Turnbull invented it.
Reiko sucks anyway and he isn’t even black.
That guy was clearly overboard but dang it, Reiko’s cool.
A turn-up for the books.
A comments section in agree-ance that social media is a disgrace!
Reiko’s a girl’s name…
The gamer outrage machine got stuck on 11 and nobody knows how to turn it off. This is going to keep happening until something terrible makes it stop.
Ok, don’t shoot me here, but what was the actual reason he quit?
Was it because he just doesn’t have the patience for this garbage, or because he actually saw it as a legitimate threat against his family?
If it was the latter, how would the offending asshat even know where the developer lived?
All you need is someones name and the town/city they live in and you can find them. I don’t think the mentally ill man that sent the tweet featured above is intelligent enough to do that. But I don’t think that’s the point.
I totally read that title wrong. I thought it said “man walks away from family after twitter threats”. That seemed drastic.
This dude needs to learn to tweet like Russell Crowe (3rd last paragraph): http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/29/the-trials-of-russell-crowe-pranked-by-jacko-goaded-by-paparazzi-threatened-by-al-qaida
This is why I hate people.
Some people….
This….this is why we can’t have nice things.
Also, 90% of the internet is a toilet.
It really annoys me that a lot of people have no courtesy or sense of common decency. Even on the internet.
I know I would be stupid to expect anything to change but this isn’t even outright criticism. It’s just some douche who wants a character in a game.
This is why we can’t have nice things.