Bungie has looked into how the hate symbol found its way into Destiny 2.
On Tuesday evening, thousands of players hung around without enthusiasm and couldn’t play Destiny 2 – Bungie was conducting painfully long maintenance work, which was then extended indefinitely, ruining the evening for German players.
In the midst of this maintenance, Bungie sent out 3 or 4 tweets: “We have a hate symbol in the game on a pair of gloves. We are sorry. We disassociate from it! We will fix it.”
For the first few minutes, nobody knew what was meant at all. The “guilty gloves” look completely innocent to most people, with only two green “K” visible on the sleeve.
What many of us do not know, and probably Bungie does not know either, is what this symbol currently means. A strange internet movement has made it their symbol with nationalist and racist tendencies.
The innocent internet meme “Kek” originates from World of Warcraft
Originally, “Kek” was what an Alliance member in World of Warcraft read when a Horde member wrote “lol”, meaning when an enemy laughed. In WoW, members of the different alliances were not supposed to understand each other, which is why Blizzard implemented a “encryption” and thus “Lol” became “KeK.”
Symbol of ultra-right internet trolls
This “Kek” has then, over the years, become self-sustaining and has become a part of internet culture. It became a meme.
Recently, however, a “satirical religion” has taken the “Kek” and made it their symbol. This is a group that supposedly worships a frog-faced creature with Donald Trump’s hairstyle.
They have designed a flag for the fictional country “Kekistan”, and this flag bears these symbols. This group is considered ultra-right and extremely provocative against liberals. Thus, it is believed that the flag is also reminiscent of Nazi symbols. Green instead of red – and the “K” serves as a substitute for the swastika.
How could this be overlooked?
The question now was: How could such a symbol end up in Destiny 2? Did an employee smuggle it in as a political message?
Bungie has investigated this. According to Bungie, there was apparently no thought behind the design. The item was designed back in June 2015. When designing items, they draw on a variety of sources from the real world. The “K” seen on the gloves is, according to Bungie, a mirrored heraldic element, a chevron, actually a rank badge from a military uniform.
In the process, symbols from the real world are taken and transformed so that they fit into the world of Destiny.
Then they actually check all symbols internally once more before items go live, to see if they might be “culturally sensitive” in any way in any country. And indeed, they found the gloves and realized: “Yes, this has some pop culture meaning regarding Kek”, but when they cross-checked, they only came to the thing with the “World of Warcraft internet meme” and did not look further.
That the symbol developed from there and became a hate symbol of a nationalist movement went unnoticed.
In the future, they intend to review the process and investigate even more thoroughly. Bungie emphasizes that they have nothing to do with such nationalist ideas. This is not flat talk: Bungie lives tolerance and rejects all forms of exclusion. This is one of the cornerstones on which the studio is built.
Patch 1.0.1.3 should finally remove the symbol from Destiny 2
Currently, players can still see the “K” on the gloves in the preview screen, but other players do not see this on the avatar when looking from the outside. In the next week, a patch 1.0.1.3 is supposed to remove the gloves completely and fix some other bugs.
Read more about Destiny 2 here:
Shaders, Engrams, and Glitches – That was the first week of Destiny 2
