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2K Sports is apparently banning players for adding "Chris Benoit" like a wrestler in WWE 2k15.
Seven and a half years ago, one of the most acclaimed pro wrestlers of all time, Chris Benoit, murdered his wife and his seven-year-old son. He then killed himself. Today, some gamers want to play as Chris Benoit in a wrestling video game and keep trying to make that happen. The company behind the game doesn't want them to.
"We're deleting inappropriate content," a man named Marcus Stephenson, who Tweets about WWE games for publisher 2K, was telling gamers on Twitter a lot over the last week.
The "inappropriate content" Stephenson has been referring to are fan-made versions of Benoit, the ferocious Canadian wrestler who held world championships in WCW and WWE but who WWE has been loath to acknowledge since the murders.
Benoit is not part of the official roster of this fall's WWE 2K15 game. He doesn't appear alongside the likes of Randy Orton, Bray Wyatt and Stone Cold Steve Austin. But fans can add to the roster through the game's "create-a-wrestler" mode and then share those new characters online for others to download into their copies of the game. To an extent, they've succeeded. Alongside fan-made versions of former WWE stars such as Mr. Perfect and non-wrestlers such as Superman, WWE 2K15's community creations page, as of mid-week, showed numerous fan-made Benoits.
In response, WWE 2K15's creators keep removing some of the fan-made Benoits. That decision has spiraled Stephenson into Twitter debates with some players. I first noticed the back and forth thanks to a Reddit thread last week. I was fascinated both by the arguments in them and by my own reaction—as a gamer and as a wrestling fan—to Benoit's legacy and the idea of being able to play a game as a man who actually murdered his family.
I was intrigued, also, by the fact that you might get banned from playing the game online if you uploaded Benoit to WWE 2K15's servers. More on that later.
Earlier this week, I played as Chris Benoit in WWE 2K15. Despite all the moderation that's been going on, I had no trouble finding copies of the wrestler on the game's servers. There's clearly no ban on the man's name, no auto-filtering that makes "Benoit" a banned word. I downloaded a Benoit to my PS4.
If you play as Benoit, you play as something cobbled together with the game's equivalent of wrestler Photoshop. Players can approximate his face. They can get the tights to match. They can select moves for him that largely match the types of moves he would do in his matches. But they can't draw on his full move-set and they can't add some of the garnish that makes a WWE performer feel, well, authentic. There is no official Chris Benoit theme music to play when he enters the ring, no live-action footage of the man to display on the giant screen rendered over the in-game arena rampway. It's amazing that the game's ring announcer can even pronounce Benoit's last name. It's a neat trick that he does:
It's him but it's not him, right?
It didn't really look like Benoit. At first, it didn't really feel like playing as him. It didn't feel like this is the guy who went on to kill his wife and kid, because it didn't feel like this is the guy. It's a couple of meta layers removed from the real person, of course, a fan creation of a man. I know this... or I knew this. I'm not Chris Benoit. I'm not wrestler Chris Benoit. I'm a fan's relatively crude rendition of what Chris Benoit the wrestler looks like. It's an artifice of an artifice.
Or so I felt, at the start.
I Was Chris Benoit: Playing A Video Game As A Real-Life Murderer
The debates I saw Stephenson having—and the feelings I'd come to have while playing as Benoit—didn't seem to just be about whether a people should be able to play as a controversial wrestler in a video game. They're about how we privately and publicly regard deeply flawed people, how we remember them. They're about what happens when you layer the artifice of video game unreality atop the artifice of pro wrestling and then try to sort out what the truth of it all is. What does it really mean to play as WWE wrestler Chris Benoit in a video game?
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