Back in July the Houston Chronicle published a blog by Willie Jefferson expressing concern that Valve had chosen to set the upcoming Left4Dead 2 in the city of New Orleans.
The reason for the concern was apparently due to the fact that by choosing New Orleans Valve was being racist. The link is tenuous, and you can read MyGaming’s response here.
However, since then, more reasoned claims against the choice of location have sprung up. While calling it racist is problematic, it does seem reasonable to say that the developer could have chosen more sensitively a location for its upcoming post-apocalyptic zombie-blaster than a city which is still recovering from a horrific hurricane which killed 1836 people and destroyed the livelihoods of thousands more.
Valve has issued a sort-of response, which does not actually answer the complaint at hand.
“We still wanted it to be on the East Coast, a bunch of us are from the area,” Chet Faliszek told Planet Halflife.
He then went on to say “It’s an interesting place that is not covered in a lot of video games. There’s not a lot of video games that go down to the deep south, through the Savanna and New Orleans. There’s a lot of cool gameplay there, there’s a lot of cool areas.”
“You can be in the swamps, the Savanna or New Orleans, it’s a beautiful city. It seemed like a good opportunity to go through there, so we jumped on it.”
All Faliszek really says is that Valve chose the location because they wanted to. While the response is refreshingly free of PR ‘spin’, it probably would have been good to acknowledge the complaints being raised with a little more than “we did it because we thought it would be cool” (paraphrasing).
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