Developer who called Tiny Tina racist is out of a job

Kotaku follows the story of the Cryptozoic Entertainment developer, Mike Sacco, who called Borderlands 2's character Tiny Tina a racist.

[Root]

Unlucky...

With all the tweets he's posted I keep seeing him dig his own grave...faster....and faster.....and faster.

[cannon8800]

He's not unlucky. He knowingly did something that would indeed cause him to have big problems afterwards. Foolish is probably the best word to describe his decision making skills. But in the end it sucks to know that he lost his job. I hope he can find another job soon.

[Canary]

So few people seem to understand that the Internet is public. Very public. If you would be ashamed to shout out what you're writing in the middle of an elementary school playground, you shouldn't be writing it in the first place.

Politicians seem particularly susceptible to this, and other delusions. My favorite: that email is totally and completely private, and if it ever isn't, you can get away whatever you did by blaming it on a computer virus.

[Bimkoblerutso]

It's still sad, however stupid his comment was, that people are so sensitive to opinions that they are effectively able to run other people out of their jobs if enough disagree.

I mean, yes, it was a dumb comment, and yet I can't imagine how saying or believing something like that would matter so much to people that they find him unfit to do his job....

[showtimefolks]

tiny tina was one of the best character of maybe this gen. i wish there were more dialogues from here, she made me laugh quite a bit lol

[Letros]

Lol good, he was out of line

[toguns]

Actually if you read his tweets you'd see that he wasn't actually out of line. The person who wrote Tiny Tina described her in the script as "tiny white girl using craaaaaazy black lingo". Anyway, he didn't get fired. He quit

[Letros]

White people use black lingo all the time, problem?

[SilentNegotiator]

What is "black lingo" anyway? When I hear people discussing "black lingo" it's usually just southern slang.

[pixelsword]

@ silent;

I think you mean Southern accent, right?

Although both are regional aspects of language, most so-called "urban" slang originated in what is considered the East or West coast (a generation or two before that, it was a Detroit/Southern thing to be sure).

Just debating whether to not I should go to kotaku to read the story, because it sounds like kotaku is AGAIN trying to invent a story where none exists if they guy quit and was not fired for what he said.

[mistajeff]

As much as I agree that he was making a big deal over nothing, he has as much of a right to bitch about it as the game makers have to include whatever dialog they want. I don't agree with his bitching, but the price of free speech is having to put up with people saying a lot of stupid shit. It's good to know he wasn't terminated for it because that's excessive, but his comments should never have made headlines to begin with.

[G20WLY]

Seems free speech came at a cost for this guy.

[e-p-ayeaH]

freedom of speech FTW...

And were talking about a fictional character here...

[Moncole]

You only have freedom of speech if you are rich.

[e-p-ayeaH]

sadly that´s true

[nosferatuzodd]

Mancole true talk only when you're Rich you have freedom of speech

[Myze]

I don't completely disagree or anything, but freedom of speech doesn't apply to an employer-employee relationship, nor should it. Unless you think an employee should be able to say whatever he/she wants to their boss and the boss, by law, be unable to reprimand them for it.

I would say this was a business decision on the part of the employer(it's likely, even if the guy quit, he was pushed to do so for his own benefit), in that if the employee was giving bad press to the company he was working for, he would become a liability not worth the trouble he's causing.

[Hicken]

Speaking a certain way while having a certain skin color doesn't make you racist.

Or is it racist when a black person "speaks" like a white person? I've never heard that one, before, so why is it racist if it's the other way around? Hell, if anything, labeling a type of speak as "black" or white is more racist than actually USING that vernacular.

[konnerbllb]

Well he didn't deserve to lose his job but he quit.. so in the end I think that makes him a fool.

[CaptainPunch]

This guy was grasping at straws. He was a self righteous douche.

[TheGamerDood]

he should have never opened his mouth in the first place and especially when it comes to the issues of race/racism, it's just not appropriate for a business setting, that's why they have PR department. it's not his company, or his money, he's just a low level employee but yet he took it upon himself to speak for the entire company... stupid decision on his part and it cost him his job. now next time he'll know to keep his mouth shut. what an idiot. lol

[csreynolds]

Hmmm, what to say...

Is Tiny Tina racist? IMO, no. Yes, her dialogue is embedded with slang typically associated with black culture, but does that make her racist? I don't think so.

Should Mike have taken his thoughts to Twitter? Yes and no - depends on your views about Twitter and Tweet ownership. Technically, he was never a Cryptozoic employee, but he was a contractor - thus his comments, though personal, could easily be seen and interpreted as representative. This is precisely why some things are better left unsaid on public network spaces. Private message options exist for a reason.

Should Mike have been sacked? He wasn't. He quit - which both he and Cryptozoic confirm in the article.

Should Anthony Birch rewrite Tina's current (and future) dialogue? No. Not at all. Why do I think that? Because Tina is not racist. She is a quirky thirteen year old who uses terminology that white people all over the world use. You think words like "crunk" and "badonkadonk" should only be spoken by black people? Then that makes you an advocate of stereotype. You know what stereotyping often causes? Segregation: the action or state of setting someone or something apart from other people or things or, applicable to this case, the enforced separation of different racial groups - a la racism.

Humanity will never achieve unity and equality if we keep shouting "you can't say that" or "you can't do that" at every opportunity. What I find particularly interesting is that for every person saying "Tina is racist", there are a number of black people disagreeing with them...

[iceman06]

I agree with everything that you said. It is utterly ridiculous to think that it is racist to speak in a certain way. It would be different if she were spewing racial slurs and such. But, she is not. All she does is what most teens in America (and probably world over) do. They speak in the vernacular that is popular at the time. It just so happens that at this point it is borrowed from Hip Hop culture. In the 80's it would have probably been valley girl culture. At any rate, it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with being an easily influenced 13 year old. As for Mike, well I think he learned that freedom of speech indeed has limits. You have the right to say anything...but you are not free from the consequences of that speech...ever.

[HonestDragon]

It was a stupid comment from him anyway. To claim that a character is racist is racism in itself. The reason why is because Mike Sacco was claiming that Tina was using language that only African Americans use and blatantly replies to Anthony that Tina is racist.

That is completely untrue. I know many people who use those slang terms and are not African American. Tiny Tina is not racist and Anthony Burch doesn't need to change her just to appease a few shortsighted gamers. Tina is an adorable character and easily one of my favorites from Borderlands 2.

What those who claim she is racist fail to realize is that they are making racist statements by labeling those slang terms as something "exclusive" to certain people. They should be the ones looking themselves in the mirror for the ridiculous things they tweet. At the end of the day, using labels like that never helps and only shows how ignorant some people are.

[sackboyhappy]

sir hammerlock is like tina, he's black but talks with a posh english accent.
people get their accent from what they hear growing up, obviously, the guy who said tina's racist's an idiot.
i love tiny tina, i dont think shes racist at all.

[IIC0mPLeXII]

I was happy to see he was put out of a job, shut the fuck up next time.

[2pacalypsenow]

People are too sensitive i remember the RE5 thing everyone kept saying its racist because a white guy goes around killing black people- in africa . ITS AFRICA!! everyone is black there unless its south africa which the game wasn't in