A month in, Helldivers 2 is tangled in bigotry and witch hunting

It took GantztheDemon 10 days to be able to play Helldivers 2 again. On Feb. 21, TikTok user AJGaming shared a video featuring Gantz killing them. The sequence went viral overnight, garnering 4.8 million views as of this writing. A subsection of the Helldivers 2 community, hung up on the politically charged satire theme of the online shooter, labeled the player as a “traitor” and began inciting others to shoot on sight. Alongside dozens of TikToks campaigning for a witch hunt, Gantz’s PlayStation account was temporarily banned after receiving hundreds of reports.

“The last two weeks have been surreal, I never thought I would be getting this attention over a team kill inside of a video game,” GantztheDemon told Polygon over Discord. “It was pretty cool, but at the same time, reading comments of people saying they were going to find out who I was and release my personal information, I thought about just deleting it all.”

Just a mere few weeks after the launch of Helldivers 2, in which thousands of players were forced to wait in a queue due to the servers being at max capacity almost every day, GantztheDemon was immortalized in the fan lore. According to Gantz, however, it was all a misunderstanding. The team kill, or TK for short, was payback for a friend being attacked by two random players in a team of four. Gantz then avenged them, which is the clip we’ve all seen.

The Gantz situation has since cemented itself as an example of how the in-game theme of fighting a war together is, for better or worse, resounding in the community beyond the game itself. After conducting interviews with over 60 players for this article, it’s clear that the propaganda of Helldivers 2 inherently encourages people to band together. But some are acting in bad faith, spinning the clear satire into an overly serious military role-play — one that extends beyond acts like consecrating someone as public enemy number one.

Toxicity has become a popular topic around the Helldivers 2 community as of late. Over at the game’s subreddit, there have been discussions around pursuing or rejecting a certain meta or play style. Players told me that these conversations have allegedly led to some players kicking or TKing people who didn’t abide by the consensus. The uptick in TKs has also been attributed to Gantz — as the user told Polygon, he’s seen several copycat accounts on Discord and TikTok.

Such hostility is unfounded in terms of game mechanics alone. Some of the people interviewed said they’ve seen players embrace the game’s emphasis on cooperation, and that this attitude has been more prevalent than instances of toxicity. This is thanks to multiple factors: All players receive the same rewards upon extraction, and there’s a bonus for the number of players who make it out alive from a mission. Moreover, everybody is working toward the same goal — completing objectives to help liberate planets in an ongoing war. Keeping teamwork in mind, especially for higher difficulties where an organized squad can be the decisive factor in a tough situation, is an integral pillar of the experience.

“I haven’t seen this much love among a community since the Halo 3 days,” Haru Tachibana said over Discord. “[The game] gives everyone a sense of pride of being a piece of the greater puzzle. You see players actively fighting in the world below you and you get the surge to dive down and help them.”

This was supported by Cadrian96, who pointed out the novelty of the narrative around Helldivers 2 being purely player-driven, as opposed to other live service game events where players’ mission results don’t impact the story. “This makes it feel like if we lose, we are all going to see the consequences in a higher enemy count, Stratagem bonus, or different climate conditions on the planets,” he said. This echoes the events of Malevelon Creek and the first unsuccessful mission last week.

Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Most interviewees pointed at the sense of camaraderie as a big uniting force. Eleven of them replied to the questions in character, talking about “doing their part” for the sake of democracy alongside their “fellow divers.” A couple of Discord profiles were entirely committed to the bit, from display names detailing in-game ranks to profile pictures that say “Malevelon Creek Veteran.”

The community has been expanding on the game’s thematic propaganda since its launch, including anything from fan-made posters that gave birth to slogans like “Spill Oil” to the Super Earth Broadcast, a fan-run TikTok account that shares daily updates about the galactic war. Several interviewees said that these community creations convinced them to purchase the game. Most found its satirical perspective was easy to role-play around or create fan-made content that adds to the world-building. Others expressed concerns for those players who are taking it to an extreme.

“Something about Helldivers 2 makes the people taking it too seriously a very big problem,” user ViviGayming said over Discord. “They talk like we’re actually soldiers. I get role-playing — hell, I love the role-playing. But so many people get so into the war aspect that they fail to realize that not everyone cares as much as them.”

She added that there’s been an increase in people who are only interested in watching the numbers go up. Baptized as “Creekers” by the community, they tend to spew toxicity against anyone whom they consider to be “hurting the war effort” by not taking part in Major Orders. Part of this hate has recently been redirected toward developer Joel, who was described as Helldivers 2’s “dungeon master” in an interview with PC Gamer. “The community seems to have latched onto a name and now he’s the face of the galactic war as a whole, which I cannot imagine is good for his mental health,” ViviGayming said.

Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Players have found other ways to combat the hate. The “Super Earth says Trans Rights” Discord server, a queer-led group with 70 current members, is one of several subcommunities that sprawled outward from the official Helldivers 2 server. The channel #bigot-watching collects hundreds of messages and interactions where users in official Helldivers 2 channels (such as the Helldivers official Discord) had insulted members of the Discord using slurs and threatened them via DMs. In screenshots shared with Polygon, these users had explicitly used Nazi speech to primarily target trans and furry folks, as well as using images of related paraphernalia (such as SS uniforms) in their profile pictures. (Developer Arrowhead did not respond to Polygon’s request for comment about any of these issues in time for publication.)

“The problem here isn’t actually the bigots, those are an unfortunate fact of life that can never be fully eradicated,” user Bapanada said over Discord. “The problem is that Arrowhead’s official spaces […] have made the deliberate decision to silence LGBTQ+ voices under the guise of banning any ‘political’ discussion, as if people’s identities are political, and as if this game was not created and marketed as a heavy-handed piece of political satire.”

When Wendy Wilson joined the official Discord, she asked if it’d be possible to have pride flag capes added to Helldivers 2. She told Polygon she’s since been receiving messages telling her to “keep your shit out of our game,” followed by slurs and harassment after she changed her profile picture to the trans flag in protest. After posting a long message in the official Helldivers 2 Discord detailing the events and asking for proper moderation, she was timed out for 24 hours, her message was deleted, and another swarm of people DMed her. “Disallowing discussion only causes lgbt members of the community to hide, while the bigots get to remain,” read an excerpt from the deleted message.

Encounters like this have extended to the game itself. This past weekend, user mechanizedContortion was team killed and kicked from a public lobby after somebody in the squad saw the trans flag in her Steam profile picture. “When I joined I saw him go AFK for a bit, and when he came back he had typed in the chat along the lines of ‘get out of my game freak’ and then killed me,” she said. “He told me after I asked [why he said that] and he said he looked at my Steam profile and that he doesn’t like ‘your kind of people’. He kicked me after that. It was fucking surreal.”

Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

As it stands, interviewees echoed that the opportunity for players to grief one another is “incredibly high” with the way friendly fire works. Some argued that the mechanic adds realism, and clips of accidental kills received with jest contributed to the virality around the game. Others are aware of how kicking and killing teammates is being used in bad faith.

When asked for features they’d like to see to mitigate these issues, users mentioned that being able to report players for griefing or team killing, adding a friendly fire warning similar to that in Rainbow Six Siege, and penalties for going against teamwork could make a difference, among other similar suggestions.

Issues that extend to the community as a whole, however, seem to grow more unwieldy by the day. “The thing about this game is that on the surface, it looks like a game for chuds,” user Rayni said over Discord. “Media illiterate boogaloo boys will take the advertising at face value not realizing they’re the ones being parodied, like people who unironically think Homelander is the hero of The Boys.”

A 21-year-old user, who asked for anonymity, said over email that because tools like the website and API Helldivers.io are exposing the raw data behind the curtain, it’s led to a more meta take on the war. According to this player, details such as liberation rates for each planet have been used to spread hate at others for “not playing the game right,” which has included death threats. The user has since created a separate “brigade,” acting as one of the several subcommunities meant to be a safe and open space for queer folks.

“I care so much for Helldivers 2, and the community I’ve found,” they said, “and I’d hate to see this game become known for its toxicity not being addressed.”