EA Hates Space Nazis

Spock and Kirk would be relieved.

Everyone in our shiny MIB marble world knows that highly anticipated pseudo-evolutionary game Spore has just been released. Unsurprisngly so have the floodgates of wankery.

While Will Wright laughs and swims through piles and piles of money, the most popular "discussion" point about the game seems to be the issue of DRM -- as in, why the hell does Spore use DRM, especially when the program has already been cracked, why must we install SpyWare on our computers, and why must the software be limited to three installs. Boo, EA. Boo.

The second hot topic is why each copy of Spore can only activate ONE player account. Further fail, for sure. You mean that if I want to battle my brother with penis monsters we have to buy TWO copies? That's $100! Rock Band 2 is only $60, and we get to sing Bon Jovi!

Then there's the Amazon 1.5 Star average. Ouch.

But none of these really compares to the stupidity discovered when some idiot tried to make das master race on his account. (Hey, at least he's not trying in real life.)

So some dude makes space Nazis. He feels special. EA doesn't think so, so they ban his account four 7 days with no warning. Assumedly, they delete his Aryans too. Boo. So someone comes onto EA's official Spore forums to vent, and the topic of his post includes the phrase "third reicht." Everyone laughs silently to themselves about the guy's clear idiocy until they realize he typoed BECAUSE REICH IS BANNED FROM THE FORUMS. Uh, what?

And not only that, but Hitler, Nazi, swastika, Stalin, Osama, and Saddam are banned too, cutely replaced with "SPORE" whenever typed. Of course like on any forum there's typos around that, resulting in clever new terms like "swatty sticks." Oh, Intarwebz.

But back to serious land: last time I checked, the ONLY place in the WORLD where a ban on these terms could be justified is Germany, and even that's a little shaky. But EA is an American company running a site on American soil so ... what gives? Are EA WW2 deniers now? Doesn't everyone know the adage if we don't learn from history we're doomed to repeat it? So why try to erase history from Spore?

Okay, granted you don't want Neo Nazis trying to commandeer everyone else's planets -- even if you DO want them to buy your game. But you kinda have to forsee that potential situation and not react like asshats, especially when you allow Vag and Penii monsters to roam the galaxy. I mean, controversy would only sell more copies of the game, and unless users are truly emitting hate speech, what's the point of banning them?

Users have been suspended so far for making Obama creatures (using the default person tools -- it's not anyone but EA's fault that when you change the skin color the creature looks like something out of an 1890's travel book) and for making German tanks ... what next?

You guys created the game. You made it expansive enough to create anything. Deal with it. But don't try to rewrite history.