An exploit in Activision-Blizzard’s popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II is allowing people to inject disturbing videos into multiplayer matches and show them to other players without warning, according to several accounts in the StarCraft II community and one player who talked to 404 Media. Some of the videos people said they saw in game include real footage of a mass shooting in a supermarket and a video with rapidly flashing lights, seemingly an attempt to trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy.
“We loaded up with a few regulars and some randos who I didn’t know,” a user named Tad0422, who saw one of these videos said, said on Reddit. Tad0422 said they were playing a custom map called Monobattles, which is shared via Starcraft II Arcade, an official hub for sharing custom StarCraft maps. “About 3 min a video appeared on my screen. I have never seen this before but it took up the whole screen. It was a Russian pop video or something that played for 20 seconds or so. Most of us were talking in chat about what the heck was happening.”
“Then about a minute later a video pops up with a guy entering a store with a [StarCraft user interface] over the video and ghost emotes playing,” Tad0422 continued. “I was talking with the others in the game trying to figure out what was going on. I then realize he is murdering people and shooting people in the head. At this moment I freak out and hard close out of [StarCraft II]. My 5 year old daughter was in the room with me, half paying attention to me playing a video game.”
After Tad0422’s post got some attention on Reddit, other players chimed in to say that they’ve had similar in-game experiences in StarCraft II over the last year. In the same Reddit thread, one user said he saw an “epileptic screamer,” referring to a kind of jumpscare video with rapidly flashing images. A couple of days ago, a user on the official StarCraft II forums said they saw a swastika appear on screen during a game, and another Reddit user reported seeing the same. Posts on Reddit and the official forums that are now a year old say that some games, all in the Arcade mode, crash the client entirely.
Tad0422 told me that he reported the issue directly to Blizzard.
“I have also reached out to the ESRB and FCC to file complaints,” they told me. “My goal is not to punish anyone, just to get this fixed.”
Judging by posts in the StarCraft II community over the last year, players are convinced that the issue isn’t with any particular Arcade map, but the way the game handles “lobby titles.” Players can name the lobbies they are hosting in Arcade mode, and players think that this field is being used to execute code that is loading up the images and videos and crash the game.
Blizzard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While what’s happening in StarCraft II at the moment is particularly nasty, this type of in-game harassment is nothing new to online games. My first encounter with this type of behavior was in early versions of Counter-Strike, where players spray painted hentai gifs on to the walls of de_dust. Last year, I wrote about how Team Fortress 2 “botters” similarly exploited the game to go after their critics. Online games are much like other internet platforms in that they host large communities of people and require constant and costly moderation and upkeep. Unlike Instagram or Twitter, however, they are not financially supported by ads that can pay for the continuous work of maintenance and moderation, which is why online games are often taken offline by their publishers or are quietly neglected. Earlier this month, for example, PC Gamer reported that Star Wars Battlefront 2, a hugely important game to publisher EA when it launched in 2017, has been “unplayable for days” because it’s been overtaken by hackers.
