Of all the things you could accuse Donald Trump of, maining Hanzo in Overwatch would seem to be relatively minor. But Nuisance PAC is up to far more than just accusing Trump of being obnoxious. His behavior, they note, is fairly consistent with the irritating trolls that drag down every game.
Overwatch, if you haven’t played it, is a team-based video game where players need to work together and be flexible in both what characters they play and the strategy they use in order to win. Needless to say, being a selfish, whiny player is a good way to get everyone to hate you in the game. You get one guess what role Trump has been cast in.
This is the brainchild, unsurprisingly, of the team behind Cards Against Humanity. One of the company’s cofounders had a grandfather shot down over Germany during World War II who formed a “nuisance committee” to make the lives of the German soldiers overseeing them harder without getting killed. Hence, Nuisance PAC, which is doing things like announcing Trump’s tax avoidance outside O’Hare Airport with a massive billboard. The site is fairly hilarious, putting common troll statements like “The other team is using hacks!” or “My controller is broken!” and tucking Trump complaints, underneath them, from his complaining that the election is “rigged”,despite that being pretty much impossible, to his insistence that his microphone was the real problem at the first debate.
But underneath it all, it does ask gamers a fairly important question: Do they really want the kind of person they can’t stand dealing with in a video game actually running the country? Gamers probably aren’t going to push the election, but this might just give them pause in the voting booth.
