How I inadvertently got Karen unbanned on Xbox
I fell down an odd rabbit hole this week – one that involved two words I never thought I’d end up writing in the same sentence: Xbox and Karen.
This journey began earlier this week when I was playing Wasteland 3, inXile’s recently-released (and very good) classic role-playing game. I’m nearly 100 hours into this game, starting and stopping multiple second playthroughs as I struggle to nail down my created characters. The RPG curse, I know.
Anyway, I’d kept an eye on the Wasteland subreddit – as any good video game reporter should – to get character build tips. There I saw something… odd.
Wasteland 3 players were reporting they could not create a character called Karen.
Really!!! Im Disappointed… from r/Wasteland
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Surely this had to be a mistake? I thought I’d test it out, to be sure. So I started Wasteland 3 from Steam, started a new game and created a brand new character. Karen was fine. No problem on PC.
Perhaps it was some console-specific quirk, I wondered? So I booted up Wasteland 3 on PlayStation 4, started a new game and created a brand new character. Again, Karen was fine. No problem on PlayStation either.
Last but not least, Xbox. I booted up Wasteland 3 on my Xbox One, started a new game and created a brand new character, and boom. No Karen allowed.
What was going on?
In order to try to get to the bottom of this , I asked inXile boss Brian Fargo for an explanation. In his reply he sounded as surprised as I was:
“That’s interesting,” he said, “the console’s manage their own filters for input of names so we don’t have control over that. Though I hope they don’t preclude entering the name Polly.”
(The mention of Polly is a reference to a foul-mouthed bird who can join your party in Wasteland 3. Trust me, you want Polly on your side.)
Wasteland 3 – Patriarch of Colorado Gamescom Gameplay Trailer Watch on YouTube
The plot suitably thickened, I thought I’d ask Xbox if they knew what was going on. In the meantime I had a think about why Karen might have been banned by someone at some point. Well, I thought, it might have something to do with the Karen meme. I’m sure you’ve seen this meme on the internet – it’s pretty popular.
