TICKTOK Velma is the smartest and most put-together member of the Scooby-Doo gang. And while she can’t see a thing without her glasses, she’s absolutely the most likely member of the squad to solve any given mystery. However, in MultiVersus, the Super Smash Bros.-like fighting game filled with Warner Bros. characters, she’s a total narc — or, rather, she was.
One of the strangest aspects of Velma’s character in MultiVersus was her ability to summon the fuzz after solving a mystery (which simply involved collecting clues around the arena). A police car would then roll up on Velma’s victim, throw them in back seat, and attempt to drive them off the stage. Is that a funny idea in concept? Of course it is. Is it funny in practice to watch a cop car roll up and start wreaking havoc in the year 2022 in a game with Black characters, including real-world people like LeBron James? Not so much.
In America, police distrust is at an all-time high, with some cops finally facing punishments for criminal actions committed on duty, and many more getting away with obvious abuses of power because they wear the badge. It’s clear now to many Americans — although this has long been obvious to marginalized and oppressed folks in this country — that the police are not the “good guys” they are depicted as in shows like Scooby-Doo.
It’s with that slow but steady cultural shift in mind that some MultiVersus players winced at the choice to have Velma call the cops — a small group of fans even started an online petition to remove the cops from Velma’s ability, and replace it with the Mystery Machine. And that’s exactly what Player First Games did.
In Thursday's patch, the notes included this bit about Velma’s passive ability: “Instead of calling the police, Velma now solves the mystery and calls the Mystery Inc. gang and the Mystery Machine to take the bad guys away.”
This change may seem small, but it takes away some gloom from an otherwise silly ability while still keeping its charm. Instead of the heat rolling in to do god-knows-what to Jake the Dog, LeBron James, or Steven Universe, Fred and Daphne will simply run them over in their hippie van. Same result, committed by fun cartoon characters instead of armed state employees.
As the petition calls out, the police aren’t necessary to MultiVersus’ gameplay or even the in-game spectacle of a character calling in a whole-butt car to do their bidding. So it’s nice to see Player First Games work to improve an issue that inadvertently sends the wrong message to players and makes a group of fans uncomfortable while playing an otherwise silly cartoon fighting game.
The author btw:
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Reddit reactions:
https://old.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/x97aou/velma_is_done_calling_the_police_in_multiversus
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I don’t understand how you can hate
fun and be a games 
journ*list. Seems like an oxymoron
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It's when you go to journ*lism school, but all real publications realize you're a mediocre writer at your best, and you're not even good at being a partisan hack (you lack the sneaky deceitfulness to properly propagandize). So the best you can do is just vomiting out mask-off propaganda writing about media and hope your editor comes up with a provocative enough title for people to click on your nonsense that just clutters up the digital space. They never enjoyed or understood the media they "write" about in the first place. Their content gets mogged in both quality and audience size by people with actual passion for these things who make videos or write blogs in their basement or spare bedrooms. They will never be real journos. At least they will certainly not be happy doing it for terrible wages, as the hope slowly fades of the dream of ever having a real respectable journ*lism career. They desperately grasp at their bluecheck as their one sign of legitimacy, something people tend to ignore when you have 1k followers and only spew r-slurred takes onto Twitter all day anyway.
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Being a game's journ*list is kinda like being a cop. It's a shit job in shit conditions, but at least you get bribes and the joy of messing with people.
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Basically they wanted to be an art journ*list but nobody wanted them.
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An industry where failed movie directors wrangle failed codecels and failed artists into making a product peddled by failed salesmen, reviewed by failed journ*lists and lets-played by failed humans. And they wonder why their audience are the very dregs of society.
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