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Gay Guild Recruitment Disallowed From WoW?
Fireball394 wrote with a link to an article on the site 'In Newsweekly'. The article, entitled "Blizzard of GLBT gaming policy questions", discusses the application of a harassment warning on a player who was recruiting for a GLBT guild. From the article: "In her follow-up letter to the company, Andrews explained that there was an obvious misunderstanding and that she was not insulting anyone, but merely recruiting for a 'GLBT friendly' guild. The response from Blizzard was, 'While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that the advertisement of a GLBT friendly guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Sexual Orientation Harassment Policy is to be temporarily suspended from the game. However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning.' Blizzard's stance was clear that recruiting for a guild using 'GLBT' was inappropriate as, the company said, it may 'incite certain responses in other players that will allow for discussion that we feel has no place in our game.'"
I agree with you 100%. Online gaming is a haven for homophobia. The amount of gay-bashing that goes on in in-game chats would be considered intolerable in even the most conservative circles in the real world.
A few years back, a small online FPS game I used to play decided to extend its anti-biogtry policy to protect against gay-bashing. The backlash was severe, and many players left in protest after being repatedly kicked from the game for using offensive language.
Fortunately, the developer running the game stuck with it despite the many rumors circulated that he was gay -- I can't help but admire the fact that he never bothered to defend himself against the rumors. I think he eventually responded in an interview something to the extent of "No, I am not, but I don't feel the need to defend myself against these rumors because I find nothing offensive about it"
Gamers can be so immature. This is probably the biggest reason I no longer game online. These people give the impresion of being 13 years old, and you later learn that they're actually grown adults. Pathetic.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
There's nothing wrong with a gay guild from the perspective of total in-game immersion. Homosexuality is not something artificially created by contemporary society - it will exist in any environment where humans, and indeed other species, are present. There's no republican gene that would cause an elf to magically align his or her self to what is, compared to the number of possible outlooks on life, a relatively narrow band of thinking. However, where nature can only incline you to be attracted to one gender or a combination of the two, then probability says it is definitely going to happen.
Take a mythology with 10 races, all of whom are loosely based on humans. In total, you're going to have as many gays over all as, for example, dwarves. Your argument appears to equate homosexuality (an inherent characteristic) with any of a number of artificially defined concepts, such as religion or political alignment. If it's ok to base a guild around in game concepts, say all those who worship some in game deity, why is it not acceptable to base a guild around concepts which exist both in game and in the real world? Would it be a violation of Blizzard policy to create a race of herbivores? I think not. Why then is it wrong to differentiate between (loosely paralelled) homosexuals (herbivores), bisexuals (omnivores) and heterosexuals (carnivores)? If anything, denying the existence of homosexuality within the world of warcraft reduces its verisimilitude and only serves to alienate people further.
I totally disagree.
The fact is that discrimination against GLTB people is fairly common in WoW. Usually when I'm confronted a person who gratuitously uses descriminatory language, I just tell them to knock it off, and I've had about a 50% success rate with this strategy. Some will apologize and tell you that they have several gay friends, and that they totally didn't mean it like that. Some will tell you about Sodom and Gomorrah and how 'that lifestyle' leads straight to hell, and while I find it quite hilarious that people actually believe that in this day and age, I can see how for some people it would get quite frustrating. Which is why a GLBT-friendly guild has a place on WoW - it would be a place where you can play the game and not have to deal with discriminatory fuckwits. It makes even more sense when you consider that, when you join a guild, you often don't know the GLBT-friendliness of your fellow guildees. And if you do find out subsequently that some of them (especially a guild leader) are not terribly enlightened, you face a tough decision about whether or not to stay with the guild (most of whom may be really good people). I've had this happen to me - I eventually quit, because the guild leader was one of the less enlightened folks. Joining a guild advertised as GLBT-friendly would alleviate all of these problems.
Blizzard has a LONG history of turning a blind eye to assholes and jerks, simply because they're a large portion of their fan base. Every time I reload Diablo 2 I'm reminded of why I remove it; "oh yes, I'm surrounded by scum".
I'm just not sure that there's as much mischief to be made out of this as Blizzard seems to think. What are they going to do, call them fags? Oh noooo.
Braxor begins to cast Bruised Feelings.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
That's actually a good standard to apply. One should look at something that they're doing considering GLBT people and replace the word "gay" with "black", "homosexual" with "african-american", "gay culture" with "hip-hop culture", etc, and see if what you're stating sounds horribly racist. If it does, don't do it.
FSB hits! FSB hits! Your democracy dies. Do you want your possessions identified?
To apply this in more detail, I've "translated" part of the article.
Original poster: OZ [the name of her guild] is recruiting all levels. We are not 'Non-caucasian only,' but we are 'Multicultural'!
Blizzard: While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we feel that the advertisement of a "non-caucasian" guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Racial Discrimination Policy is to be "temporarily suspended from the game". However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning.
Blizzard's stance was clear that recruiting for a guild using "non-caucasian" was inappropriate as, the company said, it may "incite certain responses in other players that will allow for discussion that we feel has no place in our game."
Gamer John Blatzheim, who heard of Andrews' situation, e-mailed Blizzard to express his concern of a double standard that game masters would send her a warning that she could not use "non-caucasian" as an advertisement to express a safe place for black gamers after an incident a few months ago where a drive-by occurred within the game and players yelled in general chat, "Don't trust the n******!"
"Many people are insulted just at the word 'African-American' or any other word referring to race," Blizzard responded to Blatzheim in an e-mail. "Also to discriminate against other players, such as not allowing any caucasians into the guild simply because of their race, could cause extreme offense to a large percentage of our players and should be avoided."
MLK Champions and The Spreading Pride, two large black guilds are currently formulating a letter they plan to submit to Blizzard requesting a more detailed explanation as to the intent of this reinterpretation and execution of the racial discrimination rule. As the spirit of the discrimination rule seems to have been reinterpreted from protecting non-caucasian players, to keeping them silent.
There are various types of servers that players can experience the game on. One of the options is to play on a role-playing server where players actually play as their characters, rather than through their characters. "We have determined that advertising race is not appropriate for the high fantasy setting of the World of Warcraft and is therefore not permitted" was another of Blizzard's responses. Does this mean that if a player has a character on a role-playing server that they play as black that would be violating the policy?
FSB hits! FSB hits! Your democracy dies. Do you want your possessions identified?