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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.'"
This cannot possibly backfire in any conceivably way.
Way to go, clowns!
Let's see... because doing this MIGHT cause other players to harass and discriminate GLBT folks, Blizzard will head this all off by discriminating against GLBT folks.
So now you're allowed to go around calling other people and things gay, but refer to yourself that way, and you're in trouble.
Quality ideas here.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I wish they could come up with a better acronym. I always read it as "Gilbert", which probably isn't the intention.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
So why can't this other persona be gay?
I may have something wrong here, but it seems as though the company is blaming the gay player for harassment that might come from other players. That would be like banning women from playing so that men don't harass them. It seems pretty backwards to me.
San Francisco Photographers
why should your orientation be brought into a game that has nothing to do with sex?
:)
Take a look at the promotional art for any female character in the history of fantasy and tell me that's not true
Christian guilds, why should other communities be blocked.
From TFA:
Sara Andrews has stated that she will not be renewing her World of Warcraft account due to Blizzards lack of support for a GLBT friendly environment, "It seems to be OK for general chat to be flooded with, 'That's so gay!' and 'I just got ganked! What a fag!' yet advertising for a GLBT friendly environment where we don't have to deal with such language is deemed inappropriate."
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But I don't see any links about "Damn republicans! Stupid GOPs!" or anything like that. If done right it can be a positive thing, and people see that there are gay gamers out there. A thing more rare than women it seems. It doesn't have to be an isuse, it can be a positive thing. Instead of grouping with a bunch of people who just yell anti gay slurs and being a closet-case-ork.
The problem is the society, you can't take the issues of contemporary life out completely, and it never hurts to group up with similar people so you don't have to worry about those issues either.
What blizzard has done has simply left those issues in.
I guess you think they should sit back down and take the abuse silently like good little homosexuals... I can't believe this received a +4 Insightful on Slashdot.
Gay
Lesbian
Bisexual
Transgender
No. Would some of you dense people read the fucking article? The guild was formed because WoW is rife with homophobic abuse. Yes, Blizzard has a policy against it but it is not enforced. And the guild is "GLBT Friendly" not "GLBT ONLY." What does GLBT Friendly mean? It means guild members can rest assured that they will not receive homophobic harassment from other guild members. It does not mean this is some sort of "gay sex club." Get a fucking grip.
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.
Everyone who plays WoW is gay.
No, WoW just reveals latent gender-identity issues in our youth. Why else would almost all of America's male teenagers want to play a female night-elf?
"While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that parking your bright red 2006 Ferrari F430 Spider is very likely to result in the theft or vandalism of a car that may not have occured otherwise. If you look at our local and state laws, you will notice the suggested penalty for parking bright red sports cars in seedy neigborhoods is to temporarily jail you. However, as you are just an arrogant, rich prick, this penalty has been reduced to parole and 1000 hours of community services."
Seriously though, this situation is ridiculous. Blizzard is punishing the wrong people here. Harassment of any player (gays, lesbians, straights, americans, canadians, jews, muslims, etc) should not be tolerated. Blizzard apparently has a "Don't ask, Don't tell" policy when it comes to diversity.
-William Brendel
So because an offensive act is accepted within a given subculture, we should always just sit back and accept it?
My understanding is that slaveholding was pretty universally accepted in the antebellum South. Does that mean that everyone should've just gotten over that and waited for the fad to change on its own?
(No, I'm not claiming that calling someone a fag is the same scale of badness as holding them in lifelong servitude. But I'm pointing out that societal acceptance is a crappy sole standard for the condoning of oppressive discrimination.)
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.
A lot of people miss the point. Thankfully, other slashdotters get it and have clarified the point in these comments. To me, it seems clear that Blizzard is trying to prevent people from fighting by preventing them from getting to know one another...but they're doing so inconsistently. "For your protection, we are not going to let you identify yourself as being gay." But not... "For your protection, we are not going to let you identify yourself as being xxxx." where xxxx is anything else that might make a person a target for harassment: Christian, Jewish, African-American, Muslim, French, female, etc. The guilds in question are not GLBT-exclusive. They don't prohibit heterosexuals from joining. They essentially have a code of conduct that they make clear in their recruitment efforts. Given the ubiquitous "ghey" and "fag" comments seen in every chat channel in the game, GLBT-Friendly translates to: "We do not tolerate harassment of GLBT people or slurs against them. If you cannot abide by this policy, don't even ask to join our guild. If this policy is acceptable, we welcome you." Why is that different from "We do not tolerate foul language in our guild channel, regardless of the built-in language filter."? It isn't about sex. It isn't about bigots. It isn't about religion. It's about Blizzard's vague and inconsistent application of their own policies in a manner that looks a heck of a lot like discrimination.
"Gay" and "Fag" are common parlance of annoyance and insult with the younger set.
Yeah, and it makes people who are gay really uncomfortable to have those words thrown around as insults. It's hard enough to come out in the first place; I can't imagine what it would be like to come out if everyone I knew was clearly hostile to my sexuality because they used those words as insults all the time.
What's your ethnicity, what's your kink? Search and replace "gay" and 'fag" and so on with "wop" or "kike" or "Jap" or "nigger" or whatever term is instant fighting words, when applied to you. Looks like a pretty hostile environment, doesn't it?
I've actually gotten younger people I know to stop saying "That's so gay" when they mean "that's stupid" by pointing out that, hey, I'm gay, and it hurts every time they do that.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Oh and gays, no walking hand in hand, that might upset people. White and blacks kissing in public, no sorry, could lead to scenes.
What you suggest is a very slippery slope. You are giving in to the haters. How far are you prepared to give in? What race/religion/orientation can be told to keep quit before you will say enough? Or will you only cry out when it is you who is being told to behave.
No this stuff makes me sick. People like you in my eyes are worse then the open haters, I rather deal with ten neo-nazi's then with one person who says to not upset them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.