Sanitizing Expression In Virtual Worlds

1up has a piece looking back at the GLBT guild mixup that happened earlier this year in World of Warcraft. From the article: "'... last summer a friend introduced me to WOW, and I really liked it, though I didn't care for remarks many of the players made, like the fact that everything is apparently so gay when it's bad. So I decided to create my own guild, which would be GLBT friendly.' Sometimes singing, other times slogging her way through WOW's exacting echelons to a formidable level 60, Andrews had big endgame plans for her developing guild--until January 12, 2006, that is, when a note from publisher Blizzard blinkered everything."

Comments

Sex & Violence

[f97tosc]

I am amazed by how much fuzz anything related to sexuality is generating. For crying out loud, you are playing a game in which the basic premise, like in most other games, is to kill and plunder. There are no moral problems with this because you are Good and they are Bad. But if someone say "gay", or starts an LBGT guild - then what an outrage. No more is the game good "family" entertainment, no indeed, it needs to be cleaned up, the little ones need to be protected.

Tor

Re:Maybe People Just Want to Play

[arkanes]

Your problem is that you fundamentally misunderstand the concept of a *multiplayer* game. It's not "escapist" any more than playing basketball down at the park is escapist, and "real life" issues are just as valid in WoW as they would be on a basketball court. Gay this and fag that is as annoying in WoW as nigger this and nigger that is at a park. If you want escapism, do it with either solo or with a carefully selected group of other people.

Blizzard, by the way, (and this may change but I doubt it will) does not generally police channel speech, and GMs are incredibly slow to respond to even extremely outrageous actions. So "report people using the word gay" is hardly a reasonable answer. Actively attempting to create an environment that is more friendly is a totally acceptable reaction. I've belonged to a guild were were didn't allow trash talk or l33t speak on guild channel. Thats more or less the same thing as the guild in TFA was doing.

Re:This story is so gay

[Hannah E. Davis]

Is it to get more men to be homosexual or find and support the boys who already are that way? I know plenty of gay guys who are happy to support confused/bullied young homosexuals, but I have never known or heard of any gay people trying to "recruit" straights. All of the gay guys (and girls, for that matter) that I know seem to hold the belief that if they can't even convince themselves to be straight, the odds of them convincing somebody else to spontaneously become gay are vanishingly slim.

Well, I suppose there are probably some who try, just as there are some straight people who try and "recruit" gays... but unless the victim in question happens to be bisexual, very confused about what love is, or a very good actor, it's unlikely to work very well.

Re:::kicks troll back under bridge::

[flyingsquid]

I really wonder about Blizzard though. I wasn't terrifically bothered by the lack of non-causasian humans in Warcraft III; after all the whole fantasy thing is sort of a modified version of medieval Europe, which was pretty white.

But I thought that Starcraft verged on overt racism- the only black characters were the dumb, nose-picking, powerless SCV pilots- basically, the manual laborers. Everyone else is lily-white. Well, OK I think Duran from the expansion was black. And evil.

I don't buy into the concept of political correctness, but I do think that the vision promoted by Starcraft- where there aren't any positive portrayals of non-white humans- was really a step backwards from the vision promoted by Star Trek, where you've got blacks and asians and whatnot serving as equals. It's disappointing that Blizzard seems to be so backwards looking and narrow-minded in the fantasy worlds it creates.

Re:Maybe People Just Want to Play

[Skreems]

> You wat to be gay? Fine. Why do you have to announce that in a game where odds are you'll never even meet any of these people?

1. heterosexual culture, especially among gamer geeks, has an amazing amount of innate homophobia. Everything bad in a game is "gay" this, or "fag" that. The article even says, the impetus to start a LGBT guild was because of the language in the game at large.
2. rubbing it in everyone's face is not the same thing as just being yourself. People shouldn't have to pretend to be something they're not just to play a game
3. the point of the guild is that it DOES let them meet others in the same situation