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Sanitizing Expression In Virtual Worlds

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the speak-and-be-heard dept.

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."

3 of 516 comments (clear)

  1. Sex & Violence by f97tosc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  2. Re:Maybe People Just Want to Play by arkanes · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

  3. Re:::kicks troll back under bridge:: by flyingsquid · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.