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Xbox Live Enforcement — No Swastika Logo
itwbennett writes "It's one of those questions that really should never come up, but as blogger Peter Smith points out, Stephen Toulouse, the head of Xbox Live enforcement, is used to fielding all sorts of strange questions. Recently, one of those questions was apparently 'Can I use a Swastika as my logo in Call of Duty: Black Ops?' When Toulouse responded with the obvious answer ('No, of course you can't, we'll ban you.') he was met with some pushback by people he refers to as 'contrarians' and 'internet pundits' who decided to educate him on the long and storied history of the swastika as a symbol of good fortune and how just because the Nazis used it, it doesn't make the symbol itself a bad thing. Toulouse covers the topic on his blog in a post titled Context and it's an interesting read if for no other reason than to get a peek inside the day-to-day issues the Xbox Live Enforcement team deals with."
The guys tone seems to be that he knows best and that his view is commonly held, and that the people arguing are only doing so for the sole purpose of arguing.
I don't think that's true at all, and while a company certainly has no obligation to assure free speech to all customers of its service, I would expect it to at least be considered, especially when the arguments have a lot of merit.
I mean, if his point is that they won't allow things commonly found horribly offensive then he should have simply stated that, without diminishing the people making the argument. All in all, he comes across like a tool.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
"This isn't gonna stop until Pictionary bans the word 'windmill.' "
While the symbol (and the name) are older, there are many ways to draw the original symbol that barely or superficially resemble the Nazi emblem: From orientation (right or left-facing; the Nazi flag always faced right) to the rotation (the Nazi flag stands on end at a 45% angle) to the color (the Nazi flag is red-white-black).
That implies a hazy line, but it redefines the offense as one of intent, context and of what a reasonable observer would see.
If you draw something like this, you can use the "traditional symbol of luck" defense; if you draw this, then it's a fairly obvious lie.
No one is playing the "Super Hindus" when they use the swastika. It is an inflammatory icon with specific anti-Semitic meaning.
Its use ought to be banned, just as if a group called themselves the "Jew gassers" and tried to claim it was a tribute to a wacky Israeli troupe.
Should anything offensive be banned? Well, MS has decided that they will cater to the lowest common denominator, so that means nothing offensive. These rules are indicated up front, so you don't really have a case that you didn't know about the rules.
Buddhists would say that the meaning of the icon lies in the mind of the one ascribes the meaning to it. Therefore the icon has no intrinsic meaning in and of itself and thus they would have no problem finding another meaningless icon to use in its place.
Nope. I'm a 'brown' person whose country used to be ruled by the Brits. Yes, they unjustly killed tens of thousands (e.g. the Jalianwala Bagh massacre).
However, the Nazis were far worse... 2-3 orders of magnitude worse. The Nazis killed hundreds of thousands of browns as well (e.g. Roma).
There is no comparison. Ban the Nazis!
I bought the game when it came out because I'm unemployed, living in my mother's basement, have nothing else to do, and haven't bought a game in a year or so (besides Civ 5 but that's different).
I love the fact that you can customize your logo. Other than unlocking better weapons, it would be difficult for me to care less about customizing the appearance of the weapons (which you can do) or your character model (which you can do to a limited extent). But somehow, designing your own little logo really appeals to me.
I'm obviously not the only one who feels that way, because there are a lot of really intricately designed logos that people have made. I am always sure to look at everyone's logo when we're sitting in the lobby between rounds to look for interesting ones. You see them each time you kill someone or they kill you, too, so you can keep track of players you're playing with by their logo. Of course, there are a lot of typical design styles that you might expect, like skulls and penises and what not. Even with those, though, it's often amazing the creativity that went into them (using the set of graphics available, it's amazing the different ways people have come up with to illustrate ejaculating penises).
However, for the first several days, there was almost always at least one person with a swastika. Not a hindu or buddhist one - a red, white, and black, rotated 45 degrees, unmistakeably Nazi one. I was in one lobby where no less than three people had them. It's kind of funny actually because, since there's no pre-set swastika symbol, they had to be just as creative when designing their swastika as other people are designing other things.
Now personally, I believe fully in the freedom of expression, and all that. I am not offended by swastikas, even Nazi ones, by themselves. It depends entirely on the context. Here, it's mostly teenage boys donning them. They're ignorant of history and what the Nazi swastika represents, and the crap that spews out of their mouths if they have a microphone only confirms their ignorance. It really does become offensive. And, I don't need my parents (or anyone else) seeing me interacting with a bunch of idiots with swastika logos - the type of person you'd avoid at all costs in any other context, but who are difficult to avoid on xbox live (or playstation online in my case).
I believe they must be doing something about it on the PS3 too, because for the past few days I can't recall seeing any swastikas, and I've been playing quite a bit. From a purely business standpoint, it definitely makes sense to ban things like swastikas. To their credit, that's probably the only thing they're going to care about. There certainly hasn't been a decline in the number of ejaculating penis logos.
What the hell? I really can't scroll down on your site without javascript enabled?
I'm sure your content was compelling though.
Isn't it interesting that Slashdot edits out svastik characters. There is a line of them below
None of the articles seem to mention that the swastika is banned in Germany. As a result, model aircraft manufacturers (Airfix, Revell, etc) don't include swastikas in their decal sheet so they can sell to the international market.
This is the famous picture of Jackie Bouvier (later Jackie Kennedy/Onassis) wearing a Native American costume as a child, complete with swastika. The Swastika is a sacred symbol to many cultures.
Like, you made a whole video game to accurately recreate the violent deaths of people for sport, right?
And you have problems with people expressing their preference for a group that violently killed lots of people?
MORAL DILEMMA!
You know, if the Nazis had chilled out a bit, stopped the whole "let's conquer Europe" thing and the other bit about genocide and racism, established a modern liberal democracy, made friends with their neighbors, but kept the whole swastika business, I don't think anyone would have a problem with it.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
No, the players themselves have the power to create logos. There's a fairly extensive set of graphics (clip art essentially) which you can arrange in any way imaginable - choose the colors, size, arrangement, etc. - to create your logo. Lots of people find creative ways to make penises, and lots of people were finding creative ways to make Nazi swastikas. I made a much longer post about it here already, but you've been modded up, and you're misinformed.
...not someone's personal religious blogspot page. If you haven't been on xbox live, let me fill you in. It is not filled with nice people that have a fun game, then talk about their cultural differences in a calm manner over tea. When you turn on your headset, you hear screaming 9 year olds telling their mothers to fuck off when asked to do homework, then tell you how they are going to teabag your corpse. Then they blast gangster rap in your ears over the mic and make it so your team can't talk to each other. You hear people shouting over the microphone's at each other screaming racial slurs every 2 seconds. In my experiance with xbox live, I saw more racism and hate than anywhere else in my life. So if I saw a clan with a swastika as their logo, *yes* I would automatically assume it was the racist/nazi version. And I would also wonder why in the hell I ever went *back* to xbox live in the first place compared to my relatively tame gaming experiance on pc.
'No educated person on the planet looks at the swastika symbol (...) and says "oh, that symbol has nothing at all in any way to do with global genocide of an entire race"'.
Well, no educated person except a couple of billion buddhists and hinduists. But I suppose they're not educated, since they don't believe in our God.
When you get a city map in Japan, it's often littered with swastikas for all the buddhist temples. I'm pretty sure those have nothing at all in any way to do with global genocide of an entire race.
He could have made his point with a little more respect. I can understand you don't want swastikas on an online video game service that's used by a lot of people from western societies, but he's pushing it a little bit too far when he's talking about contrarians arguing about some innate facts.
The USSR (whose flag you are referring to, lumping them all together as "commies" under that flag might offend a couple of other nations) was especially good at getting it's own inhabitants killed and in doing so didn't differentiate between various ethnic groups, for actual genocides I'd say a citation IS needed.
The Nazis specifically prosecuted and eliminated Jews, gays, lesbians, Roma, handicapped people and probably a slew of other groups that didn't fit into their world view, quite a difference if you ask me.
An innate right? No, they don't. However, if you are in my house, or on my server, I get to make the rules and decide how far my guests are allowed to go when offending one another.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
If you'd ask those people to explain in more detail what they know about the symbol, why it is designed that way and why exactly their 20 people clan so badly wants that symbol as their logo, they would not be able to explain it (or you'd just get a copy of the wikipedia article) - because in reality they actually want the swastika symbol BECAUSE they want to offend people and all tht online game, the game company CAN state that they will ban you for it (free speech does not apply there, same as it does not apply on a private message board).
Absolute fucking cobblers. In nearly every city in Britain and probably America you will find a Mandir and every one will have swastikas. There have been 3,000 people at ours at Deepawali and other similar occasions (not your group of 20), and nobody is shocked, or wants to shock people. Your assertion that a handfull of people want to use the swastika to shock people is absolute crap, a large number of people use it regularly as a religious symbol.
Absolute fucking cobblers. In nearly every city in Britain and probably America you will find a Mandir and every one will have swastikas. There have been 3,000 people at ours at Deepawali and other similar occasions (not your group of 20), and nobody is shocked, or wants to shock people. Your assertion that a handfull of people want to use the swastika to shock people is absolute crap, a large number of people use it regularly as a religious symbol.
That may be, but we are talking about an ONLINE SHOOTER here. The only reason anybody would want to use a swastika in a xbox live shooter (with mostly male teenage players) is not religion, it's the link to nazi Germany.
Please enlighten and list which of the Crusades were held under the banner of the Union Flag.
Half the world is starving - capitalism exports it's misery and pollution to poor countries and robs those countries of there resources. How many people have died of famine - and how often have the people in those countries been living under capitalist goverments? Add those numbers up and then tell me communism is worse. Don't get me wrong, I don't like any dictatorships, but your post smacks of McCarthyism.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Laws
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Zionist_committee_of_the_Soviet_public
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews#In_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_Joseph_Stalin
Would you like any more or can I stop there?
Orwell was an optimist.
Yes, swastikas have a long history of meaning good luck and prosperity all across the world. Yes, I would have preferred the nazis to use the goatse man instead of the swastika, but unless you are in the most remote regions of the Andes, a swastika means nazis.
The twin towers had a different meaning before 9/11, Tiananmen Square used to have a different meaning and so did a lot of other symbols/places/buildings.
And about the trolls who argue otherwise: They don't want to use the swastika cause they are deeply rooted in one of various old cultures or religions. It's because they want to shock people or they actually condone the actions of the nazis.
Long story short: Fuck them. Optionally with a large swastika. Those are cool, after all.
Yeah I tagged it "trident" because why not ban that symbol of eternal evil as well?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Having deaths, events, emotions and other things attributed to them is actually exactly what symbols are for. It's kind of the definition.
Activision made Call of Duty. Microsoft is banning people from Xbox Live. Those are two different parties, and their actions don't (necessarily) have anything to do with each other.
Hard concept, I know, but please try to follow along.
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