This In Newsweekly article claims that Blizzard cracked down on a World of Warcraft player for advertising a GLBT-friendly guild,
Sara Andrews thought it was a big misunderstanding when she received an e-mail from a game master in Blizzard Entertainment’s popular online role playing game “World of Warcraft” citing her for “Harassment – Sexual Orientation.”
Andrews had posted that she was recruiting for a “GLBT friendly” guild in a general chat channel within the game.
Believing that her notice had been accidentally flagged, she e-mailed Blizzard to correct the problem. Blizzard, to Andrews’ surprise, upheld the decision.
. . .
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.”
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 “GLBT” as an advertisement to express a safe place for gay gamers after an incident a few months ago where a plague occurred within the game and players yelled in general chat, “Don’t get the AIDS!”
“Many people are insulted just at the word ‘homosexual’ or any other word referring to sexual orientation,” Blizzard responded to Blatzheim in an e-mail. “Also to discriminate against other players, such as not allowing any heterosexuals into the guild simply because of their sexual orientation, could cause extreme offense to a large percentage of our players and should be avoided.”
Ugh. This is all too typical of the idiocy that is Blizzard “support.” As Andrews notes later on in the article,
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.
This is just like their selective enforcement of their almost-impossible-to-comply-with naming policy. Blizzard support seems to spend a lot of time worrying about crap like whether CmdrTaco is a legitimate character name or whether “GLBT-friendly” is appropriate, but the general chat areas are flooded with childish antics, inappropriate sexual chat and, as Andrews notes, plenty of anti-gay slurs. Frankly, since you can ignore individual users and filter chat, I’d just create a laissez-faire approach to the in-game chat if I were Blizzard, but if you’re going to enforce content, don’t make the main focus of that policing character names or slamming individuals trying to create a more tolerant environment.
Source:
It’s interesting that when a journalist is injured in Iraq he or she can garner literally hundreds of hours more coverage on the news than a soldier who is killed there.
On the same day Bob Woodruff and his cameraman were injured, a U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, but the media have so far not chosen to run round-the-clock coverage of that tragedy. It’s kind of funny to read things like this, from a Jan. 24, 2006 Wall Street Journal story, While tech-heads have been using the method for the past year or so, tagging is now moving into the mainstream.
I don’t know if there were other services that allowed it at that time (and Lord knows I searched for them), but Macrobyte built an extensive, completely customizable tagging system into Conversant back in 2001. Conversant is the software that runs this site, and I’ve been extensively tagging all the articles I post here and at my other sites since then.
It’s nice to see the rest of the world finally catching up. And if you’re looking for a very forward-looking company for software development, check out Macrobyte. The other day I was wondering what Marvel would follow-up its 40 Years of the X-Men DVD-ROM with, and it turns out my speculation was right. The latest issue of Previews has a listing for a 40 Years of The Avengers DVD-ROM that will “collect over 535 complete Avengers comics spanning September 1963 through December 2005. Scheduled to ship in April 2006.” Suggested retail price is $49.95. In case all of the World of Warcraft posts of late are going right over your head, never fear, there’s Massively Multiplayer Games for Dummies to help sort all of that out.
The book I’d really like to see? IQ Tests for Dummies.
Update: For those of you not hooked on MMOs, let this screenshot serve as a warning. That third line from the bottom reads: Total Time Played: 21 Days, 19 Hours, 56 Minutes, 10 Seconds
That means since May 2005 I have spent almost 524 hours playing just this character — the equivalent of more than three months worth of 40 hour work weeks. My total time played with all my characters is probably a little north of 600 hours.
Do not, under any circumstances, start playing an MMO. You have been warned.
Bob Woodruff Coverage
Conversant — Tagging Since 2001
Next up for Marvel: 40 Years of the Avengers DVD-ROM
MMOs for Dummies
He Who Dies With the Most Levels Wins
