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.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Homosexuality, World of Warcraft | 2 Replies