“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” ring any bells for ya?
Except that they have lots of references to “sexual issues” written into the game. How many quests revolve around avenging some NPC’s dead spouse? There’s a multi-part subquest in the human starting zone where the player faciltates a love affair between the son and daughter from two feuding farm families. Fuck’s sake, the female night elves practically do a pole dance when you type /dance! Blizzard has no problem with expressions of heterosexuality in their game at all. They only have a problem with expressions of homosexuality. Yeah, it would make waves, but putting the onus for that on the people being harrased is spectacularly unjust, and about the most blatant display of moral cowardice imaginable in the context of an online video game.
As a long time player and also a GM for online games, I’d like to add my 2 cents. FTR, I’ve not played WoW but am speaking from my experiences in other games.
I tend to be much more of a role-player than a roll-player so I would join a gay group, if my character were gay. Any game that has mechanics for forming personal relationships, intimate bonds, marriage etc (as many do) shouldn’t have a problem with gay characters, or groups comprised of gay characters.
When it comes to forming a guild based on the RL characteristics of players, I have a bit of a problem with that. As was mentioned, a game is escape from real life. Elements of that game should reflect an in-character outlook.
As to the company having the ability to monitor chat etc; saying that they can’t is utter and complete bullshit. They may choose not to, or not have the staff for it at the moment. But to say that they don’t have the ability is crap. To say the system can’t alert staff to someone using the term faggot, that is also crap. They can setup alerts for anything they choose to.
Personally I find it hilarious that anyone could conceivably get their panties in a twist about “unneeded and unnecessary reference to sexual issues” in a videogame without having their head explode from irony. As a medium, videogames probably rank second only to music videos in the number of unnecessary sexual references. Heck, the World of Warcraft web site prominently features a night elf who’s not wearing enough clothes to ward off pneumonia, let alone an angry orc. But that’s a sexual reference that doesn’t seem to be infused with The Gay, so that’s just hunky-dunky.
Yeah, I think you have. You want Blizzard to give you some affirmation against the big bad death machine, to take sides in your glorious struggle. It’s not about your sexual preference, but about the ridiculous politics of sexual preference in this country.
You want some damned recognition. And they’re right to say no. As far as I can tell, nothing is stopping you from starting a guild and chatting openly therein about your sexual preference. Nothing is stopping you from climbing atop the nearest piece of rendered landscape and yelling, “We’re a gay guild, gay as a lark! Only join us if you’re gay! And we don’t mean John Hughes-Sixteen Candles ‘tahts ghey’ gay, we mean like REALLY gay. We mean like Liberace gay.”
But then you wouldn’t have your label. And what’s a political struggle without labels. You don’t need that guild so that you can know that you’re gay…you need it so that OTHER people can know that you’re gay. You want to make a statement, and have Blizzard at least tacitly endorse it.
I don’t see that Blizzard has fucked you over any more than they have guilds that might have been called “Bush Sux,” “Jesus Is Our Sacred Lord,” “The Hetero Breeder Straights,” “The Abortion Clinic Bombers,” “The Rusty Coathangers,” “The Digital Jihad,” or the “Fallujah Hacksaw Video Boyz.” Real life is an appropriate place for these topics, but maybe video games aren’t. And if you bring it there, I think it’s foolish and more than a little self-absorbed to think that the developers of the game will help you carry your flag.
In sum, this isn’t a gay/straight thing. It’s a politics thing, and your OP makes that pretty damn obvious.
(My opinion on the profligate use of ‘gay’ and ‘faggot’ is that it should be treated like an ethnic slur…an opinion that seems natural but is no doubt owed at least in part to the relentless consciousness-raising of the GLBT community, which has politicized the living fuck out of the issue for years.)
Again, the guild in question was not “gay-only,” but “gay-friendly.” The only RL characteristic involved was that the members of the guild not be homophobes.
Why was I under the impression that the guild in question wanted “LGBT” appended to their guild name? Well, in that case Blizzard is out of it’s fucking gourd. :o
Ignore me, I may have been poisoned by the tuna fish sandwich.
Are you implying that a gay person of the appropriate orientation wouldn’t find a night elf female attractive? Or would she have to have a mullet and Doc Marten greaves?
My $0.02 is that I am not at all surprised by Blizzard’s decision. They are in the business of making money. It seems (I have never played WoW, but have played other MMORPGs where I did not notice the complaint of the OP) that many of the paying customers of WoW enjoy the use of the word ‘fag’, and would probably not like an openly gay guild. This could cause Blizzard a few problems; loss of business, harrassment for said guild and the customer service issues associated with it, and bad publicity by certain groups who do think being gay is a sin. Why would Blizzard risk their business so a certain subsect of people could be happy? Yes they may be ‘cowards’ but they aren’t in business to do anything but make money, not help the valid civil right movement of G-L-B-TG people.
I also agree with some posters who thought cthiax was a little over the top in his treatment of Martin Hyde (which seems to not have bothered him at all), and I don’t think his first post was all that jerky. Mayhaps Martin Hyde has shown himself to be anti-gay in the past (I have no idea if this the case), and cthiax and Miller are aware of this and therefore reading more into his post?
I understand that, but that doesn’t detract from my comment that it should reflect whats going in the game as opposed to RL. If there are elements to WoW that would reflect that the characters themselves are gay or not, then a guild like that is completely appropriate. I also realize that many people are completely unable to seperate RL from IC interaction, so that of course adds another layer to the topic.
Nope. I am, however, implying that wringing one’s hands over “sexual issues” in a videogame ignores a giant elephant in the room. Namely, the fact that “sexual issues” only seem to be a problem when they’re unambiguously gay sexual issues. Scantily-clad night elves don’t set off the same shrieks of alarm because they happen to titillate stereotypical 14-year-old heterosexual boys.
Yes, they also no doubt titillate lesbians. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that lesbians were the last thing on the mind of whoever drew that elf on the WoW web page, unless they were the kind of lesbians that only appear in porn films when the soundtrack goes “boom chikka bow-wow”…i.e., the fictional lesbians that only exist to support the fantasies of heterosexual men.
I don’t feel that “being in business to make money” makes one immune to criticism for ethical decisions made in the pursuit of profits. Blizzard has decided to cater to one subset of their customer base at the expense of another subset. Obviously, this is going to be unavoidable in any sort of business. When McDonalds stops selling its McRib sandwich, it’s favoring the subset of its customers who want a new sandwich over the subset that really likes the McRib. But the subset to which Blizzard is catering are bigots and homophobes. I think any company that caters to those sorts of people is deserving of criticism. Moreover, if enough of their customer base complains about Blizzard’s decision, there’s a good chance that they’ll reverse their decision. If they truly are as mercenary as you say they are, then the best way to change their behavior is to appeal to their wallets. If they perceive that there are more people who are pissed off over this rule than are pissed off over the gay guild, Blizzard will remove the rule. It worked recently when Ford decided to pull its advertising from gay publications, there’s a good chance it will work here.
Not everyone who plays the game is interested in heavy role-playing. In fact, I’d based on the number of RP servers as compared to PvP and PvE servers, I’d say they make a distinct minority of the people who play the game. Besides, even within the construct of the fictional world of WoW, characters themselves could be played as homosexuals, and those characters whould be no less likely to seek a guild that accepts gays than would be the players who control them.
No, gay kids commit suicide (at a rate vastly higher than their heterosexual counterparts) because of the endemic homophobia they are confronted with on a daily basis, of which Blizzard’s policy is one more example.
It sounds to me like we’re saying essentially the same thing, just in different ways. As I said before, I speak from my own experience. I realize my gaming background may not be representative of anyone else.
I would note that my Alliance guild was founded by a gaming buddy I’ve known for over ten years. It includes mostly people I know personally (and most of the exceptions are personally known to other guild members). We have a group of affiliated small guilds (of which we are one of the smallest) that we do high-end raidgroups with, which consist of people who we don’t find irritating as players.
What’s going on in the game is that a bunch of friends are getting together to play the game, and we’re using the tools we have for facilitating that. Because I know the members of my guild personally, I know that that’s a place where I won’t be on edge or be exposed to stuff I find hostile. If I were on the game without having friends I wanted to play with (highly unlikely, but as a hypothetical), I would be interested in groups that I was confident would not display hostility to me as a person, because I, as a person, don’t enjoy spending time in a hostile environment.
I’m totally with you on that. It’s a lot easier to form groups with people you know. I was speaking to a guild in game, with a written charter that SHOULD be written for and from the perspective of the characters. There can be a lot of blurry lines between RL and IG, I’m totally aware of that. However, when we’re talking about GM sanctioned guilds, it should follow IC guidelines. It may sound like I’m arguing both sides, but that comes from my answering the issues from both a player and a GM perspective, all of which are colored by my own past and experience.
