And I’d buy it if they filtered out fag and gay and allowed the recruiting with an warning - a GM saying “gee, guys, I hope you know what you are getting into” rather than a prohibition.
In my experience, the GBLT folk get to choose whether to out themselves by being in a gay friendly group that is generally known to be a gay friendly group (and unless they chose a gay friendly group name, it would take the gossip mill for people to know), and probably have far fewer illusions than Blizzard does about what that will mean. Let them choose.
Ok, I am officially switching my position. It is one thing for a mercenary company to decide we don’t want any sexual behaviuor in our game, at least in public (as it would be impossible to stop in private, during my time playing Camelot I once played a friend’s femal character, the number of a/s/l’s I got was insane), and ban any sexual guild names. It is quite another to program straight sex into the game, as proven by BlackKnight. Blizzard should take steps to remove sex from the game or add “Fag”, “Homo” and “faggot” to its filter list. I still see why they wouldn’t want a group with GLBT above their heads though. As said by another poster, they didn’t allow bukake.
Oh give me a break, elly. There’s so many words that figure into daily conversation that could be used for insult, there’s no friggin’ way Blizzard could filter them all out. That includes non-gay insults. Plus, don’t gay people use the word “gay” themselves? News Flash: sometimes they insult each other too.
You can’t expect Blizzard to get all Gestapo on word usage. If you weren’t so bound and determined to find something to offend you everywhere you look, you might see your blood pressure lowered a little.
I forgot to add this repetition to my earlier post: treating the issue of queerness like it is political, where straightness is not, is precisely the problem. You are the problem - oh yeah baby, that’s right. “But I don’t hate fags! And dykes are kinda hot!” you wail, because bias is never invisible and everything a person ever claims about themselves is accurate.
Well, I believe you. I don’t think you do hate gay people. Instead, I think you’re ignorant of the ways in which your attitude helps those who do hate queer people, and how it contributes to holding back our progress toward true equality. “But it’s such a minor thing!” Most everything that really effects our daily lives is minor. Because you live behind a shield of invisible privilege, you do not see how all the little things add up for those outside of it.
As far as whether Blizzard needs to “cater to that shit” - they don’t need to do anything but allow one word and an acronym in a Guild ad. It requires more effort for them to stop than to allow, so your word choice is invalid.
Comparing it to the abortion issue suggests that you’re not really thinking of real queer people with real lives; you’re thinking of a poll, a debate, an argument you heard people have on TV. Generally, people actually in the process of having an abortion are not gaming on WoW, and generally, the chat is not full of dead fetus jokes, so the need for a harassment-free communal space does not exist - and neither would the enormous double standard Blizzard is adopting with this decision.
You get over it. One reason homosexuality stays controversial is because it remains marginalized. How does the sexual orientation of any character (or any player) change this game? Were the medieval ages completely without homosexuals? Is sci-fi homosexual free? I contend that expanding the filter to derogatory words like fag would help some players feel more comfortable, while not unduly restricting other players–or do you play WoW to exercise some homophobic agenda? Somehow, I doubt it. I could well be wrong.
What conflict would filtering the words fag and such cause? How is that a bad thing? I have never spoken to the GBLT guild names–I could care less about that.
I can even follow the logic of Blizzard to some extent–but I can’t swallow the allowance of those insults.
And just what shit IS Blizzard catering to, to allow sexual slurs in its game?
You really don’t see it, do you? The blatant heterosexuality in WoW IS a political statement, although tacit in nature. It may well be a game, but games reflect current social mores and values. Some fantasy.
You sure are a real good dancer, cthiax. You listed 2 or 3 examples which are lame jokes at best, and not hate speech. It’s not like Blizzard injected rampant homophobia into every NPC encounter, which is the picture you’re painting.
So do you think my point has merit or not? Don’t you think the GLBT guild would be harrassed even more if they were allowed to advertise their sp? And don’t dance this time. I already saw the act numerous times in this thread.
A good point. Sadly, it is moot - I stopped playing WoW a while back, before this story broke, and before I was aware of this policy.
I had planned to buy the expansion pack. I’m now unsure. I won’t say I’m not going to buy it - it is a very good game - so I imagine if I do, then I’d be part of any petition or collective action designed to get Blizzard to change their mind. And any guild which I join or create I’ll make sure references it’s GLBT friendliness when advertising/recruiting.
The problem here is that Blizzard has one set of rules for heterosexual people, and one for homosexual/bi/transgendered people. It’s something we like to call “discrimination”.
I agree.
Negative - it would not bring conflict into the game. That conflict is, as posters have pointed out, already there in spades - have you not read about the widespread use of homophobic non-censored terms? A GLBT friendly guild, allowed to advertise as the same, would allow for a positive approach in a game where negativity is all but pervasive.
Blizzard does not ban one side of that particular argument’s epithets. Blizzard bans racial and general expletives - it does not ban homophobic expletives. Ergo, Blizzard sets the example that homophobia is not as bad as racism or general swearing. Do you agree with this?
The political statement is already there - Blizzard’s policy on non-censorship of sexual slurs is pro-homophobic. The allowing of a GLBT friendly guild, and the advertisment of same, would help to even out that unbalance.
True, so why don’t we stick with racial, homophobic, and general expletives.
Like “fag” for instance? I for one am willing to give up my right to refer to a ciggarette as a fag in order that this potentially homophobic word be censored. I could always use “cig” instead. It’s the same amount of letters!
Let me ask you this; how often do you think people use “fag” to refer to a cig, and how often do you think they use it as “OMG Troy you’re a ganking fag”?
But nigger is banned! And black people sometimes use that to refer to each other! Horrors! The word “nigger” must be immediately uncensored.
Like they have with racist and general expletives, you mean?
Now, I’m actually annoyed. Please, please tell me you aren’t actually saying “People calling each other fags isn’t homophobic! It’s just a term!”. Teenage boys (the usual suspects) use “gay” and terms like that to indicate badness. I very much suggest you rewrite that sentence so it doesn’t make you look like you’re dismissing homophobic comments as being inoffensive.
Your point has no merit, because whether a queer guild would be harassed is irrelevent. The people doing harassing should be the ones breaking the rules, just like they are in every other case. But to answer your question anyway, yes, I think some people might try to get their kicks hassling the homos at first, but that it would become boring once the LGBT friendly guilds became normalized. I also think certainly that the harassment would be easier for players to bear from within a safe community base.
I’ll answer that: yes. Yes, they would. And the answer to that is not to penalize the (potential) victims of the harrasment, but to punish the harrassers. Yes, this creates more work for Blizzard. Too damned bad. They can use some of that eleventy bazillion dollars they’ve made off this game to hire more staff to take care of it.
And the thing is, it’s not even that much more work. It’s pretty much the same work they were supposed to have been doing all along - according to their own po-lie-cy.
I’m not looking for things to be offended by–who has that kind of time or ambition? I am looking to teaching my kids tolerance and to trying to advocate for it within my sphere.
Blizzard is discriminatory–I am sorry to take away everyone’s fun at “dissing” gay folk, but Miller is correct.
AAnd again I ask - what the hell does anybodys sexual orientation have to do with their ability to play a ranger [or whatever] I am NOT looking for a hook up, or a discussion on the best way to blow my husband, or asking some one to do me slower and to the left. I want to kill dragonkin. I want to kill lots of dragon kin [well actually I am currently ganking moonkin for a quest in winterspring right now …]
I dont want to see Bukake or NAMBLA or anything else sexual above anybodies name - no matter what their orientation happens to be. As I said before, I report guildnames like bukake, and people using obscenities [and yes that includes fag] in /general and have taken heat in general about it [though the guy that followed me around barrens for 10 minutes dancing, spitting, chickening and telling me in general, say and whisper all sorts of garbage about my purported sexual preferences vanished all of a sudden , followed shortly by a GM telling me that they had been watching his chat and suspended him for a week with warnings was fairly amusing.]
If more people like ME did petition people using fag, maybe they would add it to the censor list. Go to their forum for devs and pound in the desire to add fag to teh censored list.
And again, I see ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING [checks - yup pit] NEED for sex in any way to be in the game in guild ‘public’ policy. If you and your friends want to privately make a guild, I have no problem. Make a guild webpage and have it part of the application process to mention/discuss/point out that this guild is gay and lesbian friendly. Do it out of the game and I have no problem. In game, there is no reason to discuss it. If someone in your guild bashes fags, then drop them from the guild. I simply dont give a shit if you are friendly or not, if I am not fucking you in real life, I have no need to know or care about your orientation. I will however report people using fag as a perjorative.
If you are not helping solve the gay bashing problem by petitioning, then you are part of the problem in letting the idiots get away with it.
Nothing at all. And if everyone felt that way, this would never have been an issue in the first place. Unfortunetly, for some reason, a lot of people get conniptions over the idea that some people are gay. So there is a need, for some people, to create a group that explicitly forbids that sort of stuff, and they want other people who feel the same way to know about it. And the best way to let people know about it is through the game itself. Not everyone reads the WoW forums. I sure as hell don’t, because that much concentrated stupidity probably causes cancer, or something. (Makes me a little worried about my interaction with Gray Matters in this thread, come to think of it). Now let me ask you, why do you care if people advertise this guild in game? How does it detract from your enjoyment of the game in any way?
I don’t want to see either of those things, either. What’s the connection between them and “GLBT friendly?” Because I’m really not seeing how they relate.
Why is this more objectionable to you than the myriad other non-game related chat that goes on in the game all the time? What makes the phrase “GLBT friendly” so objectionable to you that you insist it not appear anywhere in the game? And how do you weight this against the dozens of references to homosexuality that were included in the game by the designers themselves?
Don’t have much of anything to add here; it’s been said.
Blizzard has way too many sexual innuendoes built into the game (to claim that there’s no issue); Blizzard is failing to treat anti-gay slurs as they do racial slurs. The simple act of advertising for a GLBT-friendly guild should not be against their rules. They dropped the ball on this one. It’s not enough to make me stop playing (plus, they’ve already got 4 more months of my money), but this debacle does not further endear me to them.
[minor hyjack]
The whole “guild advertising” thing is assinine, anyway. I had a friend get me into his guild just to stop the goddamn asking every two minutes. I think they need to make guild advertising in the general chat line a bannable/suspendable offence. There should be a special chat line, or even better, a bulletin board in the cities.
[/m h]
I asked my son and his friend about this whole issue. Turns out the friend’s older brother is in the technical end of the theater business (college at prsent), and so said friend has had it drummed into him to NOT use "fag’ or “faggot”. He says he makes a point of calling others on it while playing. My son has told me that he doesn’t use that word. They both see no problem with the word gay, so there is more work to be done. (I am half of the mind that if “gay” is taken away, some other word will take its place–neither boy uses it as a slur against homosexuality, unlike “fag”. I realize that gays may see this very differently.) I have asked my son to spread the word that “fag” is not cool to those he plays the game with.
He also informed me that he was once up against someone from Japan (or interacting with this person in some way) and as a shortcut, he typed in “jap” in all innocence. He got in trouble by some mod (not sure what the title is of the folks in charge) immediately-strongly warned to not use such language.
So, again, it would seem that Blizzard is quick to denounce racial slurs. I would like to know how to contact the company. I will ask my son, but he is at a sleepover Bday party tonoc. Anyone have a website that I can email? They most likely won’t pay too much attention to me, since I don’t play the game, but it’s worth a shot.
I’m losing sleep tonight because I just read about this issue last night on this WoW-related website (link contains text from the actual e-mails exchanged between Blizzard and Ms. Andrews prior to all the publicity). It was bugging me so much tonight that I had to get up and see what the SDMB had to say about it. You guys never let me down.
Blizzard’s response to this issue is pretty backwards. This is like the cops telling a rape victim that it’s HER fault this horrible thing happened to her. Someone reported this guild because they were offended by something as innocuous as an acronym. This guild got fucked against its will and now Blizzard is saying it’s the guild’s fault it got fucked. It’s just bullshit.
Now, I can’t help but understand that Blizzard has this issue with certain content showing up in public chat channels in the game. I didn’t get the impression that they’re trying to prevent GLBT guilds from existing, they just don’t want folks advertising them on public channels in-game. I personally think it’s BS, but I suppose it’s their prerogative. However, their approach was not to tell the person what the preferred method of advertising was. They didn’t say “Please don’t advertise your GLBT guild in-game on public chat. The appropriate place to advertise would be on your realm forum…” (or wherever they want it, if they indeed HAVE a place where they’d consider it acceptable - I don’t think the discussion went that far). Instead of citing the frigging Terms of Use and how they were so horrificly violated (this still boggles my mind), they could have just said “Hey, we’d appreciate it if you would kindly not advertise on in-game public chat.” That may have resulted in the same response from the player that received the warning, but I’m willing to bet it would have received a slightly better response than threatening to suspend her account for a completely illogical reason. Read the e-mails - Blizzard says what she did was against the Terms of Use, when it clearly is NOT against the Terms of Use, as written.
Someone said “Jesus” in general chat when I was playing earlier today. It offended me because I’m an atheist. It’s funny, though, that it didn’t occur to me to fucking REPORT the person because they said something offensive. WoW is an extension of the real world and we can’t hide from real-life shit in the game. I’ll frequently turn off all my chat channels because I don’t want to read some of the crap that goes on, since I’m fully aware that offensive shit’s gonna be out there. (There was also an ongoing discussion in General Chat earlier tonight about whether the username “Gingivitis” was within the realm of fantasy or not - and I play on an RP server.) I think it’s ridiculous that this guild even got reported to begin with. I know some folks might say “well, if they’re offended by the faggot talk then why don’t they just turn off those channels” … well, I’m sure they probably do, but it’d still be nice to be able to find a group of folks with common interests to chat with in-game without worrying about hearing crap you don’t want to hear. I think Blizzard’s big mistake was not making it clear how one should properly advertise to find folks with common interests in the game, since it’s clearly NOT cool to do it over General Chat.
But nigger is banned! And black people sometimes use that to refer to each other! Horrors! The word “nigger” must be immediately uncensored.