Online Game Addresses Gay-Rights Uproar

[FVZA_Colonel]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060215/ap_on_hi_te/warcraft_uproar



Online Game Addresses Gay-Rights Uproar
By MAY WONG, AP Technology Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A gay-rights uproar in the popular "World of Warcraft" online game has spurred the game's maker to review its treatment of gay players.

The game, which draws more than five million players worldwide, was hit by controversy last month after a player was threatened with expulsion from the virtual Warcraft world when she sought to recruit others into her gay-friendly team.

Blizzard Entertainment, the game's maker, apologized last week to the player, Sara Andrews of Nashville, Tenn.

It said the warning was a mistake and that it will make some changes to prevent a repeat, Andrews and her attorney from the Lambda Legal civil rights organization said Wednesday.

[keopeli]

1. Sounds like she got an automatic warning designed to prevent and deter...

people who try to start a group with illicit language in the title. "Gay" is certainly a potential word on that list.

I think this is a non-starter. Everybody did the right thing here to catch and fix a problem.

[Canuck55]

3. Yeah, Blizzard did it right.

I've been in online gaming for 6 years now, including WoW. The biggest misconception is that gaming is a teen market, the average age of PC gamers is 24-30, due simply to the costs involved ($50.00 to buy a game and/or monthly costs of usually 14.00/month for online games, let alone hardware costs vs. platform systems).

It is still common to see gay used as a derogatory term every day in every mmorpg i've ever played. Blizzard's stance from release was to basically ban the term outright, because they know it is meant as derogatory 99% of the time. I was actually dissapointed to see John Aravosis bite into this story originally for its big 'anti-gay' angle of deleting the guild because they were gay oriented, when really Blizzard, albeit in total cover your ass fashion, was on his side. They took a zero tolerance policy towards gay-bashing. So i commend them for moving to accept her stance once they were presented with the facts that they were indeed a gay-oriented group.

You also have to keep the scale in mind here, i know the majority on DU here don't play many mmorpg's. For years an online game was lucky to have 50-100k subscribers. World of Warcraft has 5 million after 15 months from release, so this issue was inevitable, it was just never before affecting enough attention based on the subscriber numbers.

[sleipnir]

2. This is probably a huge misunderstanding. The few game programmers I know

are extremely liberal and would in no way try to discriminate against anyone. I agree, it seems like some code was written in to actually prevent abuse of the word into a negative connotation.

[Canuck55]

4. No, its not a coding/filter thing

Blizzard has a team of <Game Masters> in the game that are either Blizzard employees or long time 'loyal' players that review complaints case-by-case. They don't filter out code or anything, they wait until live players file online complaints, then they address each one individually. This boiled down to an employee GM going through a S.O.P. of looking at the guild name, determining it violated the rules, and suspending the guild name.

[Bassic]

5. Well the guy who deleted that one

probably got one hell of an ear-full.

[jumptheshadow]

6. Hooray for Lamda Legal

Good for them for sticking up for the right of a gay friendly guild to exist and to advertise. I hope other games get the message. I also hope some of the African American organizations start to warn game companies that allow racist slurs to be used against players without penalty.