Acceptance of Racism and Homophobia... WOW.
The rampant racism and homophobia present in normal, accepted Warcraft banter is literally disgusting. I'm fully aware that the humor of ironic controversial extremity is culturally "in", but I'm not talking political correctness infractions here... I'm talking about overt harassment, discrimination, and slurs - packaged with even more hate and ignorance than a high school gay comment. The Warcraft environment accepts and breeds hate if even some of the smartest people I know from liberal Madison, WI can be heard spouting juvenile, hateful language they'd never utter (I hope) in the real world.
Read a firsthand account of gamer racism here.
Checkout MSNBC's coverage of Warcraft's gay rights uproar here and an article called "Game Operators Face Social Responsibilities in their Online Utopias" here.
Read a firsthand account of gamer racism here.
Checkout MSNBC's coverage of Warcraft's gay rights uproar here and an article called "Game Operators Face Social Responsibilities in their Online Utopias" here.
posted by Kyle at 12:29 PM
4 Comments:
WoW isnt the only place people are racist. I have a human warlock on deathwing and used to be a part of a guild called Trivium. we used to make jokes about emos, gays, jews, and other things. we used these jokes to bond together and we all became good friends. maybe you should just accept that people are only joking.
If I see that kind of banter happen I will speak against it, but the thing about online is you feel protected by the anonymity so people will say what they wouldn't say in person. It isn't that there are more racists in WoW, it's that those racists have more serious repercussions for speaking that way in real life, so they don't. A stranger chewing you out online for a slur isn't nearly so hard as say, your neighborhood identifying you as the local racist. As for guild chat.. that crap would get you kicked from my guild. So just as in real life there's a huge variety of people, and also among circles. This is only another tidbit of yours that is inflating the problem and making blanket assumptions about 9 million varied individuals in the WoW community. I can personally assure you that every time someone is racist or bigoted, for every remark that reflects the sentiment, there's one or two that lash out against it. When was the last time you saw that kind of outcry in a group of people visiting in real life? I've heard hate talk in real life where there was no protest whatsoever, or if there was it was just me. :-) I do pick my fights though!
I dont know my servers seem to have a history of being free wheeling with the racist jokes. I've even been kicked out of guild for telling people in guild chat why what they weren't saing wasn't cool. I found the racism in the game more interesting than insulting though. I also think there is a definite denial about a lot of the racist stuff that goes on in mmorpgs I mean jokes are one thing and we can all laugh at chapelle like satire, but I'm sure some of the stuff at least part of the time what wer'e actually seeing/reading is real racism which must often be supressed in the world since it has become such a taboo subject.(And an easy way to get your ass kicked and lose friends.)
If anyone has any anecodotes or experiences of minority interaction I would love to hear them (Research Paper) leave me a comment or shoot me email at my website aniggaincyberspace
I didn't know how bad it was until my gay friend decided he wanted to meet more LGBT people in wow.
Posted that he was looking for LGBT friends and WOW.
A torrent of spamming, badgering, and unbecoming comment flew.
In less than a full day, it had 4 pages of post.. NOT one of which were remotely complimentary.
I was so utterly disgusted at this, I informed blizzard.
With a cookie cutter response and a washing of hands to the whole ordeal.
They choose to do nothing.
Some even openly admitting the ONLY reason they were posting there was because he asked for an "LGBT" friend. If it had been anything else, they wouldn't have bothered..
Personally, I think I'm going to go play something else now.
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