Blizzard Gives the Cold Shoulder to GLBT-Friendly Guild

In a strange, and rather eyebrow-raising bit of community moderation, Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, has cited a guild member under their “Harassment – Sexual Orientation” policy.

Sara Andrews did what all good guildies often do: try to recruit members from general chat areas in a game. What she didn’t expect was her message to get flagged by Blizzard moderators as inappropriate. What did she say wrong? Silly Sara mentioned that she was recruiting for a GLBT-friendly guild. Not a GLBT-only guild…not some offensively ‘out and proud’ guild, but a guild that would welcome GLBT members into a supportive gaming environment. Confused, she emailed Blizzard to see if the flagging had been a mistake, and to her further surprise, the company upheld the decision based on a clause in the game Terms of Use that states:

This category includes both clear and masked language which insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation pertaining to themselves or other players.

I wasn’t exactly sure how Blizzard considered the recruitment to insultingly refer to much of anything, although they kindly cleared up that little bit of confusion by also saying that

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.

How kind of them to only issue her a warning.

Rather than foster a community of understanding, Blizzard seems more willing to ban inclusive guilds in order to keep the peace in an already unruly online world. It seems easier, at least in their opinion, to keep things simple, and keep things straight, than to have to deal with the fracas and potentially hateful reactions of other WoW players.

As one reader suggested in the comments to the article when it hit Slashdot, “Blizzard has a LONG history of turning a blind eye to assholes and jerks, simply because they’re a large portion of their fan base.” Oo…unhappy fans in the Blizzard camp. Unhappy indeed.

If you’re interested in this issue, have a good read through the In Newsweekly article “Blizzard of GLBT Gaming Policy Questions” and make darn sure to read the comments on the Slashdot piece, they’re worth their pound in gold. I suspect the debate will have started to wind down now, seeing as this news is, like, so last week, but it’s interesting to think that some feel that the easiest way to protect GLBT players is to keep their existence under the table.