[Boing Boing: World of Warcraft: Don't tell anyone you're queer](http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/27/world_of_warcraft_do.html) > players who have advertised their guilds as "GBLT-friendly" have lately been warned off by Blizzard moderators, who cite a rule against sexual discrimination in censoring the players. When pressed for explanations, they offer the genuinely bizarre excuse that if queer players are allowed to tell other players about their sexual orientation, that it might arouse discriminatory or unkind remarks from those players, and that would violate the anti-discrimination rules of the game. This is just ridiculous. So people who want to advertise their groups as being friendly to certain people aren't allowed to because some idiots might taunt the members? I would assume that WoW has an age limit and doesn't allow kindergarten age children on their game so why are all players being treated as children who can't either control their bigotry or be called names? I guess the real question is why doesn't Blizzard have a way of dealing with people who actually discriminate or taunt other players? They know what's going on in the game at all times. If somebody calls me a name because I'm a member of a certain group I should be able to tell an admin and the admin should be able to look at the logs and see what the other person said. Then that person should be kicked from the game immediately. Since the threat of physical violence and jail is removed in an online environment, there needs to be another way of keeping bigoted cowards in line and not let them define the acceptable behavior for the group.

This reminds me of what I read about the recent riots in France. Apparently the French position on multi-culturalism is to ignore differences between everyone. That sounds good in theory but in practice what it really does is erase the culture of people who aren’t the mainstream group. So you have people who have had all expressions of their cultural individuality suppressed in favor of the majority. This obviously causes some problems in the long run. If these online games keep pretending that real world differences don’t exist, it’s just going to piss those people off and they’ll find somewhere else to spend their time and money. As these games grow in stature and importance, the ones that find good ways of dealing with the idiots will be the ones that thrive.

Tags: grommes, games, discrimination, glbt, bigotry, warcraft