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BAD IDEAS FROM SMART PEOPLE

Long Overdue: Blizzard Removes “Homosexual,” “Transsexual” From List of Blocked Profanity in World of Warcraft

by Susana Polo | 11:47 am, January 26th, 2012


The big news on the Blizzard front yesterday was that they’d decided not to have a BlizzCon in 2012; that is, the large fan convention at which the titan (ha ha insidery Blizzard joke) of the gaming community makes the biggest of its big announcements. The reasoning was that with three games/expansions expected to drop within the next year and a half, the company’s time would be better spent working on them and, moreover, they just didn’t have anything really exciting and new to show.

But there was a tidbit of smaller news that we feel is still important to highlight. Blizzard was successfully pressured to remove “homosexual” and “transsexual” from the list of words that the in-game profanity filter of World of Warcraft automatically blocks.

World of Warcraft‘s profanity filter defaults to the “off” position, and when turned on, automatically replaces certain words with cartoon-typical exotic punctuation. A recent bug, however, resulted in the filter being turned to the on position at every log in, consistently showing a lot of players who’d never tried out the feature exactly which words it did and didn’t permit. This is undoubtedly what caused a lot of people to realize that the profanity filter doesn’t let you say “homosexual” or “transsexual.”

Blizzard’s attempts to keep drama out of the game have not always been the best when it comes to the LGBTQ community. Allow me to quote myself in explanation:

The idea that banning the use of LGBT terms entirely is a good way to protect users from harassment is one that has a number deep flaws in it. Primarily, it doesn’t work because you can’t tell someone that they can’t do something on the internet.

Otherwise, banning a term that a minority uses to describe itself in many ways renders that minority invisible and incapable of fully representing itself. Blizzard ran afoul of this problem in 2006, when one of its moderators threatened to punish a player who was advertising her (World of Warcraft) guild as LGBT friendly, because of a context neutral ban on using LGBT terms in public chat channels [in order to prevent harassment]. After a considerable amount of controversy including a letter from Lambda Legal, Blizzard publicly stated that the player would not be penalized and that the warning was a result of “unfortunate interpretation” of their harassment policy

Secondarily, banning words that communities use to self-describe symbolically removes their ability to self-identify, which is also a pretty crap idea. LGBT friendly guilds have become numerous enough in WoW to put on a yearly in-game Pride Parade on the Proudmoore server (what better server name, really?) complete with plenty of pink shirts and tabards.

Blizzard reacted quickly as soon as the issue was pointed out, with a community manager responding: “We’ve reviewed our filter list and there are a few words there that should not be blocked as profanity; we’ll be removing them in a future patch.” This is not entirely inconsistent with Blizzard’s policy towards offensive content. For example, the company has made clear in community statements that it relies on players to know and report violations of its naming policy (no offensive content, no names of actual celebrities or famous fictional characters or Blizzard NPCs, no sentences) so that it can enforce the naming policy, rather than spending manpower on seeking out all the think-they’re-so-clever Anigavs and Sineps. Not to mention all the deathknights named Arthazz.

Even if it’s a feature that very few players actually use, you’d think that Blizzard’s own curated profanity filter would deserve a company review now and then, if only to keep up with the times and remain relevant to parents whose children play. When that future patch hits (perhaps with the expected update next week), World of Warcraft will not imply that “homosexual” or “transsexual” are dirty words for the first time since its launch in 2004. Would this be a good time to mention that the seven letter F word and it’s oh so charming diminutive are not masked by the profanity filter? Apparently it can’t be used to harass players like “homosexual” can.

(via WoW Insider.)

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  • http://twitter.com/UnravThreads Kathryn

    Blizzard’s approach to its policies is… questionable at best.

    I used to be on a roleplay server, back when I played, and it was a terrible mess. Absolutely terrible. You could report people for talking out of character (one of the RP Realm-specific policies was that certain channels were EXCLUSIVELY in-character), and nothing would be done. You could report people for policy-breaking names, and nothing would be done (unless they called themselves LordMcFaggot, in which case something *might* be done), and this also extended to guild names.

    WoW is not an LGBT-friendly place at the best of times. I’m glad Blizzard are backing down on their policies a bit (mind you, this is after 5+ years of the game being around, so yeah), but they don’t address the problems at hand whilst spouting platitudes about how they’re open, friendly and supportive to LGBT people.

    And then they go and get that Corpsegrinder pillock on stage for Blizzcon.

  • http://grabthemandtakethem2.blogspot.com/ Gabriela Alonso

    That adult filter bug really gets on my nerves. I have a sailor mouth when I play with my friends, and it pisses me off to see my carefully worded phrases cut off. I do behave with strangers though. About the filter itself, I don’t know how it
    works for English language, but in Spanish it will block the most
    unexpected words, or half cover words because they contain a swear word in them.

    I don’t think it’s such a hard thing to do, ensuring name policy. A lot
    is done automatically already. For example, my sister tried to name a
    hunter’s pet Hellboy and she immediately got a message saying it was a
    copyrighted name or somesuch. Same thing can be done with offensive
    names. Also it should be easier and clearer to report such violations.
    Right now you can right click and report Spam, but must open an enquiry
    in order to report an offensive name, taking your time to type in the
    name of the character, pet guild, etc, the server if you’re in a BG or
    random dungeon, etc. It’s just not practical.

  • http://twitter.com/UnravThreads Kathryn

    In theory it’s not hard to ensure the name policy, but when you count the number of accounts, characters, guilds and pets (and so forth), it becomes a near-impossibility.

    ‘Hellboy’ might flag the filters, as you said, but ‘Hellbuoy’ or ‘Hellboie’ might not despite arguably being the same reference, but merely with a different spelling whilst retaining the same phonetics (or near enough). The number of permutations would be absolutely insane for the more popular names, and when you think just how many copyrighted characters (and so forth) that are out there, it’s really not possible to catch them all.

    “jcdenton” might not be flagged by most people and Blizzard likely wouldn’t have a filter for it, but some gamers will instantly recognise it as the name of the protagonist from Deus Ex (J.C. Denton).

    You’re right on the money about the reporting system, though. It’s terrible, or at least it was when I last played.

  • Francesca M

    Just a note. Heterosexual was also banned.

  • http://sdhardie.tumblr.com Sheila

    It’s about freakin’ time.

  • Anonymous

    I play WoW, and I’m glad they’ve realized their mistake and corrected it. Even if it was just due to pressure from people who were offended, rightly so in my opinion, at the inclusion of those words on the list of profanity.

    I, like Kathryn, play on a RP server, and I have run across players with names I think are in violation of the naming policy.  I always report them, and yes sometimes nothing happens, but there have been plenty of times those players have had their names changed when I see them next.  I believe it to simply be a case of what GM reads your ticket, like the moderator who was going to punish the woman with the LGBT friendly guild.  I believe that most of the GMs wouldn’t have even thought of doing such a thing.

    Maybe I’m being naive, but I think one big motive for the inclusion of “homosexual” and “transsexual” on the list was the worry that players or parents of players who, unfortunately, view those words as profanity would complain.  I don’t think it was the right move in the first place, labeling them as profanity, but I do believe they ultimately did the right thing.

  • Anonymous

    “Would this be a good time to mention that the seven letter F word and it’s oh so charming diminutive are not masked by the profanity filter?”

    Maybe I’m being really dumb here, but I can’t work out what seven letter word you’re referring to. The only F-word that comes to mind is six letters.

    Nice to see some sense from Blizz on this, though.

  • Carmen Sandiego

    Yeah, I’m assuming the author meant a certain six-letter slur and its three-letter abbreviation.

  • Frodo Baggins

    Wait a minute, I thought “transsexual” was considered a slur, and the preferred term was “transgender?” 

  • E S

    There’s a Pride Parade on WoW? When? I wanna go!

  • Jenn W

    Transgender is actually an umbrella term that refers to several types of gender non-conformity. Transsexual refers to one of those types in which the individual feels that their inner sense of gender is opposite to the gender they were assigned at birth. Hope this helps.

  • Frodo Baggins

    And wikipedia confirms your statement. Thanks! Not that it comes up especially often in everyday conversation.

  • Anonymous

    That is worthy to note, thank you :-)

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