Here’s yet another data point in the discussion about whether sexual harassment law and private harassment policies are harmful to other interests—either First Amendment interests, or the interests of people of color and sexual minorities—or whether the fear is overblown. (Previous posts on the topic from Joe and me are here and here.) While I cited the Friends case as a possible example of overblown fear of sexual harassment law, this story seems to represent a good example of the queer theory version of the fear.
For the non-gaming readers of prawfsblawg, World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). Subscriptions are sold by the private company Blizzard. And, in case you think controversy surrounding WoW is isolated to some kind of irrelevant and tiny geek subculture, it might be interesting to know that WoW boasts over 6 million active subscriptions.
In Newsweekly reported on the situation back in January:
Sara Andrews thought it was a big misunderstanding when she received an e-mail from a game master in Blizzard Entertainment’s popular online role playing game “World of Warcraft” citing her for “Harassment – Sexual Orientation.”. . .Andrews’ original posting read: “OZ [the name of her guild] is recruiting all levels ¦ We are not ‘GLBT only,’ but we are ‘GLBT friendly’! (guilduniverse.com/oz)”
In her follow-up letter to the company, Andrews explained that there was an obvious misunderstanding and that she was not insulting anyone, but merely recruiting for a “GLBT friendly” guild.
The response from Blizzard was, “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.”
Blizzard’s stance was clear that recruiting for a guild using “GLBT” was inappropriate as, the company said, it may “incite certain responses in other players that will allow for discussion that we feel has no place in our game.”
Gamer John Blatzheim, who heard of Andrews’ situation, e-mailed Blizzard to express his concern of a double standard that game masters would send her a warning that she could not use “GLBT” as an advertisement to express a safe place for gay gamers after an incident a few months ago where a plague occurred within the game and players yelled in general chat, “Don’t get the AIDS!”
“Many people are insulted just at the word ‘homosexual’ or any other word referring to sexual orientation,” Blizzard responded to Blatzheim in an e-mail . . . .
. . .
Sara Andrews has stated that she will not be renewing her World of Warcraft account due to Blizzards lack of support for a GLBT friendly environment, “It seems to be OK for general chat to be flooded with, ‘That’s so gay!’ and ‘I just got ganked! What a fag!’ yet advertising for a GLBT friendly environment where we don’t have to deal with such language is deemed inappropriate.”
Blizzard’s tune changed, however, after Lambda Legal interceded on Andrews’ behalf. Kotaku has a good summary of how Blizzard finally apologized in March, characterized what happened as a big mistake, and clarified that its harassment policy does not prohibit players from being out of the closet.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard’s game masters had interpreted Blizzard’s rather clear and sensible written harassment policy to impose a general norm of silence about sex. As Joe pointed out in his post, while the law itself tends to create a pretty narrow definition of what constitutes harassment, it may have encouraged private entities to create broad harassment policies to avoid liability.
But this story appears to be about more than fear of liability. Fear of liability would lead one to police sexual talk across the board, not to interpret a harassment policy so as to force its purported beneficiaries into the closet, while leaving untouched heterosexual talk of dating, sex, marriage, and even insulting epithets. Instead, this does look to me like a case of rearticulating old fashioned discrimination against sexual minorities in terms of “legitimate” attempts to stop harassment.
Posted by Gowri on April 28, 2006 at 06:23 PM
Comments
Wow. While I know nothing about WoW, this does seem like an excellent example in support of the theories you’ve been describing.
Posted by: Joseph Slater | Apr 29, 2006 11:03:30 AM