BlizzCon’s Homophobic Gaffe

So here’s a thing: You’re the house band of Blizzard Entertainment, made up of Blizzard employees, and you’re playing the closing ceremony of BlizzCon, your company’s yearly sold out event that everyone in the gaming world pays attention to because you run the MMO that is the 11 million-player-strong gorilla in the room and the RTS that spawned a professional gaming industry in Korea. You invited a guest musician from a professional touring band to your World of Warcraft themed gig, and wanted to play an intro for him to your audience that shows his dedication to the game. You want everybody to know that you didn’t just get any musician, you got a player.

So, would you use a clip from a video where the musician calls out opposing players using homophobic slurs?

It’s one thing to trash talk between factions in a game, and swing into the fun of fake rivalry. We like a good ninjas vs. pirates debate as much as the next person, probably more; which, lets be honest, is what the Horde vs. Alliance debate boils down to. It is another to call players of the other side homos (bad) and in the same breath joke that that they should commit suicide (wow, that’s bad, or have you been living under a rock?).

But whatever, a person can say dumb things. Companies, however, are made up of many people, and many decisions, and we don’t like to think that many persons thought these dumb things were okay. So Blizz. Don’t do this kind of thing. Your players don’t even like it.

(via Rock Paper Shotgun.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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