Death and life are in the power of the tongue

King Solomon (Proverbs 18:21)

I have always been a believer in the power of words.  When I speak or write, I choose my words carefully.  I try to know my audience and consider the ways in which what I say could be misinterpreted.  I do this both because I want what I say to come across clearly and because I understand how words can hurt someone, even if not directed specifically at them.  I don’t want to say something that brings up a particularly traumatic experience, or reinforces prejudices, or just crosses the line of human decency.

Rarely is it necessary to go to such lengths to get your message across.  Yet daily, I see examples of people abusing the power of words in WoW.  Some days, I see people purposely using words to incite others, or to try to hide racist or sexist messages in their guild or character names.

Why do people do this, and more importantly, why do we let them get away with it?

Let me use an example that to this day both infuriates and boggles my mind: the guild name “Sapped Girls Can’t Say No”.  There are more than 120 such guilds on the US and EU realms and over 300 arena teams.  Most of the guilds have five or less members, and many have only one.  These aren’t real guilds.  They are attempts by people to make a joke.  A joke about rape.  There’s no wiggle room here – go do a google search and you’ll find that the top hits replace “sapped” with “drunk” or “drugged”.

If you stood in the middle of a busy city centre wearing a sandwich board that read “Drugged Girls Can’t Say No”, you would at the very least convince passers-by that you were an asshole, and at worst get lynched.  Depending on the country you live in you might be charged with a hate crime or inciting sexual violence.  Yet somehow it’s OK to do the virtual equivalent in WoW, and we (the people who see them displaying that guild tag) let them get away with it.  Under Blizzard’s terms of use, such guild names are clearly not allowed.  All it takes is one report and Blizzard should by all rights force the guild to change its name.

That these names still persist suggests that people either don’t care or think the joke is funny.  But what about those players who have been the victim of sexual violence?  Is it fair that they should be reminded of that dark past just so that some asshat can have a laugh?  Why do we not extend the same human kindness in the virtual world that we do in the real world?  You can’t play these types of things off as “part of the roleplaying experience” – it’s a plain and simple attempt to tell a sexist joke from behind the shield of anonymity that your character provides.

Dredging the Forums

So, what prompted me to write on this topic?  Against my better judgement, I decided to take the pulse of the WoW forum community by browsing the General forum, a decision that was both stupid and tragic.  Among the torrent of nerdrage about the forced Battle.Net merge (more on that next week), I came across this post:

Yes our named got banned because I camped a shadow priest. Tell me what is wrong with the guild name “halaa back naga”. Two of our members that are african american suggested that name, we liked it so we made it. We were getting complements like “man awesome guild name” “Dude can I join your guild its so awesome” etc.  I want a gm to respond to this because that guild lasted 4 months before some scrub that couldn’t get away from me reported it.

Admittedly, this guild name is less offensive than my example above.  But the responses (in which the OP is essentially told that he is an idiot and should have known better) encouraged me to write about the more extreme examples that I’ve seen in the past.  Obviously I’m not alone in my thinking.

It’s not every little thing that I take issue with – just the extremes: racism, sexism and religious zealotry.  I remember an incident from my first EU guild.  I was leveling both my Paladin and Death Knight at the time, and mentioned in guild chat that it would be great it Paladin tanks had a similar spell to Death Grip – call it “Holy Lasso” or something like that.  The response that came back (from the guild leader no less) was that if I wanted a holy spell that dragged people in, it should be called “Islam”.  That was a serious “WTF?” moment, after which I ripped the guy a new one publicly for preaching that level of intolerance.

Calling a Spade a Spade

Let me be blunt: I consider the extremes of this type type of behaviour to be bigotry, plain and simple.  Is that too harsh a word?  Should I try to find something less insulting those those who are only a little bit racist or sexist?  Nope.

A bigot is someone who is intolerant of those whose ideas differ from their own, most often with regards to religion, race or politics.  When you attack or victimize someone who differs from you, you’re being a bigot.  That the attack is passive (displaying something offensive towards another group in a public forum) rather than active is irrelevant.

It’s the degree that is the problem.  Intolerance is such a malleable term.  Some people will observe a disagreement or heated discussion and accuse one or both of the parties of being intolerant.  If any degree of intolerance could be equated to bigotry, nobody would be able to say anything negative to anyone else, and that would be a terrible world to live in.

For my purposes, the line is when you say or do something that would be generally offensive to a mixed group of people you didn’t know in the real world.

(more) Too sensitive?

Tags: bigotry, character names, guilds, hate speech, human decency, policy, prejudices, sensitive, tolerance