Stop that witch hunt on apparently offensive content. You don’t have to change every god damn picture that shows a women to a fruit basket and you don’t have to change apparently offensive achievement names.
How about you stop oppressing your employees. How about you change the Blizzard Tax into a Blizzard Gift.
The issue here is that your PR team or whoever decides this is poop. It’s an easy “solution” for a big issue. All you have to do is say “Yeah, we did bad, very bad. We started a task force to help our workers unionize, because we value the human beings who work for us.” It’s really really not that hard and if you people would have been raised right, that wouldn’t even have been an issue to begin with.
Having naked women and men and Taurens and what not is fine in the game. It’s just you Americans who go apepoop over a pair of juicy boobies [for some reason your never see a wet shorts contest…] or rather your media. Even if a 13 year old is playing. It’s not a issue because, shocker: That child saw naked bodies before.
It’s natural. Having sexualized content is fine because this is a game about demons and poop so that just will include lust.
Blizzard are acting so stupid. Video games and movies are all about escaping real life. Look at GTA… you run around killing people. Does that have anything to do with how you act in real life? Of course not!
Playing devil’s advocate it is not us that make that decision, nor even is it Blizzard. Well… Blizzard could introduce it by their own decision, but the ratings board would very likely then move the rating up to 15+ or 18+ which would reduce the playerbase reach.
A lot of the renaming (Bro’s before ho ho ho’s) etc came from internal feedback from employees, they did mention this right at the start of the fiasco that the changes needed to be not just their work practices but also in their game design choices and they asked the staff for feedback.
So do we, we just don’t do it with guns
All the above said, some of the changes seem very “peacemeal” to me and in many cases un-necessary but that’s just my opinion.
They got the current rating using the content they have. So there is no reason to change it. In my view, and my view basically comes from twitter etc. (so it might be wrong), Blizzard has a lot of woke people in their team. I’ll spare you the discussion on why it is bad but to put it simply: Any hardcore and fundamentalist ideology should not be part of any business decision. It doesn’t matter if left, right, up, down or center.
As you can see, the team made a decision who does not resonate with the playerbase at all. Like absolutely zero. Nada. Nil.
That’s just it though, if they introduced Sexualized content, it would be changed. Several films for example have had their ratings lowered after directors agreed to cut scenes and some have been increased as the ratings board decided it was originally rated too low.
There is no denying that they are trying to be more progressive and some of those changes I think they are good changes, but not all of them by any means. As Jean Luc Picard would say…
“My sack is gigantique” for example did not need changing in my opinion.
“Bro’s before ho ho ho’s” is a grey area for me, personally I thought it was fine in it’s context (ho ho ho being Santa), but feedback from a lot of female players I know think it’s a bit “urgh”…
It’s not only “a bit urgh” it supports a certain mentality. That is, if you have to decide between a woman’s needs or feelings and the bro’s unwritten codex, always choose the codex.
It also labels women generally as hoes and encourages an according imaginary / behaviour. More than a bit of a grey zone imo.
I don’t disagree. I never read the achievement in a context other than it was a humorous play on words, but that is because I am male, I read it in a male perspective… but after hearing how females read it, I get it. I do however believe that it was intended as humour rather than being a dig at the female gender and supporting a patriarchy… particularly as the achievement had nothing to do with females at all…
An example of this…
Grease (1978) was originally a PG movie… it was increased to PG13 yet there is no nakedness, no swearing, no shooting.
I remember it because my sister was allowed to go and see it at the cinema and I wasn’t lol.
And we are likely to see more of it in the coming years.
Peoples opinions change. What was acceptable is no longer acceptable.
In the UK we had some historical statues torn down because the person the statue was of used to support slavery. I think we can all agree slavery is bad… but when those statues went up, it was not considered bad, it was considered normal.
A lack of sensitivity towards female players IS promoting the patriarchy, though. A joke can still not be comprehended as such by people. And the phrase itself functions as a slogan the more it gets repeated. Brainwashing and psychological conditioning is based on repetitive patterns. And if something is repeated often enough, you start to believe in / act upon it. Very often without recognising it at all.
I’m not saying it was intended to work like this, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is how it unfortunately works. And to be honest, Blizzard’s current state of affairs plus the, to a woman incredibly “ew” screaming amount of half naked female characters not actually played by female players speaks for itself there…
