Blizzard as a Political Entity

I've always claimed Blizzard was a Center-Right company with many policies and in-game examples of this stance, but the (most) recent talk of homophobia has me thinking about it again and I wanted to take a look at Blizzard as a Political entity and try to articulate my feelings from having played the game for a number of years.

Full disclosure - I consider myself a fairly progressive individual with very liberal opinions on gay rights, equality for women and minorities, social welfare and a complete separation of church and state. Also, before I get too far down the road with this, I want to set aside the expectation that because this is a "medieval" game, Blizzard gets a pass for doing anything because they're being authentic to an anachronistic setting.

Bullshit.

When you can introduce dragons, magic, motorcycles, planes and tentacle monsters, you divorce yourself from any expectation of representing reality in your playground. And typically, the point of representing an anachronistic culture through art is to illustrate the stark differences between where we are now to what was once the norm. Not to revel in the injustices of the past.

Racism
The most recent blind example of this are the Pygmies in Uldum. You have a squat race of brown people with turbans who speak gibberish and steal from the noble Tol'vir and we're tasked with knocking them around with comical hammers.

As an Indian of Arab descent, I was looking forward to seeing Arabian, African and Central-Asian culture in the game, but I wasn't expecting this.

There are plenty of other example - from cannibalistic Trolls who are influenced from Island culture to the apologist noble-native take on the Tauren, there is a complete lack of clarity or foresight in the design team of how the game appears outside of their bubble.

Homophobia
From the videos posted at BlizzCon last year to the lack of any openly gay characters in the game, to the above-linked history wherein a burgeoning Gay community received negative attention from Blizzard in their attempts to come together and it took public outrage for them to reverse their decisions, we see a company that thinks making gay-jokes is funny.

I'm not suggesting they're homophobic, but I am suggesting that they are insensitive to the way the world appears to gay and gay-friendly people.

Diversity
Of the people who sit on the panels at BlizzCon, how often do we see women or minorities, especially in the upper levels of the design team?

The diversity is just not there, and that's part of the reason why we see the Azeroth the way we do - it's a one-sided view of the world. Their quest-team (from what I could tell of the article posted in the WoW Magazine) is entire male, for example. What would you expect from a team that had no women working in it? I'm not suggesting men can't write well-rounded stories or women-positive quests, but the incentive isn't there especially in a team where no one else might be making an effort of it.

Take this one step further and you can point at all the plate-bikini armor sets, the festival sets that make women look like lingerie models, Achievements that require us to target women and give them Playboy bunny ears.

Torture
There are a number of quests where torture is successfully used to extract information from victims. True, this is a common fantasy trope, but it still leaves one feeling queasy when the target is begging for relief and yet we continue with the torture. So much so that the NPCs suggest this is beyond them and they ask the player to engage in this behavior, as if the developers are chortling at the prospect.

Especially at the time that Wrath came out, Torture was a vital topic of conversation as America itself was dealing with the problem of figuring out where the lines were between interrogation and torture. It was ill-timed, thoughtless, impulsive and unfortunate at best.

Conflict Resolution
Consider the fact that seldom, if ever, do you run into situations where you can reasonably resolve issues in the game. It always comes down to physical conflict. I'm not suggesting Raids involve a riddle contest, or a conversation thread that makes it possible to bypass a boss, I'm talking more in terms of quest design here, and the general theme of the game itself. War is a viable solution to all problems in the game.

Jaina and Thrall have often been the only voices of dissent in the entire setting, and while they might be the protagonists, their hopes are constantly dashed and the conflict continues.

I appreciate that the Horde vs. Alliance conflict is vital for Warcraft, and I'm okay with it, but the level of ridicule and impotence thrown at pacifism in the game is a little strange when you sit back and think on it. At any point politically, you might imagine there is some contingent of a population that is working on peace and appeasement and negotiation. We never see those elements in the game. At least with Cataclysm we're seeing some fall-out in South Shore and Barrens and maybe it's a move in the right direction.

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Now.

I don't think anyone at Blizzard is explicitly racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or war-mongering, or pro-torture - but I do think nobody sat down, to look at the races, or the armor, or the quests and thought, "Is this insensitive or offensive to some significant sub-set of our audience?" And that's kind of the point.

When you have millions of people in your audience, you are going to offend someone, that's inevitable, I don't need a squeaky clean game with no possibility for freedom of expression - far from it - I enjoy and consume vast amounts of media that explores inequality.

But really, for a game of Warcraft's size and scope, with the size of their audience, what are they getting in return for the level of offensiveness in the game? Is the latent sexism and racism vital to their storytelling? Is it important to the arc of the expansion? Are these points that Blizzard needs to make and stand behind?

Or is it just a cheap joke for a bunch of guys to laugh about?

Two Problems With Pandaria

5.0 sounds like a lot of fun, but there are two basic things that I think are worth discussing - one is not an issue at all, but has become a problem for the player-base, and the other is an actually sort of a problem but I haven't heard too many people discuss it yet.

First, the thing that might actually be an issue: Is Blizzard reducing Chinese culture to an expansion?


We've seen Blizzard co-opting culture before. Trolls for Caribbean culture, Tauren for Native Americans, the dismal portrayal of Middle-Eastern and African people in the Pygmy of Uldum (down to their gibberish gibbering), the one-dimensional Irish/Scots among the Dwarfs... is this another step in that direction, where a pop-cultural understanding of Chinese and Far-Eastern culture is being stuffed into the Pandaren where we're going to see mildly offensive stereotyping based on fantastical imagery rather than any basis in the reality of that culture?

I can't say, but I do think that Blizzard does a lot of this without thinking about things. I don't think there is a process in Blizzard that filters ideas - I think it goes from design to execution with little conversation in between in terms of thinking about what the impact might be culturally. If there was even a minor conversation in the vein of, "Do we think this might offend the cultural sensibilities of the people involved," we would never have seen the Pygmy, or at least not in that incarnation. Or for that matter, quests in which we torture people, but that's a different topic completely.

The most confusing and unfortunate part of it is that nobody ever calls Blizzard on it, and when they do, the argument is thrown out as it's a game and not meant to be taken seriously.

Well. As a brown person playing the game, I felt a little hurt seeing the Pygmy. I wasn't particularly offended, I wasn't going to stop playing the game, but it just made me wish that Blizzard had taken the time to have a conversation about cultural impact, impression and stereotyping before building those models or designing the race.

And I think the fact that they never even had that conversation is kind of the point I'm trying to make.

Without playing through 5.0, it'll be impossible to tell how the far-eastern culture makes out among the Pandaren, but we'll see.

Next, let's talk about the non-issue: "Pandaren area a joke race, Blizzard is ruining WoW."

The problem isn't with Pandaren, the problem is that it's not Wrath of the Lich King. It's not The Burning Crusade. It's not the Cataclysm. It's not about your world in danger, it's not about a threat, there is no angry, angst-ridden, gritty and horrible antagonist to rage against, and certainly no obvious Gothic elements to be seen. Armor doesn't have skulls and bones on it.

Do you remember the Diablo 3 fiasco with the color pallet issues? This is the same thing in a different vein.

The criticism leveled against MoP is ultimately  in the vein of, "This isn't what I like." Now, measure that against a game with walking cows, pig people with crossbows, and gurgling fish men who chase you on land. It isn't about the silly nature of the Pandas, it's their lack of grit.

Pandaria is beautiful. It's breathtaking. There are no ruins, the buildings are alive and open. The landscape isn't scarred by war. The mountains are cloaked in mist. The forests still stand whole and pristine.

After 3 expansions full of war, grit, dirt, blood, and more skulls and bones than you can find in an abattoir, I think the artists were done with those themes and wanted to move on. I think the writers were tired of pushing the same styles of quests. The creative team wanted to stretch its muscle in a way it hadn't before and Pandaria was that venue.

I can't seriously have an issue with that - video games at their purest, are art. Artists don't just repeat and do the same thing over and over - they experiment, they modify, they grow. That's what Blizzard is doing with Warcraft - they're moving on to something completely new, and I'm excited to see how it turns out.

A game doesn't need to be drowned in inches of blood to be good or interesting. People change, stories grow, and the game evolves.

This is a good thing.