Thanks to the Internet, there’s not too many words that attention-starved little snots can use that can get rise out of people. Given the increased rarity of the alternatives, that one is attempted fairly often.

Yeah, trade chat is horrible. And racism is pretty endemic in the MMO world, anyone else remember the whole “Naga Stole My Bike” meme? heh.

Remember right after release when Arcadian told a joke about French people and got tempbanned?

Good times!

Just one of the numerous reasons I don’t play W.o.W. or allow my children to play it.

Here we see an example of one of the few downsides to having a game that appeals to the lowest common denominator.

C:\>Deltree C:\Progra~1\Blizzard\Wow -y

@JuJutsu

No. Soup raised a fair point – being the victim of racism doesn’t give the right to be racist. While I’d concede that racism against white people doesn’t have nearly the same power or historical context as racism against many others, it’s still wrong. He went too far in claiming that not only is anonymous internet douchebaggery somehow ‘unique’ to white people, but lumping all white people into this. He could just have easily have replaced ‘white people’ with ‘immature asshats’ and he’s have got his point across without racist connotation or stereotype.

Yeah I keep all public channels off just for this reason.

Shortly before the election I decided to revisit Asheron’s Call on Darktide. The global chat was like a cross between Fox News and a Klan meeting.

VPellen :
I’m sorry, I detest political correctness with all my being. There’s a lot of segregation and xenophobia in the world, and getting all standoffish and uptight because somebody called you a questionable word isn’t fucking helping.

The main thing that isn’t helping is people who bleat on about political correctness because they don’t understand the impact of racism or other forms of passive-agressive harassment.

Ignoring the whole white pplz are teh evil thing that you lot seem so worked up about, but the point of Ixo’s post wasn’t to make white people feel bad but to kind of argue that Blizzard doesn’t generally do much about asshats. For an example, I’m pretty sure I’ve pissed off a good chunk of people on my server through spamming and numerous other misdeeds but I never got a ban. I try to be as much of an asshat as possible but its usually an angry tell then nothing. I don’t know if they actually reported me or not, many of them say they have, but nothing generally comes out of it.

VPellen :
I’m sorry, I detest political correctness with all my being. There’s a lot of segregation and xenophobia in the world, and getting all standoffish and uptight because somebody called you a questionable word isn’t fucking helping.

Wow.

You must be a really special person.

This thread has a lot of “so that’s why I leave trade chat”, but that’s only a local solution on a per-player basis. Are there global solutions? Ixo says that Blizzard won’t do much… even if they banned Moxxi’s account he’ll go out and buy another copy tomorrow. What more could be done? Placing a block on the payment methods Moxxi used? That would at least force the purchase of game cards, which is very inconvenient. Place a block on “nigger” in its entirety in the game? When, when, when, do you need to say that? Not that it would stop him being abusive and offensive in other ways instead.

Perhaps a system where if someone gets /ignored enough, they lose the right to speak in public channels. That might actually work.

I ran an experiment for a graduate class I am in, to see if people would grief Club Penguin. Not only did they, one or two managed to reach a level that was tantamount cyberbullying. This stuff is just very easy to do. The issue of not giving idiots a voice to all is something we need to look at very, very seriously if MMOs are to grow.

Trying to defer to a greater impact of racism to belittle the fact that racism is an extremely common cry of those who are, gasp, racists misses the point.
In my life, straining to think of refuges from racism, I can come up with my home, a few churches, and college. Everywhere else, everyone else is likely to look down on anyone not like them. This is true with or without the presences of whites.
There are big milestones that wash up from the current of a population’s prejudice, but the river is bigger even if you’re missing it for the spectacle of the hour.

I’ve seen plenty of beaten, robbed, or hospitalized white people(or just paler than X people) that were victims of whatever group was the majority where they were at the time. I’ve never seen any of them get any justice, and I’ve seen fierce backlash for those who’d try. I have to imagine that most people defending the right to hate havent actually seen the day to day violence that sort of thing inspires.

Political correctness is shite. The idea that we have the right to not be offended by something or someone is shite. The fact that people in America still identify by ethnicity instead of nationality is shite.
Being an ass in WoW is awesome

@Raad

I’m not really convinced he wasn’t serious, to be honest. Particularly since his post was about Blizzard letting this kind of crap slide – he seems to have just taken it as given that it that all the asshats were white people. I’m not ‘defending the rights of white people’ because they’re white – I would point out the same hypocrisy if a homosexual blogger claimed that all straight people we’re hateful anti-gay bigots. I would also be as offended as anyone if someone made the claim that other races really were inferior, or that homosexuality was ‘wrong’.

Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but to me a troll is just a troll. Whether he’s spouting racist, homophobic, sexist or generic douche bag comments, he gets added to the ignore list and forgotten. When a serious post is made, on the other hand, which makes claims that are racist, that is – to me – a bigger issue. The fact that it’s directed towards ‘white people’ doesn’t change that. I’m not claiming that stereotypes and racism directed towards white people is as serious as those directed at minorities or other races; but that does not make them acceptable.

I can tell you, from personal experience, that racist remarks get you suspended and eventually banned from WoW. A few years back, I had to institute a DKP penalty for anyone that got themselves suspended on a raid night for racist comments.

Oh look! Crypto-racism. How… totally unsurprising.

If your comment can be rephrased as ‘I’m not a racist BUT…’, it’s probably racist.

I’m not sure what he’s up in arms about. This is a classic example of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

Trade chat can be that bad, but reporting people really does help.

The author of that article made a pretty major mistake, though. It’s not just white people who act that way…punk kids of any race are the most likely.

A couple of years ahead of me in Junior High School there was a Hispanic kid who decided he was a Nazi, because Hitler totally had the right idea about wiping out the lesser races.

Even when I was a kid I was pretty sure most kids were dumb. Now, with a little more perspective, I’m sure I was right.

Brent Michael Krupp :

Alex :
Shortly before the election I decided to revisit Asheron’s Call on Darktide. The global chat was like a cross between Fox News and a Klan meeting.

Wow, a thread complaining about bigotry and you jump to calling people that watch Fox News a bunch of crazy racists. Nice work!

He didn’t say it was racist, he said it was a cross between Fox News (a US conservative mouthpiece) and the KKK (a bunch of racists).

That’s different than saying Fox News is racist or that Fox News is the KKK.

I opted for the “oh my god how the fuck do I turn off a chat channel?” solution within 15 minutes of hitting The Barrens way back when. The problem was not the racism, or misogyny, or /b/ memes, it’s the fact that I felt like I had just gained the most horrible super power ever conceived. I was able to simultaneously listen to every single conversation in a junior high lunchroom, in a world where lunch lasts all day.

It sort of loops back into the whole shtick of whether media influences the masses or is merely a mirror of the masses.

Some would say that Fox News pushes an agenda of ignorance upon a certain denomination of the American public that watches them. Others would say that Fox News simply caters to a certain denomination of the American public that has an agenda of ignorance which was already there.

Like any other unresolved binary problem, the answer is probably in the middle and slightly off to the side. It’s mostly a matter of how many people have learned through life experience that it’s better to fear the unknown – it may well have teeth. Other people have learned that if you don’t seek to learn of the unknown, the teeth may come to get you sooner or later whether or not your head is planted in the ground.

Now, if you were a person looking to find somebody to exploit by telling them exactly what they want to hear while feeling confidence they’re generally too afraid to look down and see you picking their pocket, which would you go after? In my mind, this is the sieve that drives the separation of the political parties. (Granted, there will be “bad seeds” on either side as no politician is a complete absolute by simply being human in the given instance.)

The kid saying “nigger” over barrens chat is a very minor reflection of the easily exploited portion of America. Chances are, he picked it up from parents whose heads are so deeply into the ground that they think racial bias is still in vogue. There’s honestly not enough difference for there to be a reason to have bias based on color of skin, it’s just forcing an extra class difference out of pure egotism.

yeah, point taken on the whole ‘calling out white people’ thing and that in itself being racist, but pointing to that and then sticking your fingers in your ears and neenerneenerneener-ing is a bit silly.

I didn’t explicitly put it in the post (and probably should have) but a lot of this is usually in the form of:

10: DIE NIGGERS LOL
20: WHITE POWA!
30: GOTO 10

I’m a white guy myself, with a japanese wife, and half white/half japanese son. The amount of asian bashing (mostly chinese, but occasionally all lumped together in one big pot), black bashing, and (oh gee really?) gay and female crapping upon is just silly.

We get it.

I’m not trying to rescue wow (as I mentioned about 8 times), I’m just saying, when it immediately goes to ‘lol ur a dum nigger, die plx’ in private tells, it’s a bit overboard.

Telling the internet to grow up is silly, I was just posting it. Not every documentary needs to have some grand solution. Some are just ‘look at how fucked up this situation has become’ kind of things.

“Hatred is the stillborn child
of ignorance and boredom”

Now, now, this is supposed to be about racism, not Internet forums.

So I’ve been racking my brain, trying to come up with a suitable comment to leave on this posting and what it cross-posts to. Perhaps some sort pseudo-intellectual dissertation on how the perceived cloak of anonymity the Internet provides give many people an outlet to say things, hateful or otherwise, that would never be uttered by them in reality? Perhaps a pointed comment on how sad it is that such blatant racism exists in today’s world?

No. No, the thing that keeps echoing in my brain over and over the more I think about it is as follows:

Stupid people are stupid.

I don’t think anything else I could possibly add could sum up my thoughts on this issue much more than that phrase.

I’ve had trade (and why IS it trade, anyway? Is it because it’s all the cities at once?) turned off for a while now, although not due to racist/sexist bullshit, just due to general dipshittery (it’s REALLY spammy and full of useless crap on my server, I dunno if it’s taken a racist/sexist turn though). That it’s that bad on some servers (perhaps even mine!) is depressing as hell.

@ixobelle
Were you role-playing a black guy or are you actually black? Because if you’re white then lol, watch all those outraged white dudes over you racist remarks go all “oh that’s fine then, he is white”. And that applies to every(race)one! YAY!

Ritchian :
Stupid people are stupid.

ALL people are stupid, once you accept this, everything makes sense. Try it!