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Champions Online - gay gamers not wanted
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Two words.
Drama Queen
Refugee from UO,EQ,AC,AC2,AO,DAOC,L2,SB,HZ,CoH,PT,EQ2,WoW,VG,SWG,EVE,WAR,DF,MO,AI,GA,LOTRO, SWTOR... Gw2 on Deck
Lol. I wonder what all those people there were thinking when he said that.
It is a story whose topic may be know to you. Banning gay people from MMOs. The story is simple enough. I created a character called "Qweer Cop", looking like a Cop. Now my character was forcibly renamed, telling me it was harrasment against sexual orientation.
Before you get your knickers in a knot over what you perceive to be a personal slight, feel free to remove the fishbowl from your head. The GMs and/or CMs don't know you from any other faceless gamer in the game. You are one out of, what, hundreds? Maybe thousands?
How do they tell you apart from a griefer trying to get a rise out of people? The simple answer, as always, is that they can't, and rather than spend hours trying to agonize over whether or not to make an exception for one, little person, they simply decide to do the sensible thing: apply the rules to you as equally as to everyone else.
You may mind the irony, that a gay gamer (me!) is "protected" from being harrased by calling himself gay. You may or may may not share my idea of freedom that I can call a character as I want, but pretending to protect ME, by banning my own self-descption is in every way the height of absurdity.
Except that a video game isn't a soapbox for your rhetoric. They have to water down a whole lot of things in order to satisfy the sensibilities of the most people. This is exactly what happened here. Rather than trying to create double standards about who can use certain words or terms or whatever, they just said, "Hey, no making character names that reference sexuality. Move along."
The fact is, you just have a chip on your shoulder and want to be exceptional. Sorry, but if you wanted to be shout your pet cause to the world, there are just about exactly one ho-jillion forums, chat rooms, and organizations out there for you to do that at. If you honestly play video games for any reason other than pure entertainment, I can not help but think you are in store for even more disappointment later.
I posted a post in the Beta Forum, *kindly* and *reasonably* asking that it was wrong to forbid my character to be named like that. The Tems of Service just mention usage of sexual orientation is only forbidden, when it is used in a derogatory way, which I as gay gamer myself, can't. I mean I AM GAY.
Prove it. Prove you are gay to someone who can't even see or hear you. Prove you are even a man using just text in a chat interface.
You know all those stories about people posing as the opposite sex, about people getting into RL drama because they have little MMO cyber-affairs and never mention they are married with two kids, etc.? There's a reason that stuff happens. It's because (gasp) nobody can prove they are anything online. It's all smoke and mirrors.
So once again, we come back to the lowest common denomenator. You can't prove anything about being gay and not being some random douchewaffle trying to offend others. So you get an impersonal whack of the rod of authority, and they don't even have the decency to ask pretty please if you'll consider renaming, maybe after they bring you breakfast in bed. It must have been terrible to realize you weren't nearly as important as you thought you were.
I can call MYSELF as I want. Freedom of Speech in USA used to be an absolute, but apparently in 2009 it just means "Freedom of Speech to say what I agree to". There goes the land of the Free.
Obviously you either haven't completed high school, or you have a lamentable ignorance of your rights as a citizen of the U.S.
"Free speech" means that the government isn't allowed to infringe upon your ability to speak your mind to the public. However, you make a classic mistake in assuming that the internet is somehow a public forum. Allow me to rectify this assumption: it isn't. Forums, chat rooms, etc., all are privately-owned segments. Unless the government rubber stamps the funding, administration, and policies of Champions Online, they have no truck in what the company running it decides to do.
Let me simplify this one for the kids at home. Visiting a message board like this one is like visiting someone's house. If you go there and insult and belittle the owner, he can't have you arrested or fined for it. But he can damn sure kick you out, or refuse to give you milk and cookies. Your rights do not supercede the rights of others. You can proclaim you are gay all you want... but the minute you ask for special treatment, you aren't asking for equality. You're asking for privillege.
Freedom of speech automatically comes with the freedom to ignore things that are spoken. You exercised the former, and Champions Online exercise the latter. You don't like it, you can always quit playing. That is also your right: the right not to associate with people that truly offend you.
I am ired about the fact they forbade "Qweer Cop" - I used a hero called "Qweer Avenger" in City of Heroes for YEARS, and not a single moment anyone cared.
Then go play that game. Let your money do the talking. Trying to make a federal case out of a video game puts you right on par ethically with Jack Thompson.
Nor is the word "Queer" genuinely sexal, as if I had called the char "Assbang Anvenger". It is a matter of identity. And it was a simply fun char, either way. The matter is, when in a forum a reasonable debat isnt just locked, it is deleted, and all the effort from both side are nullified.
Except that it is sexual in nature, by your own admission. You used it out of fun, got banned like people who use it to be offensive, then suddenly it was personal?
You just want to have your way. That's all there is to it. Everything else is justification to get a name that nobody else of any other sexual orientation is allowed to have anyway. The hypocrisy of the entire OP is starting to tell as we go along here.
I understand most of you won't care. I know most of you won't care rat's ass about my pain about being made invisivle and being harrassed by a company. But even tho I know they will likely win and I won't, I must fight this fight. It is to acknowledge what I am - what we gay gamers are. We are once more forbidden even our very own name!
Oh, I care, actually. I care that a few gamers are using my freaking hobby just to parade around their personal issues so that they can try to make me care. Because I sure as hell don't pay every month to get preached at. If I wanted some anonymous stranger to tell me how bad of a person I was and then ask to be paid for the privilege, I'd just assume go to a Baptist church and drop a few bucks into the collection plate.
As for your internet activisim, I refer you to the wise words of Penny Arcade (with the most pertinent statement in bold):
"People seem to think that by posting in threads and agreeing with other people they are changing the world. They are not. They are posting in threads online. The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. Being outraged online is a form of entertainment, and refreshing a thread to receive a hit of consensus packs the thrill of genuine activism without requiring any sweat."
Tycho, 4/11/07
And tho it may not credit me as a serious or sober person by your definition - I spit my hate of despise against Cryptic. Hell's own fire is not as hot as my anger against you. Know that I am entirely honest and serious in saying this: from the depth of my heart I wish Cryptic curse and doom.
If you want, I can buy you a phone card.
You know, so you can call someone who cares.
You've obviously never read the Constitution. The 1st Amendment does not apply to video games. In fact, it specifically states 'Congress shall make no law' in it's definition of 'free speech'.
Last time I checked, Cryptic was not Congress.
You fail. Again.
Private or public, citizen or corporation, if you're located in the United States or it's territories, you must abide by the Constitution and it's Amendments. Any service or product is included in this. Lawsuits are filed and won against private companies and individuals who infringe these rights on a regular basis. All it needs is someone to challenge it.
The passage you quoted means that no successive law can be made to circumvent the first amendment.
Prove this. I call bvllsh1t on this.
Did you ever take a government class? They teach you on day one that the Constitution is the Law of the Land. The entire purpose of the Supreme Court is to defend and interpret the Constitution and the court system is to ensure everyone abides by it as well. Anything that a corporation or individual does that is un-constitutional can be challenged and taken to court, doesn't matter if it's on a bulletin board or in a computer game or in the confines of your own home.
I would love to see you take something like that into a court of law.
Alright, if we have to play this game, the Constitution is the law of the land, but it normally respects the rights of private property. These virtual worlds are private property, and as such, by signing the TOS, you agree to the rules of this property, and thus agree to play by their rules.
But, you cannot truly apply the rules of the constitution to the rules of a virtual world or virtual property, and the US courts of law really have no precedent in dealing with such. So your whole arguement of trying to apply what you learned in government class does not really apply here, now does it?
If you are going to bring an arguement like this up as a matter of fact, you need to provide facts/links, not just some statement of, "Did you ever take government class?"
Yeah, I took government, and guess what cupcake, MMOs were not mentioned. They must have just forgot that chapter, right?
So seriously, talk to the guy who had his character name banned, you two go to a court of law, present your case, and come back here and tell me just how far you got with the constitution and the name change.
Here is your fine line, the slippery slope as it were with the law of the land, my final foray into your game of applying the constitution to this arguement and please tell me the social importance of being able to use a name in video game that many might find offensive or dare I say, obscene (I mean, since you obviously want to argue Freedom of Speech, you must be all for him using that name):
Obscenity
Obscenity.—Although public discussion of political affairs is at the core of the First Amendment, the guarantees of speech and press, it should have been noticed from the previous subsections, are broader. “We do not accede to appellee’s suggestion that the constitutional protection for a free press applies only to the exposition of ideas. The line between the informing and the entertaining is too elusive for the protection of that basic right.”1079 The right to impart and to receive “information and ideas, regardless of their social worth . . . is fundamental to our free society.”1080 Indeed, it is primarily with regard to the entertaining function of expression that the law of obscenity is concerned, inasmuch as the Court has rejected any concept of “ideological” obscenity.1081
However, this function is not the reason why obscenity is outside the protection of the First Amendment, although the Court has never really been clear about what that reason is.
Adjudication over the constitutional law of obscenity began in Roth v. United States,1082 in which the Court in an opinion by Justice Brennan settled in the negative the “dispositive question” “whether obscenity is utterance within the area of protected speech and press.”1083 The Court then undertook a brief historical survey to demonstrate that “the unconditional phrasing of the First Amendment was not intended to protect every utterance.” All or practically all of the States that ratified the First Amendment had laws making blasphemy or profanity or both crimes, and provided for prosecutions of libels as well. It was this history that had caused the Court in Beauharnais to conclude that “libelous utterances are not within the area of constitutionally protected speech,” and this history was deemed to demonstrate that “obscenity, too, was outside the protection intended for speech and press.”1084 “The protection given speech and press was fashioned to assure unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people .... All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance—unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion—have the full protection of the guaranties, unless excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important interests. But implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.”1085 It was objected that obscenity legislation punishes because of incitation to impure thoughts and without proof that obscene materials create a clear and present danger of antisocial conduct. But since obscenity was not protected at all, such tests as clear and present danger were irrelevant.1086
Though it didn't make it to court, someone did threaten Blizzard with legal action after they banished her character for publicising a gay guild on a recruitment channel, because, they claimed, she was violating the ToS simply by using the word "gay" in a public channel.
The view that Lambda legal took was that an online world qualified as a place of business and that argument seemed to hold weight. Blizzard reversed their position, apologised to the player and wrote the incident off as an unfortunate misinterpretation of their ToS by some of their staff.
I don't agree with the OP's position - because as stated earlier in this thread, I think it's possible to enjoy the game without bringing sex, politics or religion into it, and in too many cases those things will cause offense to other players.
A game company has the right to ban or allow whatever content or material it wants, including restrictions on names based on your gender, sexaulity, religion, political alignment, or any other damn thing they wish.
People shouldn't bring those things into MMOs anyway. Kudos to the developers of Champions Online for having standards.
Ummm...nope. Queer, unless you are referring to something as strange, is pretty much derogatory in the US when referred to the GLBT community.
OP: Gay, straight...you were just being another young asshole trying to rock the boat. You were banned because your name was offensive...to the GLBT COMMUNITY! If you had talked about being gay in-game, and then gotten banned, I'd have sympathy, and in fact, would fight for your cause. A black man doesn't call his brothers "n*gg*r"; He will call them "My niggaz", referring to a common bond of struggle that black men share. There is a big difference between "N*gg*r" and "niggaz", and you would know that if you were an American; so shove that European superiority shite up your ass(and no, that wasn't meant as a gay reference, Mr Sensitivity).
You were looking to cause controversy just to massage your own ego, not out of gay pride or whatever lie you might want to fabricate. Most of those in the gay community would disparage the fact that you used the word queer, which was used as much as "faggot" was by rednecks as they would beat gays in the south and elsewhere. How about YOU learn some of the history of GLBT culture in the US, before you try to argue such crap as is in your post.
You are just another asshole trying to get a rise out of others. Well, congrats. Judging from the amount of posts here, it worked.
+1 for standing up for the side of reason. I love how some of the western europeans just love to take shots at America. To me it just shows his ignorance using preconceived notions about america to insult the entire country. Do you honestly think the majority of us in America give A RATS ASS about your sexual preference. I truly hate when people use things like race or sexual preference and the like as a WEAPON in some false self righteous crusade to "enlighten" the huddled masses of a country they clearly have no idea about to begin with. You were wrong, everyone pointed out the fault in your logic, you got mad and called us all uneducated biggots basically. That my friend is what actually took place. You can play your mental gymnastics all you want to convice yourself that we must all hate gay people since we don't agree with you, I actually find it sorta funny, your plight give me a break....
Ummm...nope. Queer, unless you are referring to something as strange, is pretty much derogatory in the US when referred to the GLBT community.
OP: Gay, straight...you were just being another young asshole trying to rock the boat. You were banned because your name was offensive...to the GLBT COMMUNITY! If you had talked about being gay in-game, and then gotten banned, I'd have sympathy, and in fact, would fight for your cause. A black man doesn't call his brothers "n*gg*r"; He will call them "My niggaz", referring to a common bond of struggle that black men share. There is a big difference between "N*gg*r" and "niggaz", and you would know that if you were an American; so shove that European superiority shite up your ass(and no, that wasn't meant as a gay reference, Mr Sensitivity).
You were looking to cause controversy just to massage your own ego, not out of gay pride or whatever lie you might want to fabricate. Most of those in the gay community would disparage the fact that you used the word queer, which was used as much as "faggot" was by rednecks as they would beat gays in the south and elsewhere. How about YOU learn some of the history of GLBT culture in the US, before you try to argue such crap as is in your post.
You are just another asshole trying to get a rise out of others. Well, congrats. Judging from the amount of posts here, it worked.
Queer isn't always a derogatory term. Some use it that way, but many gay rights groups quite proudly label themselves with it.
And I doubt the OP is a "young asshole trying to rock the boat". He said he had a character with the same name in CoH and no-one complained, and I can believe that.
He's probably just someone who has no problem proudly labelling himself as gay. And there's nothing wrong with that.
The problem, as others have pointed out, is there's no way for a company like CO to distinguish between a player like him and another who might be trying to use the term "queer" in a derogatory fashion.
Blizzard reversed their decision, which I think is a good thing, but it still did not make it to court, so there is no precedent set. Besides, I have to say that using the word gay and creating a gay guild and naming a character Qweer Cop are two different things.
I don't know any gays that consider the word gay offensive, but I do know many that don't like the word queer or any subsequent play on the word. While I can see quite possibly a case being won in the Blizzard case, I can't see one being won for the right to name a character "Qweer Cop" on the grounds that some people would and do consider that offensive.
Any case that makes it to court dealing with the virtual worlds of MMOs will be an interesting one indeed, because as I have previously stated, it is a slippery slope indeed. Can an arguement be made as a place of business, sure. Can an arguement be made as private property, definitely. Who is to say who is right?
As for your last point, I agree one hundred percent. It is possible to enjoy the game without bringing sex, religion, and politics into it.
honestly i would have reported the name as well. anyone seeing a name like that, 99.99999% of the time the person who reported it, thought the moron that made the name was gay bashing and being an all around tool. and i have reported names that have no place in games idc what your prefence is, and infact no one else does either. i reported a name in wow once it was "Fag" something reported it and they literally changed the guys name within 15 minutes. did i think the guy playing the character was actually gay? not for a second, do i care if he was? nope still would report it. there is no need for it.
WoW can be criticised on a lot of grounds, but they always with stuff like this at lightning speed.
And for all that people complain about the supposedly immature community, their chat channels are quite civilised compared to many other mmos.
In the WOW case, a good argument was made for it being a place of business, and I think that if anything like this ever did make it to court, that the courts would agree. That would, however, open the question of how to deal with the international nature of the online world.
But I honestly think that mmos will do everything humanly possible to never let a case like this get to court. And the fact that chat channels and tells can be monitored and logged, puts them in an ideal position to do that.
I think the difference between that particular case and this one, is that the girl in question simply used the word "gay" in its literal sense in the context of recruiting for a gay / gay-friendly guild. In that context, Blizzard's actions were discriminatory - though I believe their explanation that it was a misinterpretation by staff who didn't have much experience with these things.
Qweer Cop is definitely in a different category, and I personally side with Cryptic in that I think their intentions were good, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to bet against him winning a case. I've read of some downright bizarre decisions in this area, especially in the US. I think my favourite one was a woman who successfully sued her employer for sexual harassment because she overheard two other employees discussing a rumour about a fourth employee having been sexually harassed.
Anyone else reminded of George W.?
This is a good point. There's a big debate going on right now in the gay communities whether using the 'f-word' is okay if you are gay, just as the n-word is supposed to be okay if you are black (see the Thirty Rock episode for season 1). GLAAD downright condemns any use of the F-word, claiming it is an entirely derogetory word of control and oppression. On the other side you had Parez Hilton who used it in a slanderous way with will i am and claimed it's fine for him to use it since he's gay himself. He's already apologised saying that he'll never do it again after he huffed about it a bit.
Point being, for many people words that have been traditionally oppressive are stil offensive even if they don't hold the same connotations in contemporary society as they did in the past.
Post made and then deleted in protest of this thread.
Is the original poster serious? Man, that doesn't mean they don't want gay gamers. If they let you name yourself Qweer Cop, then they have to let everyone use names like that. Is this really what the gay community needs or wants? Then we'd hear people QQ because of it. It really isn't that hard to understand the actions they took. Would you think it was ok for an African American to name themselves N****r Jim? Because I sure don't think it'd be ok. It's derogatory no matter who says it. It ticks me off when I see this crap. Oh it's ok if I call myself (insert derogatory name) but if someone else does it's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
In the WOW case, a good argument was made for it being a place of business, and I think that if anything like this ever did make it to court, that the courts would agree. That would, however, open the question of how to deal with the international nature of the online world.
But I honestly think that mmos will do everything humanly possible to never let a case like this get to court. And the fact that chat channels and tells can be monitored and logged, puts them in an ideal position to do that.
I think the difference between that particular case and this one, is that the girl in question simply used the word "gay" in its literal sense in the context of recruiting for a gay / gay-friendly guild. In that context, Blizzard's actions were discriminatory - though I believe their explanation that it was a misinterpretation by staff who didn't have much experience with these things.
Qweer Cop is definitely in a different category, and I personally side with Cryptic in that I think their intentions were good, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to bet against him winning a case. I've read of some downright bizarre decisions in this area, especially in the US. I think my favourite one was a woman who successfully sued her employer for sexual harassment because she overheard two other employees discussing a rumour about a fourth employee having been sexually harassed.
Here again, I agree on the WoW case, but I still have to say, even knowing that some bizarre cases have been won in the courts, this one with the naming issue wouldn't float. The WoW case showed a knee jerk reaction to a sensitive issue, and was clearly discriminatory.
A case in the naming issue with Qweer Cop would lead to a web of entanglement with names (if the issue ever made it to a court mind you) that I am sure no judge would want to untangle. Who is to decide if this name is being used by a proud member of the gay community or some punk kid thinking he is just being funny? If that goes through, then what is to stop names with other deragatory terms that others could just claim they are using because they are a proud member of such and such and are just trying to show it? And who is going to be the one to make those distinguishments between who honestly thinks they are doing right and by those who are being purely deragatory and racist/biased/etc?
A sexual harrasment case, be it valid or not is one thing, but something like this has too many factors for it to feasibly pass.
Besides, if parents can't get away with this: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479904,00.html ; then why would this it make it through? Names can be and are a sensitive issue.
So, we can agree on the idea that Cryptic had good intentions, but we have to disagree on this particular boat floating in court.
I will say, thanks for the interesting convo though=)
Preach it Brother!
Couldn't say it better if I tryed. 100% correct.
You should have changed your name to "Retarded Cop", because that seems to describe you too. Ethics? I don't think you understand the meaning of the word. I like Women does that mean I should be able to make a character named "P%#@* Banger"? NO, it is wrong. I get it, Your Gay, Your Proud, Who gives a F#@*. That doesn’t mean we need it thrown in our face.
I have to agree. OP, you have some serious self identity issues if you feel you need to parade around an online game world proclaiming to the world that you are gay. You sexual orientation has NOTHING to do with why your name got changed. I've been playing online games for years and I don't remember any company letting people run around with avatars with any sort of sexual orientation theme. If you did see one, it would not last long because people report the crap. The companies don't care at all about your sexual orientation and bottom line is, they don't want it in their games. Remember, their game their rules. You are just another pog in the wheel.
Fear not fanbois, we are not trolls, let's take off your tin foil hat and learn what VAPORWARE is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
"Vaporware is a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product."
Thread has run its course, locked.