Shattered Fantasy

Head Chef and I play a video game called World of Warcraft, and it is a lot of fun. We play online simultaneously with hundreds and even thousands of other players from across North America and Australia, helping each other complete difficult tasks, defeat monster(ous) foes, and earn powerful weapons and abilities.

It’s all very exciting, time-consuming, and carefully designed to be as addicting as possible. At that, it’s very successful.

But recently, a spectre has appeared in game that crosses into the real world.

Head Chef and I have always appreciated the fact that Blizzard, the company that publishes World of Warcraft, has a firm policy against using the word “gay” in an insulting or derogatory manner in the game. Occasionally, we’ve actually reported other players who were abusive to gays, and it was nice to know that Blizzard was protecting us so we could play free of harassment.

But lately, Blizzard’s had a change of heart. A new policy was recently introduced after a woman announced in the game that her guild – a group of other players that are allied with one another – was looking for more members. The guild was “LGBT friendly.” Someone complained, and the woman was issued a warning by Blizzard. ‘You can’t say LGBT in game’ they said, in essence.

What followed was uproar. After a protracted silence, Blizzard made their policy more clear. Mention of sensitive topics, they said, was forbidden in game chat. Since gays and lesbians are a sensitive topic, they, like Christianity and Neoconservatism, were a prohibited topic.

But Blizzard was still vague enough in their description of the new policy to leave a lot of people wondering. ‘So is it OK to talk about heterosexuality, wives, or marriages,’ people have wondered. The verdict is still not in.

But something has happened – or at least is alleged to have happened – that may turn the question on its head. A player asked a Game Master if his two friends – a heterosexual couple that both play female characters – could have a marriage ceremony in the game. The answer was no. And more troubling still was that the answer was no because they were both playing female characters. The wedding, however, would be fine if they were playing opposite-sex characters.

This is a significant disappointment. If this account is true, it means that players are forbidden from creating the appearance that they are homosexual, or creating characters that they portray as homosexual for fear of being reported, warned, or even permanently banned from the game. But this rule does not apply to heterosexual players or players who play characters they portray as heterosexual.

Blizzard is based in California, and California law prohibits businesses from discriminating against gays and lesbians. Already, there is talk of letters from lawyers and articles in mainstream gay press.

Ostensibly, Blizzard is to doing this to maintain the purity of the fantasy fiction they’ve created in the World of Warcraft. But while Blizzard isn’t asking heterosexuals to portray themselves as anyone other than who they are in the World, they’ve seemingly instituted a new requirement that LGBT people must.

And that requirement utterly obliterates the fantasy.