talldarkbishoujo:

uncdan:

talldarkbishoujo:

At the beginning of the current WoW expansion, monkeys were added to the classes of animals the Hunter class could tame and use for combat pets. I am not exaggerating when I say that I was putting in report tickets near daily, I saw so many Hunters running around with monkeys named after either famous black people or what they believed to be “black names” (“Laquisha”, etc). Even on my server, that is known as a beacon of progressiveness among WoW servers, for our huge LGBT population. (racism in MY LGBT community?! heh)

Before monkeys were tameable, it was gorillas named after black people. “Obama” was especially popular. To their credit though, whenever I submitted these tickets I never got the standard cut-and-paste response, I always got a personalized response from the GMs apologizing profusely, and I knew they took it seriously. But still, it happened. A lot.

And before players of other MMOs get smug and start talking shit about WoW again, I saw similar shit in “mature” games like FFXI and City of Heroes/Villains back when I played them.

This is what it’s like being a black online gamer. This isn’t the sum total of it—but this is the kind of thing you have to steel yourself against.

Frankly speaking… 

A lot of the online gaming community is trash. And I say this as a member and I’m not proud of the community as a whole. 

I recently started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s a brilliant new game that has attracted a lot of old gamers and new ones. The gameplay and systems are pretty similar to WoW, and so it makes itself easy to pick up for WoW veterans. 

And we get some of the same trash, I’m sad to say. 

Less than 2 weeks after launch, I already got goldfarming spam. But that’s another thing. 

I hate to admit I’ve long been aware of horrible racism in-game, because people think they can get away with things just because it’s the Internet and they’re anonymous. 

When I first starting gaming online, it was in FPS games. And I saw blatantly in chat the common use of n*gger and various other racial slurs. 

Not cool at all. It shocked me. 

My recommendation if you play an MMO and you want a relatively mature and well-behaved crowd, go to Roleplaying servers. They spell better, have better grammar, respect character and story much more, and, well, are just nicer people. 

Okay, this kind of response is exactly what I was afraid of, I just knew some clueless person would stroll in and try to make it about how terrible WoW’s community is or whatever. This is missing the entire goddamn point of my post. My post was not about “how to find a non-racist server”, or which games are “non-racist” (hint: neither of these things exist).

MY POST WAS NOT ABOUT WORLD OF WARCRAFT.

My post used World of Warcraft as an example of the kind of racism that black gamers run into while playing online games. That is all. There is a particular kind of denial in the MMO community in particular, that all the “trash” in their particular game’s community comes from World of Warcraft’s community. Which is absolutely fucking ridiculous. I ran into racists on EVE Online (about as far removed from WoW’s target demographic as is humanly possible for a game). I ran into racism in Final Fantasy XI, a game with a huge Japanese community (“no Japs” parties). I ran into racism in City of Heroes. Jesus fucking Christ, I ran into racism on MUDs and Gemstone III and the original Neverwinter Nights, long before MMORPGs were even conceived of. I actually lied and pretended to be a white girl because I couldn’t stand the negativity anymore, on a couple of MUDs I played.

And there is not a single solitary game in existence where I have not seen glaring examples of sexism and homophobia.

The WoW community didn’t invent racism. These problems have existed in online gaming since long before WoW. They will exist long after WoW shuts off its servers. Wherever there are privileged assholes, there will be racism. Racism is endemic to the gaming community and subculture period, just as it is endemic to the culture at large that spawned this subculture. Any subculture that enshrines white males as representative of the sum total of the population is going to have these issues.

RP servers are not immune to this kind of behavior either, by any means. People don’t magically become less racist because they can spell properly and give you a history of their faction’s lore. RP servers vs. PvP or PvE servers are like the Northern US vs. the Southern US, there is still racism, it’s just not blatant and in-your-face most of the time. RP server racism tends to come less in the form of gorillas named after black people and more in the form of people cracking jokes about how this particular elf’s name is “kind of ghetto” and people mysteriously not responding to your forum threads as much once they see a picture of you IRL. It’s Mean Girl racism. Which is still racism, btw.

This idea that is particularly a World of Warcraft problem is pernicious in the online gaming community, and irritating, and just fucking wrong. We are just talking about a matter of degrees, here. And as a person who is marginalized in multiple ways, there are King Solomon decisions to be made on a daily basis.

Reblogged for the commentary.

And ye gods, have I had those conversations with so many of those of my acquaintances playing MMOs. And they never seem to get it. Ever.