Current mood:	infuriated
Entry tags:	armageddon, censorship

Gaming and Hatespeech

While I was off at Taos, apparently the Armageddon message boards blew up when a post about how the world had gone to hell since women got the vote was moderated. I just deleted two nasty posts and warned the posters, and then had someone earnestly tell me that they were “just making fun of political correctness.”

But here’s the thing:

For one, those boards are often the first thing a potential player sees about the game. I don’t know that threads like “Girl-boobs” are the best representation of the community, but okay. I know that posts where people use the word “faggot” or tell people to “get back into the kitchen, bitch” step over the line, though.

We want more female players. One of the strategies for getting them is not to have a board where they are marginalized, objectified, or insulted on a daily basis. This is one of the reasons that we DO have more female players than similar games.

Beyond that, language shapes our perception of reality. If I saw someone beating a child, I’d step in. If I see someone else perpetuating thought models that allow, for example, Matthew Shephard to be beaten to death because of his sexuality, in a place that I sponsor and pay to have maintained, I will step in again. That doesn’t happen on my dime. Never. People are welcome to talk about how horrible it is that their free speech is being curtailed. It’s not a right that is extended on those boards, and we’ve been at great pains to make that clear. And yet, every year, it comes up once again.

It’s so sad that “political correctness” has come to mean ridiculous, stifling actions, and it’s another example of how the left letting the conservatives redefine a word, just as they did with “liberal” and “feminist”. When are we going to do some of that on our own? How about starting with “conservative”?