Just when you thought Blizzard had learned their lesson from the Overwatch Tracer pose fiasco they continue to show how tone deaf they are. The original Tracer complaint post (that included Jeff Kaplan’s replies) that started this incident and the rebuttal post made by a 30 year old mother and Blizzard super fan named Ginny Higerd have both been deleted. Fearing that this kind of whitewashing might happen, I saved the text of Ginny’s post and made it available here for posterity:
My name is Ginny Higerd. I’m 30 years old, and a mother of an 8 year old. I’ve been playing Blizzard Entertainment games since The Lost Vikings on SNES. I’ve been a gamer since 1993. I’ve been a WoW player since 2005.
I’m not attractive. I’m not skinny. I got my jelly rolls that I have to deal with. I’ve been teased about my appearance since elementary school. As I got older, I tried very hard not to let it get to me.
Today, however, I’m upset. I’m disappointed.
Today, I feel like my voice no longer matters to Blizzard. Today, I feel like I was told that I have to give up confident and sexy poses to cater to a small minority, very annoying voice in the gaming industry.
I’m quite frankly sick of it.
I love being a sexy night elf character. I love being Tracer. I love being Nova. I LOVE these strong women that can be confident in their abilities and their appearance, because in the real world, I’m none of those things. These games were an escape for me. I channel myself into these characters, because I would give anything to be just like them.
Blizzard, why am I not allowed to be strong and sexy? Why am I not allowed to love these characters as they already are? Why are you alienating not just me, but many other women that love these female characters as they are for a single voice?
I want Tracer to stay how she is. I want her to be strong, confident, and sexy. Please, PLEASE, stop trying to make this game too PC. Stop trying to make women like me out to be sensitive babies that can’t handle beautiful women. Stop trying to cater to “families” when this game isn’t meant to be played by younger children.
Stop snuffing out my voice!
Edit: Since I have to prove myself constantly: https://twitter.com/mahoumelonball/status/714561794363097088
Do I post on KiA? Yes, because I am a firm believer that video games are an art, and need to stop pandering to the PC crowd that do not actually play any of these games. My opinions are my opinions, and they should not be invalidated simply because of subreddits I browse.
I’m a grown adult that can make my own decisions, and simply because I disagree with the PC police does not mean I’m trolling.
Edit 2: Other characters in the game use the exact same pose. Why aren’t people calling for them to be removed because they’re “sexist”/boring/whatever excuse? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ceq0ec7WsAMUK-x.jpg
Edit 3: I’m calling you out, Jeff. If that’s your excuse for removing it, then every character that does the same pose must also be removed. Fair is fair, right?http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20743015583?page=11#post-210
Ginny Higerd is a true hero. She rightly called out Blizzard for their pandering. She showed courage and bravery for speaking out and countering the false narrative of female oppression in video games concocted by social justice warriors and attention seekers like Anita Sarkeesian and others.
According to Blizzard’s mission statement every voice matters. If every voice does indeed matter, then why were both of these threads deleted?
-Wolfshead
There’s another, indirect side to this issue that I think deserves to be looked at: Activision-Blizzard has increasingly been courting Hollywood in its endeavors to expand their operations, most notably during the creation of their most recent sequels and expansions (StarCraft II, Diablo III and WoW: Mists of Pandaria onwards).
Here’s a 2014 interview with Blizzard’s audio team regarding their “big three” franchises (StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo). Notice that they namedrop the Screen Actors Guild a couple of times with reference to voice acting:
http://speakhertz.com/6716/interview-blizzard-entertainment-audio-team
In his KillScreen interview, sound director Joseph Lawrence notes the following on Diablo III’s audio design:
“I’m a little biased because I actually did it, but the cackles of the skeletons when they laugh uncontrollably. I did them very early on when I was trying to figure out what those guys sounded like. You actually have to sit there and wait for a while, but then they just burst into this maniacal laughter.
That was before we were union, so all of that got grandfathered in. Now we wouldn’t be able to do such stuff unless I got a SAG (Screen Actors Guild) card, but back in the old days we were able to do that.”
Source: https://killscreen.com/articles/sounds-violence/
Also, just last year Activision Blizzard opened up their own TV and film studio:
http://investor.activision.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=941323
Of note is that Hollywood is very much a leftist progressive propaganda machine now. I wouldn’t be surprised if Activision-Blizzard were being pressured to skew their operations via string-pulling.
Thanks for the insight and info on what Blizzard is up to. As Blizzard moves toward being a full blown Disneyfied company you can see them start to adopt many of the progressive tenets of faith.
Blizzard public overtures to progressive victim groups is a form of virtue signalling. They want to show the world and their new buddies in Hollywood how wonderful they are and what better way than to talk about diversity.
I was in the Bay area over the weekend visiting friends and family. One friend mentioned that in the Bay area one does not simply purchase a dog as a pet, you must “rescue” a dog. While a noble thing it is really just more evidence of the spread of virtue signalling in our culture.
This whole pandering to mainstream culture is simply heartbreaking. What happened to merely putting out games for the world to enjoy or dismiss?
As much as I advocate the tenet that companies should not be focusing on making profits but rather customers, I’d rather the merit be in the products and how they solve the customers’ needs and wants, not in “consumer relationship” through virtue signalling.
In that light, I have to point this out: once upon a time we weren’t playing “Blizzard” games. We were playing Lost Vikings, or Blackthorne, or Rock n’ Roll Racing, or Warcraft, or Diablo, or Starcraft, or those licensed DC games we shall not speak of. The products stood on their own two feet (or, in the licensed DC games’ case, fell hard).
Nowadays, however, we have either become accustomed to “brand recognition” or have had it impressed on us gradually instead of allowing the games to speak for themselves. “Oh it must be from Blizzard so it must be good.” Then we end up disappointed and berate the company as a result. What exactly happened that ended up replacing product merit with brand recognition? Now we have entire game companies making PR statements about issues and whatnot trying to appease the crowd.
I don’t want a “relationship” with an impersonal legal entity, I want to play video games made by real gamers like me!
I agree. I think the Blizzard name has become bigger and sadly more important than the games that they are producing. The opposite should be the case but it isn’t.
Go read the reviews of Blizzard at Glassdoor.com and you’ll see that Blizzard pays below industry standard. How do they get away with it? It’s the Blizzard name of course.
It is bad enough that most videos games such as Candy Crush are created for the solo purpose of making as much money via shady and manipulative monetization techniques but now we must contend with the specter of indoctrination and propaganda in order to appease a small minority of people who don’t even play video games.
Video games should exist for their own merit and intrinsic value, not to promote any particular ideology or advance a social benefit. It it not Blizzard’s responsibility to advocate for any particular special interest group or to solve some social problem via the content in their video games.
Art is rapidly becoming propaganda in Western culture. We see this already on most TV shows and films. Most plots are infused with politically correct morality and where it was once covert it’s now overt. Even the realm of sports has been taken over by political correctness.
EA, Bioware, Arenanet and now Blizzard are all major offenders here. We are living in very dangerous times with regard to where entertainment culture is heading. This cannot last forever without a massive wholesale consumer revolt which has already been started by Gamergate.
Thank goodness for video game companies in Poland and Russia who unashamedly make video games their own way without the taint of political correctness. They lived under communist control for decades and they have a real understanding what is like to live without freedom unlike the spoiled and coddled millenials in the West.
Blizzard seems to be in pure panic control mode.
One of the most anticipated features of Legion involved the cosmetic Wardrobe system that, according to BlizzCon 2015, would make the Transmogrification system more like Diablo3 ie accountwide.
This would include making all the skins of the Quest rewards from Quests removed by Cataclysm available, a token of appreciation to the fans widly cheered on both at BlizzCon and the official forums.
However, the late Alpha/Beta build suddenly changed this, now people would only unlock those rewards if the Quest was done by a character that had an armor/weapon type that was ‘right’ according to the new WoD rules, irrespective of wether the Quest even offered the ‘right-under-WoD’ choice (which was almost never the case, for one thing as Vanilla was rather sparse with options).
Threads appeared on both the US and EU forums, quickly being highly upvoted (the US one to over hundred) due to massive outcry about Blizz going back on a popular feature etc. but within a day the US thread has been deleted, and the EU one may befall a similar fate.
US old:
Stop Nerfing Transmog (Legion Wardrobe)
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20744184377?page=1
new/reaction:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20744244418
EU
Wardrobe will NOT UnLock Quest Rewards, wut?
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/17611591137
It makes one wonder why they are so desperate.
https://twitter.com/nite_moogle/status/725796607011082240
As a small addendum to what I wrote earlier today : in a surprise turn of events they just unDeleted the US thread about the Wardrobe issue(s) . Haven’t seen that often.
My fever brain sees an opportunity for cross-platforming of sorts: people can unlock appearances of Live deleted quests…at the newly announced official Legacy servers (assuring a healthy population and possible cross-fertilisation) One can dream 😉
Blizzard hasn’t unveiled the new pose for Tracer despite them claiming that they were going to remove the “Over The Shoulder” look anyway.
There was one post that stood out from a concept artist who works in the industry, posting under the Battle.net handle Asuka, where they wrote…