The self-induced contagion of identity politics is spreading at alarming rates within the woke halls of Blizzard Entertainment. As I reported earlier this year, Blizzard announced at BlizzCon 2019 that players will soon be able to select humans with African and Asian racial features for their avatars.
Wowhead just published an article highlighting the new “diverse” skin tones for Blood Elves that are expected to appear in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion due to be released this summer.
Why stop at humans when you can show how inclusive you are and make blood elves black as well?
Expect black gnomes soon. After all, we don’t want to offend the pygmy community in Africa that plays WoW retail.
In an article from Kotaku from 2019, Wow Executive Producer John Hight revealed that Blizzard worked with their internal diversity group to come up with new skin tones and racial features for Shadowlands:
Hight said that he and the team worked with Blizzard’s internal diversity group to choose the races and features they ultimately decided to go with. The hope is that people will be able to “identify with [them] and hopefully feel like it’s cool.”
No John, it’s not cool. It’s disgraceful pandering.
Blood Elves have always had white skin with Nordic facial features because that’s what elves have always looked like since Tolkien introduced them and beyond. The look of Blood Elves is well defined and an iconic part of WoW lore. Part of the reason that the Blood Elves were given to the Horde so that the Horde could have a “pretty” race to choose from.
See my previous article on this subject for my in-depth analysis and objections to this epic travesty.
Some Questions
I would like to know who at Blizzard decided that WoW player avatars which represent the fantasy world of Azeroth needed to represent real-world human racial characteristics? Come out of the shadows, explain, and own your decisions if you dare.
Why weren’t WoW players consulted and/or polled on this decision?
WoW players have been asking for many things over the years only to be told to wait and have their requests put on the “to-do” list or just ignored and rebuffed. At one point, WoW players were lectured by J. Allen Brack that they were wrong to even ask for WoW Classic.
How much did it cost to create these avatars?
How much will it cost to create even more “inclusive” avatars?
What is the opportunity cost?
Given that Activision/Blizzard are experiencing layoffs, financial austerity measures, how can diversity, inclusion and representation initiatives be justified?
How can any of this be justified by WoW’s lore?
Is anyone in the WoW lore department awake? Christie Golden? Bueller?
Chris Metzen, do you even care that your lore is being destroyed in the name of political correctness?
J.R.R. Tolkien and the Tolkien Estate would never allow this travesty to happen to characters from Middle-earth. It seems the loremasters of Azeroth have no such respect for the integrity of their own creations and have bowed down to the false god of wokeness. To them, their own lore is disposable and mutable.
Blizzard’s Soviet-Style Diversity Star Chamber
In the former Soviet Union, every aspect of life in totalitarian Russia including scholarly books and literature had to be approved by the Communist Party to ensure that communist principles were upheld and promoted. Every company and organization had officials from the Communist Party installed to monitor everyday people.
Every street had spies working for the Communist Party who would snitch on people who spoke out against the party. It was not uncommon for dissidents to be rounded up, given no trial, and shipped off to concentration camps in Siberia or just murdered on the spot by the dreaded KGB the secret police.
My family fled the occupied Baltic states after being terrorized by the bloodthirsty Bolsheviks in World War 2. When my father was a little boy, my grandmother would dress up him in winter clothing before he went to sleep each night because she was afraid the communists would take them and put them on a train to a Siberian concentration camp. My father would relate stories of people who vanished from villages and towns never to be seen from again.
The diversity, inclusion, and representation agenda is Marxism in sheep’s clothing. It’s soft totalitarianism with a smile.
Internal diversity and inclusion groups are springing up all across corporate America. Their goal — with the help of diversity and inclusion VPs and directors — is to enforce and promote this pernicious ideology. Many companies now force their employees to go on sensitivity training where they are brainwashed to believe in false concepts like so-called white privilege and unconscious bias.
Anyone who dares utter an incorrect thought or opinion or challenges this orthodoxy can lose their livelihood and is subject to marginalization and disenfranchisement.
The Diversity that Blizzard Doesn’t Care About: Viewpoint Diversity
These diversity groups are also being used to recruit like-minded people. As more progressive people are hired, there are fewer opportunities for those who hold alternative viewpoints if they are foolish enough to reveal them. This has the effect of destroying viewpoint diversity. Unlike racial/gender/sexual diversity which has no proven benefits, viewpoint diversity is a great boon to civilization. Without viewpoint diversity, our society will never progress and will remain locked in the atherosclerosis of orthodoxy.
The Heterodox Academy describes the benefits of viewpoint diversity:
Viewpoint diversity exists when members of a group or community approach problems or questions from a range of perspectives. When a community is marked by intellectual humility, empathy, trust, and curiosity, viewpoint diversity gives rise to engaged and respectful debate, constructive disagreement, and shared progress towards truth.
What is most troubling is the amount of unearned power that the Blizzard Internal Diversity Group possesses. We can thank none other than former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime for creating this Frankenstein monster and unleashing it upon both the company and the player base.
When an entity is created, it naturally seeks to justify its existence. Survival is the one thing in common every life form has. But this is no mere life form, rather it’s a deadly parasite and cancerous tumor that cannot exist without the host. Blizzard’s internal diversity group will do all it can to get bigger and become more powerful and influential until the host is dead.
Every new product that comes from Blizzard will have to get the approval of this Soviet-style committee to make sure that there is enough diversity, inclusion, and representation contained within their game worlds. This means the celebration of more leftist causes, inclusion of real-world minorities that don’t fit the lore, token LGBTQ characters, and more woke themes du jour coming in the years ahead whether it is appropriate in the game world and whether you the gamer like it or not.
As this internal diversity group grows in power, they will ensure that their friends and allies — people who think and vote like them — will get the first crack at new jobs. Nepotism and cronyism are rampant within the industry. Within 3 years, I predict Blizzard will be unrecognizable and unbearable torment for any man stupid enough to work there.
They should rename their company to Snowflake Entertainment. After all, blizzards are too harsh and too manly.
So just who are the members of Blizzard’s internal diversity group?
Is there an internal viewpoint diversity group at Blizzard that represents men, traditional people, conservatives, independents, Christians, Republicans, and heterosexuals?
If not, why not?
How many members of this group are recent hires? How many members of this group have been with the company since 2000?
How were they selected and who selected them?
How gay, how black, how disabled, how woke does an applicant have to be to qualify for membership in this elite group?
What is the gender, sexual identity, and racial makeup of the group?
As I predicted, recent identity politics recruits at Blizzard are now becoming involved in high-level decision-making not because of their actual talent but because of their racial, gender, and sexual orientation. They are also being used as props and given high visibility at BlizzCon presentations and panels for virtue-signaling purposes.
Imagine the outcry that would ensue if Blizzard had an internal Conservative Christian Group that advised Blizzard on ways to make their video games more inclusive of Conservative values, Christians, and promoted Christian morality?
Every year BlizzCon features a special Inclusion Nexus Lounge for chosen victim groups. Your WoW subscription dollars hard at work.
Will future BlizzCons have lounges for conservatives, independents, traditionals, Christians and Republicans?
With the exception of a few social justice malcontents on Twitter and Tumblr feminists and the usual “journalists” suspects at Polygon and Kotaku, there is no evidence that any appreciable number of WoW players even wanted these kinds of unnecessary changes to WoW.
The bleeding hearts at Blizzard are just one teary-eyed missive away from a trans activist, a feminist, and a minority from changing their company and content. The integrity of their lore means absolutely nothing to them if they can get another bong hit of virtue signaling. Drunk with power, the upper echelon at Blizzard do as they please.
This is no way to run a company.
Men Without Chests
What kind of man allows this to happen to his company?
The push for diversity, inclusion, and representation is coming on high from the likes of Mike Morhaime, J. Allen Brack, and Jeffrey Kaplan.
Every bit of research I have done on these three individuals has shown that they are progressives if not open leftists. Their political and ideological worldview has now manifested itself into the fabric of Blizzard.
All that gamers want are video games that provide escapism free from the yoke of politics and real-world issues. There is no evidence that Blizzard’s customers ever wanted an ideologically driven company to force identity politics down their throats. Everything that happened at Blizzard came directly from the top. Shame on them!
Are there any real men left at Blizzard who have the cajones to object to this lunacy? I guess they are too busy counting their money, stroking their hipster beards, and guzzling down their locally crafted IPA to care. Meanwhile the Blizzard we once knew is burning to the ground.
The Great Diversity Swindle
As most American corporations adopt the Orwellian diversity, inclusion, and representation agenda, it’s important to examine its underlying false assumption which is this:
Everything is racist. Everything is sexist. Everything is anti-LGBTQ and so on.
The purveyors of the diversity racket have made the outrageous assumption that until they showed up, American companies were run by bigoted and biased people. They have gone to great lengths to contrive the fiction that this malady was hampering the creativity and productivity of the company. They have implied this without one iota of proof.
Anyone who opposes their agenda must be a narrow-minded bigot.
The cultural nihilists on the left need scapegoats and malefactors that they can demonize and point fingers at. The so-called “marriage equality” movement used the exact same technique to bully the American public. Suddenly, billions of normal people on the planet who supported traditional marriage including then-presidential candidate Barack Obama were instantly labeled bigots.
If you are against pedophilia and drag queen story hour, then you’re probably also a bigot.
Nobody wants to be called a bigot because you can lose your job and your social status. So you capitulate and shut your mouth. They know this and they use this fear to quash any and all resistance to their schemes. It is cultural terrorism.
Every industry I have worked in has never openly or covertly discriminated against people who are different. In fact, for as long as I can remember, they have actively sought out minorities for hiring.
This is especially true in the video game industry. I have worked with gays, women, and minorities. I worked with women with pink hair in the early 2000s long before pink hair and being a college lesbian was fashionable. Nobody cared what color their skin was or who they slept with. All we cared about was making the very best game possible. Period.
The diversity movement would have you believe that the video game industry is rife with systematic sexism, racism, and homophobia. There is not one shred of evidence to support this. This underlying assumption is a straw-man/boogeyman that they have created and they see themselves and their ideology riding in on white horses and unicorns to save the day.
In fact, it is against the law for employers to discriminate based on gender, race, ethnicity, creed and sexual orientation.
The purveyors of diversity and inclusion are engaged in an ideological con-game and a swindle of the highest order. The diversity industry is a den of snake-oil sellers, and projecting degenerates. They are charlatans and grifters who are consuming finite resources that could be used to pay workers higher salaries, with better working conditions, better benefits, and make better video games but instead are wasted on the vanity of moral exhibitionism.
The Diversity/Inclusion/Representation Three Ring Circus is Coming to Town
At the top of the diversity industry’s pyramid are the newly minted diversity officers and HR departments. The diversity industry is one of the fastest-growing professions in America. All of them participate in the same scripted ideological virtue signaling that is spreading unchecked from the cauldrons of gender studies and racial studies departments in our colleges.
You see the same diversity propaganda on all of their websites full of pictures of shiny, happy minorities, and LGBTQ employees. Posing not for what they have accomplished but what they represent. Add to that, the token PRIDE parades and rainbow Twitter profile images during PRIDE month. It’s all so predictable and pathetic.
They are offering a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist except in the false fantasy world of ludicrous ideological pornography like The Handmaiden’s Tale, white supremacy, racism and the ever so evil patriarchy that is alive and well in their deranged and addled minds.
There is zero evidence that diversity for the sake of diversity enhances and improves products or services. Scientific studies by Harvard scientist Robert Putnam have been done to show the diversity has dubious value and has many harmful effects.
The Forgotten Victims: Straight White Males
The real victims in this specious monstrosity are straight white emasculated males who bear the burden of being systematically denied jobs in favor of protected classes of people. If anyone needs help and understanding, it is them. Those straight white males are your boyfriends, your husbands, your sons, your brothers, your uncles, and your fathers. There are no special internal groups for men at Blizzard, yet there are special groups and conferences for females only and of course the infamous internal diversity group.
Already men suffer disproportionately far more than women in our over-feminized society with higher rates of imprisonment and suicides, lower college enrollment, compromised longevity, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and unfair treatment in child custody cases and divorce. But nobody speaks for them, certainly not the empty suits who run Blizzard Entertainment.
Merit is the only standard that should be applied when hiring people. This is no longer the case at Blizzard as I have chronicled in my writings on this website.
Video games were one of the last refuges where men could get together and enjoy friendship, camaraderie and teamwork without being accosted by busybody feminists and angry lesbians. But even that was too much and like the vindictive Grinch who took the last crumb — too small for even a mouse — from Cindy Lou Who’s house in Whoville, they had to take that away as well.
Today men are disposable. They are only useful to the woke left as sperm donors and child support ATM machines. And of course, when they are needed to fight and die for their ungrateful country.
Not many male hobbies are still left for these extremists to plunder, destroy and remake in their own image. At this rate, I’m sure they’ll be coming for model railroading too.
Someday, Western civilization will need strong men to fight. Don’t be surprised when they are none left to heed the call.
Conclusion
What has happened to Blizzard Entertainment, the video game industry and popular culture was predicted many years ago.
In his 1943 book “The Abolition of Man” C.S. Lewis — a friend and contemporary of J.R.R. Tolkien — saw the danger signs of how Western civilization was being attacked by modernism and from within. In his excellent piece for The American Thinker, Chris Banescu summaries Lewis’s dire predictions with crystal clear clarity:
Mid-twentieth-century C. S. Lewis witnessed and wrote about the increasing moral breakdown and intellectual decay of Western civilization. He observed how secular and atheistic academics, philosophers, politicians, intellectuals, and cultural elites abandoned reason, denied universal truths, undermined Christian doctrines, and rejected moral principles that formed the foundation of civilized society.
So here we are in 2020 living in a sick civilization where perversion, degeneracy, and depravity are openly celebrated. The killing of unborn babies is regarded as a sacrament and a right. Men are emasculated and denigrated by popular culture unless they are pretending to be women. Men no longer know who they are or what they are supposed to be. We celebrate vice while we mock virtue.
What Blizzard is engaging in by promoting diversity, inclusion and representation is ideological bullying, social engineering and moral proselyting under the guise of entertainment. We are witnessing a diabolical infiltration of cultural Marxism, intersectionality, feminism, and sexual perversion into video games and our culture.
In a strong and healthy Christian society, these kinds of things would never be allowed to metastasize. But today we live in the demonic darkness of a “tolerant” post-Christian world, full of people weaned on shallow Hollywood superhero/comic book morality and the vapidity of Netflix binge fodder.
Blizzard’s obsession with the counterfeit morality of identity politics is also a useful smokescreen that distracts the public from focusing on their misdeeds and bad decisions such as: doing business with the barbaric regime of communist China, censorship, horrific working conditions, paying lower than industry standard pay, obscenely skewed work/life balance, broken promises, and mediocre unfinished games.
They are getting away with it because we don’t have honest journalists and reporters to call them out. With the exception of a few brave men such as Richard Lewis, Jeremy Hambly and few others, the gaming media is 99% corrupt and most of these lemmings believe in the Blizzard agenda. The timid MMO blogosphere, blowhard video influencers, and narcissistic streamers refuse to call out Blizzard on this because they are afraid of being labeled as racists, bigots, homophobes and transphobes.
Don’t kid yourself, they love the official recognition and perks such as getting free tickets to BlizzCon and getting backstage access to the devs. They are men without chests — a motley crew of groveling, sniveling, slithering invertebrates.
Back in the early 2000s, Alex Afrasiabi and Jeff Kaplan would have fearlessly called out SOE, Blizzard or any other video game studio for allowing this incomprehensible garbage to even exist. Now like trembling flowers, they sit back, do nothing and allow it to happen under their stewardship.
Remarkably some Blizzard devs like Mark Kern and Rob Pardo, saw the coming storm and left the sinking ship with a semblance of their integrity intact.
Thanks to greed, hubris, and cowardice, much of the video game industry has become infected with this virus and is rotten to the core with wokeness. I am reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s apt quote about the music industry:
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
Sound familiar?
For a company that purports to appeal to a global audience that contains a myriad of cultures, it is perplexing that Blizzard has not embraced the pragmatism of ideological neutrality and cultural commonality. This is sobering evidence of their lack of business savvy, pridefulness, immaturity, and hubris which are vices shared by most noveau rich California based entertainment and tech companies who seek to impose their values on the world. By lurching their companies to the left of the political spectrum, they are undermining the very thing they are attempting to achieve.
― Wolfshead
As a reference for this article, I present the following story from China:
How China appoints 4.5 million “administrators” to snoop on and report neighbors who don’t conform
https://reclaimthenet.org/china-grid-administrators/
Your entire premise hinges on the assumption that Blizzard is sacrificing value by deciding to make these models. If Blizzard it is profitable for Blizzard to make these dark skinned character models, then you are the one introducing your politics into the video game.
So the question is which is more likely, the conspiracy you outlined above, or that Blizzard is responding to cultural changes in a way that will be profitable for their company. You said it yourself, diversity is the new big industry. It wouldn’t be the new big industry if their wasn’t money to be made selling it. The pandering you’re talking about is just good marketing.
Keep your politics out of my game.
My premise for objecting to Blizzard’s new models is not limited to one point which is cost, opportunity cost, and profitability. It’s also about the fact that Blizzard’s lore does not support dark-skinned Blood elves. Lore matters in a fantasy virtual world. Lore that is changed at the drop of a hat for expediency creates uncertainty and makes the player feel they are standing on quicksand. It also erodes immersion and the suspension of disbelief which is critical for MMORPGs to succeed.
Regarding profitability, Blizzard has not introduced any evidence that black people in great numbers are refusing to play WoW because they can’t “see themselves” or “identify” because they can’t create black (African) looking characters. I believe they are doing this to virtue signal and to make a political point.
You are making an assumption that just because Blizzard is doing something, that it must be profitable. That’s not logical. Companies today routinely engage in rainbow marketing/virtue signaling for reasons other than profit. Blizzard gives thousands of dollars to LGBTQ groups, PRIDE parades, and feminist causes. None of that helps their profitability. Business do things all the time that are not directly related to the profit motive. The owner of Chik-Fil-A makes sure that every franchise closes on Sunday. Why? Because, he’s a Christian and he puts his faith over profits.
Regarding representation of players within a fantasy virtual world, given this logic, then Blizzard should allow players who are disabled or amputees, to make characters who represent them in Azeroth as well — in wheelchairs and with legs, arms removed — all for profitability. Where does this kind of silly pandering end?
Representation is an loathsome act of cowardice and pandering that has no place in video games or modern entertainment.
Profitability should not be the only consideration when introducing new features into a MMORPG. What if Blizzard sold a special weapon that could instantly destroy a enemy NPC and they charged $100 for this? No doubt many people would purchase this and it would be very profitable. But, it would destroy WoW in the process.
There are many things that Blizzard could do to increase the short term profitability in WoW but they would turn WoW into a joke.
I’ve never asked Blizzard to include my cultural and political beliefs in WoW. I don’t work for Blizzard. I have no power at Blizzard. All I’ve done is to ask Blizzard to stop pandering to a tiny minority of the population and stop ramming identity politics down the throats of their customers.
P.S. I’ve been writing about WoW for 16 years. Blizzard does not truly care about the majority of the WoW playerbase in the least. Blizzard is all about making a quick buck as Morhaime recently admitted with their focus on accessibility. Pardo was in on this as well from the start. Blizzard always does what they want regardless of logic or reason because they think they know better. Look at the plethora of awful expansions and constant class upheavals. Look at the declining subscribers over the years. The numbers don’t lie. Blizzard lives in a bubble of their own hubris. These are people that love the smell of their own farts. Not one of them has the guts to leave a non-controlled environment to debate their critics. They screen all the questions at BlizzCon. It’s a joke. Instead they go to media friendly outlets like Venturebeat or leak to Kotaku. Shameless cowards.
Fuck off with your politics, casual Andy