If this is the first place you're hearing it, I regret to report that the State of California is suing Blizzard over a culture of rampant sexual harassment, which, among other things, led to one employee's suicide. There are more details about this in the linked Kotaku article.
I have not fully processed this news, so what I'm giving here is my best summation of my initial emotional response.
It would be wonderful if the people who created art we cared about were as morally upstanding as we hoped them to be. And we tend to give the benefit of the doubt to people who create things that are meaningful to us. Sadly, this is a fallacy, and as we've seen with increasing frequency in the past few years, our favorite things are sometimes born from creators and managers who are reprehensible.
And make no mistake, the allegations in this suit are reprehensible. And I also want to clarify that I am not calling them "allegations" in an attempt to downplay their credibility. It's incredibly, incredibly rare for someone (most often women, who are so often subjected to these toxic environments by men,) to work up the courage to report harassment and other toxic behaviors, and especially if they are accusing something beloved, be it an individual or an institution, because of the inevitable backlash by a combination of the naive, the willfully ignorant, and the hatefully misogynistic.
World of Warcraft has been a major part of my life since 2006 - 15 years. My roommate introduced it to me when I was a lonely college student in New York, and its presence has been something to lean on in my battles with depression. This very blog is evidence of how I could quiet dark thoughts by letting my mind drift into Azeroth.
So it feels like a personal betrayal to find out that this has been going on.
That being said: many at the company are not the perpetrators of this, but its victims. And I don't want to belittle the work that they have done. As is so often the case, the whistleblowers lament having to damage a company at which they landed their dream jobs. I've often daydreamed about working in Blizzard's creative department developing WoW's narrative, and I'm sure that for those who get such a coveted position, it can feel like magic. More than most game companies, Blizzard has always worked to cultivate a community between its developers and the fans.
But then, I'll admit that I've always felt a little skeptical. Why, after all, in 2021, is it that every time I see a person in a leadership position at Blizzard, it's a middle-aged white guy? Obviously I'm not saying that every middle-aged white guy is a sexual predator - depending on when you count it, I'm either newly a middle-aged white guy or will be in a couple years. But it does seem that when that's your entire leadership, behaviors that make it harder for anyone who doesn't fit in that category to work tend to get ignored and, often, covered up.
There is a more optimistic take on all of this, though: the fact is that this behavior was going on already, and our learning about it did not cause it to exist. But with it exposed to daylight, there's a possibility for change.
And I really hope that that change comes. Azeroth is one of my favorite fantasy worlds, and the characters I've played over a decade and a half on it and within its larger cosmos are dear to me.
Blizzard needs to clean house. And this might mean the exposing some beloved figures, which is not going to be easy or painless. But remember, this was all going on for a long time. The bad stuff is already here. The opportunity is for some good change to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment