It’s a big word. It is, as per usual, a big subject. It’s long and rambling, and I’m certainly not an expert on the experiences of gay, lesbian or transexual gamers. This is not about calling anyone homophobic, or anything like that. This post is just about looking at these issues and questioning ourselves and our attitudes. I’m hoping I will have a guest poster soon who will be able to hold forth on this better than me. This post contains spoilers for the Goblin starter area.
Edit: It’s also been pointed out to me that ‘Heteronormativity’ is a rather big word that isn’t used commonly, so here is a link for you to read on that
Her still-beating heart
There is a quest in the Goblin starter area that culminates, for both male and female NPCs, in the player ripping the still-beating heart out of a cheating girlfriend or boyfriend. For the male goblin player character, first you kill Chip Endale for betraying you and dating your girl, and then you rip the heart out of her ‘fickle chest’. I can’t find the equivelants for the female characters in the wowhead or MMO Champion Cata databases, but I’ve been assure that there is a female equivelant which first has you killing your female rival, and then killing your ‘cheating ex’.
Problematic and violent quests in game are nothing new. We’ve had to torture, main, kill, poison, steal, desecrate; in short as part of computer games in general and as part of World of Warcraft, the game asks us to do some very unsavoury things. The original outrage about this quest, before it was confirmed that there was a female equivalent, is that it brings domestic violence into the game and makes a joke out of it in an environment which already has many tropes of female golddiggers, jokes with references to bondage, a joke that still hasn’t been cleared up as to whether it refers to rape or not. Etc.
However I’m not here to talk about the problems of bringing domestic violence, and whether it’s sexist or not, right at this very moment.
Is this the first time that Warcraft has defined the sexuality & personal relationships of the Player Character?
There is a lot of discussion in the LGBT gaming community about how sexuality is incorporated into modern adult games. How some games allow Lesbian relationships but not Gay relationships, or how such relationships are in danger of being tokenised rather than legitimate narrative components.
World of Warcraft has, to my knowledge, steered clear of prescribing players with romantic relationships until now. If player characters ‘fall in love’ or form attachments it has largely been at the player’s choice. If you don’t want to roleplay any romantic attachments, then that aspect of gaming never becomes part of your immersion. I fully accept that many people who game don’t really want to think about romantic attachments because they logged on to kill Internet Dragons (or zerglings, or whatever.)
However in Cataclysm, Blizzard has taken the step of putting the player in a romantic relationship as part of the Goblin Starter Zone. You do not get a choice to enter into this relationship, and you can’t chose to enter into it with an NPC of a different gender. As a female character you have your Personal Assistant and your Boyfriend. And that’s it. As part of the new, ‘immersive experience’ of the starter areas, we now play with preformed relationships. The worgen area, to my knowledge, lets you build the relationships (but doesn’t give you any choices as you go along) so that by the end of the starter zone your interactions have a history.
This linearity is turning WoW from RPG to Graphic Novel
Personally I would prefer not to have the faux-relationship with Chip Endale at all. I’d like to be able to avoid it. While the old quest hub system from Wrath has it’s problems with efficient questing, you can skip certain quests without locking out an entire zone of quests. Generally if you skip a quest line you can ignore it completely or come back to it later at your leisure. One of the problems with Vashj’ir and Mount Hyjal is that the number of quests you can skip is drastically reduced. Gazimoff spoke about this on the last episode of ObscureCast: there’s a bugged quest in Vashj’ir, and because you can’t complete it you can’t progress through the rest of the zone.
This is not locking you out of one story (e.g. Wrathgate, or some of the WotLK torture quests) this is locking you out of the rest of Dragonblight, for example. So I can’t help but feel the same is true for the Domestic Violence plot in the Goblin Starter area. I’ve compared the Worgen Starter Area to a moving Graphic Novel as well, although in a more positive sense, but it doesn’t start the player out with romantic attachments that will jar with their own sexuality, or simply be something that they don’t want in the first place (and then tie the plot up by murdering your traitorous, cheating partner and the person they cheated with.)
(And yes I’m aware that the Girlfriend/Boyfriend is supposed to be arm candy and not a ‘real’ relationship.)
But isn’t the point that you can’t change certain plot points? Shared narrative and all that?
Well, yes. I’ve always seen World of Warcraft a little bit like Doctor Who – you can change or chose to do many things, but there are fixed points in Time and Space where you can’t stop the Big Tragedy. You can’t stop or change Wrathgate, but you can participate in it. Along the way you can chose not to torture NPCs (except that wait, if you’re in Borean Tundra and you want to go to the Nexus 5 man and get the Wyrmrest Accord Dailies there, you couldn’t skip it!)
The Goblin Girl/Boyfriend crosses a line from participating in the world and making choices about it, to making choices for you. There isn’t much choice involved in questing or levelling to begin with, so for me this particular storyline was somewhat jarring. The reactions of some lesbian and gay players I know has been ‘gee, heteronormative much?’ There’s no real outcry about this, because it’s a small quest in a game where relationships and romance take a back seat in WoW (for players at least) compared to a game like Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age where the relationships with your crew and team mates are part of the roleplaying experience (and you have some choice about how those go down.)
What are you saying Pewter?
I don’t quite know. I’m not comfortable with the line crossed by Blizzard in RPG terms. There is Lesbian and Gay subtext in the presentation of player characters and some NPCs, but it remains in subtext. At the same time I suspect that a lot of people don’t want anti-gay pundits crawling all over the game and lambasting it for including non-heteronormative quests in the gaming world. Yet the game is strongly heteronormative (in most of the presented relationships) and has now stepped into forcing goblin players into a relationship (even if it is just for show) in a time when RPGs are under greater scrutiny by the LGBT gaming community. This relationship also highlights how lack of choice impacts on the RPG component of World of Warcraft as a roleplaying game as well as an MMO.
I think it was a poor story choice on the part of Blizzard. It makes the player the centre of the events in the Starting Area, but at the same time it makes everyone else the centre of the same events. The Guild Wars 2 trailers talk about this issue – all of us doing the same thing, even when we are the centre of the story. I’m not sure that Guild Wars 2 will do any better with this (as the story of the player in GW2 seems to be a solo component of the game rather than a true MMORPG).
In an effort to escape the heteronormative assumptions and homophobic bullying present online, Sarah Andrews, a gamer who actively recruited members for her guild – a group or team that comes together to achieve game objectives – stated that her group was not “GLBT only” but “GLBT friendly.” Blizzard Entertainment, the owners of World of Warcraft, argued that Andrews’ recruitment inside the game was a violation of sexual harassment policies and policies protecting against sexual orientation discrimination. Blizzard threatened to ban her and her guild, dismantling the group before it began in an effort to protect online gamers, many of whom are adolescents, from harassment (Terdiman 2006). The heteronormative matrix became a filter through which preventing discrimination resulted in silencing the discourse on sexuality. Andrews was later allowed to reinstate her guild. If this action had occurred in an environment where there was little or no homophobia, heterosexism, sexism, racism, etc., then Blizzard Entertainment might have had an argument, however, a quick venture into this world proves otherwise. So in an alternate world to Second Life populated by many youth, any discussion of sexuality outside of the bounds of traditional heteronormative assumptions is eschewed, and sexually diverse users are acceptable if they silence themselves.
This article at Beyond Current Horizons is quite applicable here. I suspect any outcry from LGBT players (and I apologise for the acronym 
) would be silenced by the player base at large, and the heteronormativey of the game explained away and excused by the heteronormativity of the world, genre, gaming culture and of the designers who created it. I am sure there are gay and lesbian gamers who are not at all bothered by this quest, because they (like many straight players) don’t play for romantic/relationship storylines, and also because they are used to seeing heteronormative relationships as the norm in traditional and new media. Blizzard doesn’t have many games in the stable, and none of them are really good with anything other than subtext (and sometimes not even that, apparently SC2 is completely lacking in it.)
I guess what I’m saying is that the quest is both problematic for it’s presumption of the sexual orientation of the player character, and because it highlights the lack of RPG in the starting areas, and the problems with zone wide linearity. There is a difference between an RPG where you control an established character (e.g. Link), and an RPG where your avatar is supposed to be grown out of your choices.
But a little discussion, a little noticing of these things doesn’t hurt, right?
That’s quite thought-provoking. I don’t recall having done that quest, maybe it’s on the second island which I’d not finished.
I wonder how light-hearted and funny it is, the rest of the zones are full to the brim with ridiculous scenarios, like on the first island you accidentally set off a volcano while proving how far your robot can throw a ball and end up destroying the whole island. You get a pimp car, pick up friends, and go collect debts, wear bling outfit (it’s called bling, even for a male Goblin) and go dancing, with people vomitting and needing buckets which you provide.
I hope the quest you mention is also done in such a riduculous fashion that one can’t draw negatives from it when in context to all the other silly things you’re doing.
Yeah. I’m not saying that violent and problematic stuff shouldn’t be in video games, but I think there’s a lot to be said about awareness of context, trivialisation, and the subtext of these interactions that we end up having.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Garland Grey and Garland Grey, Pewter. Pewter said: New blog post: Rip out my heart: Heteronormativity & Goblins: http://goo.gl/4WFs #gaygaming #lgbt #intersectional #warcraft #rambles [...]
Aye. You do make a good point for example that presumes the male character is interested in females. I had a friend some years who was both male and female (hermaphrodite/intersex/’third gender’). He really opened my eyes to the concept of gender identify, for example forms that ask for you gender only give two options M or F, and he was neither.
Secondly, generally, (and I know it’s a bit gentlemanly) I don’t like nasty violence against women in games at all, regardless of it being coached in humour.
Up til now the Goblin starting zone has sounded like quite good fun, but this “rip the still-beating heart out” thing has me concerned, and I’m not really sure why. I mean, we’ve all done plenty of quests where we’ve had to bring back various body parts (heads, hands, eyes, even hearts), and I don’t think I’ve ever given them more than a few minutes’ consideration, and then usually when I stop to think about what it’d be like to actually have to remove the head from a corpse and travel with it.
And I think that last point might be what is bothering me: in all previous quests (that I can think of right now), you always kill the NPC first, so (to me at least) it seems somehow less violent. The quest as you describe it seems much more brutal.
(I realise that the violence isn’t really the point of your post, but it’s the part that stood out the most for me, because I’m weird like that. It also makes me think of Tobold’s recent post about why there’s so much murder in games: http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-is-there-so-much-virtual-murder.html )
It is a bit gentlemanly
When I originally heard objections to the quest it was along feminist grounds, with the player being encouraged to enact violence against an ex. It gets couched, in that instance, strongly in the regions of trivialising and permitting domestic abuse. It gets ‘excused’ by some players as not being sexist because there is a female equivalent and you kill both the male and female NPCs. The argument is that we do horrible things in Warcraft all the time as both genders, so why should this be any different?
I think Gazimoff is planning to comment further on the problems of quest linearity how it interacts with quests like this one.
I think it kind of shows that the quest in general can be objected to on multiple levels (and people will find multiple ways to excuse those things – e.g. as a quest it is supposed to show how brutal and ruthless the goblin mafia really are.)
I also don’t recall doing this quest (though I remember that I submitted a few “is this quest really appropriate?” type surveys in early beta) and would have a problem with it simply for the gross-out violence. That is, in abstract from any ethical or narrative issues, I simply don’t like gory stuff.
Narrative-wise, I’d find it problematic to have to complete that sort of quest to continue in the game. Despite WoW’s strident linearity and lack of any sort of granularity in character choices, you do often have a choice when it comes to doing things your character (or indeed, you yourself) wouldn’t want to do such as PvP quests or the torture quests above. When you don’t have a choice, it’s almost like the game is forcing its own story to take precedence over your character’s. So you can’t participate in the Nexus 5-man storyline unless your character is willing to torture the captive – for your character, the story ends there if you’re not willing to take part in torture, and anyone who does continue it has to live with their character having tortured someone.
I don’t know to what extent it’s right for me to have a problem with that sort of mechanic. If a video game is trying to tell a story that is important enough (to the authors) to take precedence over the sub-narrative of your own personal RP character, then I suppose that story has to be judged on its own merits (which will be impossibly subjective, of course). If it’s trying to set a *background* for a later story, then it’s even harder to judge. That is, if all goblin characters are supposed to be (a) required by their society to take a heterosexual trophy relationship regardless of sexual identification, orientation or preference and (b) further required to punish violation of said relationship by murder and mutilation, it certainly makes sure that goblins give off a very specific sort of ethical and cultural whiff.
But if the only people who know about it are the goblin players or people who’ve played goblins, how is that useful unless it directs your character concept in ways you’ll enjoy? Because surely WoW is a game where enjoyment of players takes precedence over considerations like realism or even storyline? I guess I can, however uneasily, justify this sort of storytelling on one level, but I find it really hard to do so in World of Warcraft given the particular characteristics of the game.
Charles´s last [type] ..Playing elemental on beta also- quests
I think you’ve actually tapped the nail on the head there Charles, much more succinctly than I did xD
Also, I see WoW more as a community-building game than a story-telling game. That is, the story functions as a hook on which to hang the game’s community. E.g. we are supplied raid bosses through lore and narrative, but ultimately the purpose is simply to get us to gather together 24 of our best friends (or 9, in my case) and go raid. And to enjoy doing so. And as another example, I think one only needs to look at the extremely tenuous connections between PvP “lore” and PvP battleground design to really emphasise this point.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this point, except maybe to observe that quests like these seem to abstract and divide the game world from the community world, which is kinda weird when a lot of the rest of the game seems to be about establishing points of fun connection between the two.
Charles´s last [type] ..Playing elemental on beta also- quests
I think a lot of that comes back to the Themepark vs Sandbox discussions that the MMO Bloggers tend to have (e.g. Syncaine). The quests in EvE Online aren’t important because for the most part the content is player created – exploration, resource gathering, recon, espionage, money making. Blizzard has made a themepark that we explore (e.g. the solo quest content) with raids that we dance to (as opposed to react dynamically to unforseen bosses) and storylines that we all share.
I guess my issue is that this themepark content isn’t strong enough, it’s become more limiting rather than better.
That’s the part that disturbed me too, more than the gender thing. You are *ripping someone’s heart out of their chest*. That’s disturbing… even for me, who doesn’t generally care much about what her characters do (XP, yummy XP).
Jen´s last [type] ..My take on the RealID Blizzard fail
In Starcraft 2, I played the game more or less looking at things/being Jim Raynor, a male. It didn’t bug me. My husband often plays female avatars, it doesn’t bug him. Granted we don’t roleplay those – and games where I have roleplayed I would never play a male – but I think in games you are expected to accept a role that’s something other than yourself. Do physically disabled people have problems when games have only typically abled characters? I’m not mocking – genuinely asking.
So basically there are two different questions we could ask: first, is it ok that game designers force people to assume identities other than their own? And second, is it realistic that the game only has a limited number of identities available? To the second – we can only go from what Blizzard tells us, and apparently they are telling us there are no homosexual goblins – or at least that any must be fairly well closeted
. As the designers of the world and the species that is their right. If they designed a single-sexed species, or a three-sex species, would we complain? I am a fan of letting the author have power in his creation.
So there’s the first question to answer: is it ok to force people to assume a role they don’t want to? Sure! If they want to play the game, then play it. If they don’t, don’t, and make it really clear why now. If there is a significant number of people who want to play lesbians, or [insert whatever here], then perhaps they will change.
Look, I’m Christian. My main character is a Night Elf who says things like “Elune be praised” and lives on a pantheistic world. Blizzard is forcing me to play a pagan. I can either let that bother me, or not. If it bothers me I have the choice to play or not. Maybe it’s not fair, maybe it’s not enlightened, but those are practically speaking my options.
I also had a slight ‘wtf’ moment when I got that quest… because up til then, the Goblin quests had all be really fun, wacky things. The whole ‘ripping their heart out’ quest just seemed so jarringly twisted and dark.
Pai´s last [type] ..EQ2 Adds F2P Server
[...] arms, showering you with jobs and stuffing your mouth with gold coins. As Pewter describes over at The ‘mental Shaman, there’s a risk in Cataclysm that your progression will grind to a halt if you reject a quest [...]
Oh this IS disturbing.
Now, there’s something SORT OF similar in the Death Knight starter quests… you have to kill a friend of yours at the command of the Lich King. You don’t have the option to NOT do that. In that case, however, it’s integral to the story of exactly WHY you betray the Lich King.
It bothers me that when in a storyline there’s supposed to be a “moral choice”, you don’t actually get to make that choice. There’s a quest in Grizzly Hills (part of the worgen chain) where you’re given a knife to kill someone-or-other, and then you meet Tatiana, and she says “no, don’t you realize what you’re doing?” and gives you the next part of the quest. You walk away not killing whoever you were supposed to kill. The next time I did the quest with the next character, I tried to kill the object of the quest. I tried to attack. I tried to right-click the “sacrificial knife” that was the quest item. No dice.
The only “choice” we have is whether to do a quest or not. And if you have questlines mandatory for progression, that takes our choice away from us.
I worry about gates. I worry because I had a hell of a time finishing up this one lousy death knight quest and just could NOT progress without doing it. And nobody could help me with it because they couldn’t get to that area – AND it was phased so even if I did have a DK friend, they wouldn’t be able to see it. They want to make things more accessible to new players, but it would be bad if people just up and quit because they could not finish a quest that they needed to move on.
That doesn’t mean we can’t talk about changing those options, or asking makers of RPGs to think about more than the heteronormative norm. I set aside my straight white identity very rarely for computer games – even in regards of christian morals and values (violence aside) a lot of the games are modelled on the Judeo-Christian heritage of what it takes to be a hero/good person. How often are game players asked to play a gay character in a mainstream game? How often to games like WoW confront us with non-hetero sexualities?
I’m not sure how easy it is to equate christianity with sexuality (or even being a person with disabilities), sorry. I don’t want to start a debate about the nature of religion in WoW compared to irl religions, but I think there is a big difference between asking for real world religions in a fictional universe, and asking for game creators to move beyond traditional fantasy worlds created from and for places of straight, male, white privilege. Why is there such resistance to look beyond straight cisgendered identities, and yet a willingness to dismiss those identities that fall outside that?
“just don’t play’ is always an option, but again that means consumers of new media simply shut up and go away. Being gay then continues to remain acceptable in games so long as it is invisible. (As you say, closeted) And I think that it’s important to note that we don’t know how many players (roleplayers, raiders) think of themselves as playing gay or lesbian identities, because they already go ahead and RP them, or have those identities – and all of a sudden the game is asking or telling them to be something else. That is the issue here, this is the first time (that I can find) where the game is asking people to express an identity that they might not have chosen.
Personally I think Blizzard’s responses to the LGBT community has been pretty lacking in general, and that is what this post partially highlights.
Yeah, the DK starter quests – you start as a character under the control of the lich king. It’s part of the storyline that you don’t have choice. I guess maybe the implication for the Goblin storyline is that you HAVE to have a trophy partner, and that Goblin society is heavily heterosexual, and thus it doesn’t matter what gender your partner is because they aren’t supposed to matter to you anyway. And I’m not sure if that makes the still beating heart thing any better…..
Perchance did my last comment get flagged as spam? I think Akismet hates me and that might explain my commenting problems of late.
zelmaru´s last [type] ..Parliamentary Papers now with more high tech
It did indeed, although I’ve approved it now. I am cross at Akismet
Thanks! I was wondering why my comments weren’t going through. I thought it was my browser. I have sent a message to Akismet to unblock me, dangit. Maybe it thinks I’m a spammer because I have such a large link directory, and they all probably send gross amounts of pingbacks.
The way I handle Akismet on my own blog is to use Conditional Captcha. If Akismet THINKS you are a bot, your message goes to Conditional Captcha which gives you the opportunity to complete a captcha. If you complete it successfully, it does not flag you as spam since you just proved you were human. I am not sure why Akismet would even flag someone as spam since you already have them fill out a Captcha on your comment form.
zelmaru´s last [type] ..Parliamentary Papers now with more high tech
I shall look it up, thanks
But this isn’t Mass Effect. “The author has the power” would be fine if this were a closed narrative, when historically Blizzard has made a pretty big deal about individual player experience. Players are roundly encouraged to forge their own identity in WoW, and the story written for the Goblin starting area, while creative, is a major disruption to that process.
By making an assumption that when a player rolls a goblin, that the player wants that goblin to be straight (or even worse, that the player is straight themselves), Blizzard is removing the ability of the player to decide for themselves what the identity of their character truly is, and if the relationship depicted were a homosexual one, the exact same problem would still exist. They should not be in the business of making that important of a decision for the player.
Nothing about this will change because Blizzard’s track record of awareness about these issues is rather abysmal. They will continue to assume that either what moves the most money or pleases the most customers is the right thing to do. In this case, the result is a potential disconnect between LGBT players and their characters, and that’s unfortunate, because it perpetuates the idea that the experiences of these kinds of players and characters are less valuable and should be kept invisible.
masanbol´s last [type] ..Farsight- Around the Shaman Community
[...] Pewter’s on a roll. No, really – she’s followed up her recent post on female representation in WoW with a new one on heteronormativity. And goblins. [...]
Yes. We do. (And those of us with mental illnesses have problems when mental illness is used as a game mechanic. Which happens often. See Exalted, where the eponymous Exalts broke the world on several occasions not because power corrupts and their long lives alienated them from the rest of humanity but because they were cursed and broken and crazy.) It is a specific case of a more global problem with science fiction fantasy speculative fiction where disability is often made to disappear. Technology or magic exists to fix disabilities: Diseases of any aetiology can be cured. Mental illnesses are a thing of the past, of darker ages where genetic manipulation was unable to repair disorders like obsession-compulsion and autism. Lost limbs and organs can be regrown or replaced with prosthetics that often have capabilities fleshly body parts do not. This is the disability as super power theme — being disabled makes one awesome so no one else need worry about their well-being. Blind people are portrayed as having better-than-human hearing or smell or touch when the disability-as-super-power theme is at work. (As opposed to the disability as tragedy theme where being disabled means you suck so much that being dead is preferable and killing you is a laudable act.)
But the big problem is these worlds are created in which we do not exist. Failures to depict people who live with marginalisations based on race or gender identity or sexuality or class work exactly the same way. In the future when things are awesome, we won’t exist. In fantasy worlds where things are awesome, we won’t exist.
These media — games text video — do not exist in a vacuum. They cannot be considered as individual entities unconnected to other media or the societies which produced them. Those media consistently fail to portray marginalised people in positive ways. Those societies are consistently hostile to the existence of marginalised persons. We are killed because of our identities or because someone else believed (correctly or not) we possessed those identities. In the real world. Often. Disabled people are killed because they are disabled. Non-white people are killed because they are non-white. Queer people are killed because they are queer. Trans* people are killed because they are trans*. Women are killed because they are women. (Occasionally a person is killed because of a privileged identity they possess, but this is a rare event indeed.)
So some of us are less willing to give these genocidal media and their creators the benefit of any doubt.
Given Blizzard’s appalling treatment of race in the Warcraft franchise, I’m personally unwilling to give them benefit of any doubt at all.
I don’t know anything about game design and don’t follow game design blogs, but one of my friends who does had a really thoughtful discussion with me on the topic (I wonder if he might delurk and comment..) of Sandbox vs Themepark in WoW. While the overall design philosophy may be “themepark”, the game does have significant sandbox elements – for example, the various PvP elements and the wide variety of opportunities for social or “transgressional” play. Yet the majority of the game is still very much on rails with the player deciding which “ride” they want to go on.
Mass Effect is a game that lets you make a lot of choices yet is ultimately and explicitly based around a fixed narrative. You play Shepard, a character designed by the authors yet customised to a certain extent by yourself, and Shepard takes part in a range of story options permitted by the developers. If, say, something like Half-Life is a novel in which you play the protagonist and witness their actions by taking part in them, then games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age are analogous to Choose Your Own Adventure books – you have a certain amount of choice but it all takes place within the context of the predetermined story. A story which you bought the game to experience from within.
Both of these types are explicitly *closed* environments which nevertheless provide opportunities for player choice and expression. You witness the story someone else wrote, but you are given some freedom to affect certain details of the story yourself.
WoW, however, is marketed as an implicitly *open* environment where you can create a character who is almost entirely your own device. The character creation screen is all about freedom – faction, race, gender, looks and, of course, role. Then you can choose your talent specs, choose your gear, choose your questing areas and so forth. So we expect a certain level of freedom from the game… which, of course, the game’s geriatric quest engine doesn’t really support, as there’s basically *no* freedom in WoW’s story at all (beyond a simplistic “do” or “ignore” which is irrelevant if you go for Loremaster achievements anyway). This means that sooner or later every character is going to hit the side of the rails and either adjust their concept of their character or break their game immersion.
That is, WoW is an “open” environment which is forced to impose limits on the freedom it promises, and sometimes when we come up against those limits it’s a very uncomfortable feeling – precisely because they are in the context of a world which has, until that moment, helped us feel so free and supported.
Put in other words, games like Mass Effect are restricted environments filled with deliberately permissive acts, whereas WoW is a permissive environment filled with unavoidably restrictive acts.
So the question then becomes, what is it OK to restrict? Is it OK to tell all goblin players that their characters have to be (at least publicly) heterosexuals who’ve murdered their ex-love interest in a very gruesome way? Is it OK for that to feature so unavoidably and prominently in the storyline (even with a faint odour of comedy around it)? Is it just like the Undead starter quests, something about your chosen avatar’s archetype that you have to either embrace or ignore, or is it a more fundamental infringement on the exploration of personal identity in cyberspace?
Sigh, and now I’ve come full circle
Charles´s last [type] ..Playing elemental on beta also- quests
A friend of mine is presently doing his master’s thesis on just this topic. In theology we have an important concept called “eschatology”, which is basically the future towards which the present is moving. Eschatology is often used as a way of metering the present based on what we think the future should or will be. In both religious and humanist thought, this Future is almost universally one in which the positive has reached its enduring climax – that is, it is the best future possible.
Explicitly, hope for such a future is extremely appealing because it offers the possibility of a world without things like pain and suffering which are “bad” and thus denuded from this ideal Future. So the question is whether, implicitly, anything lacking from such a vision of the world is therefore similarly “bad”, and further whether therefore any attempt to realise characteristics of this ideal Future in the present involve devaluing anything which has these perceived “bad” elements. If there are no blind people in the ideal Future what does that say about blind people in the present?
Two tentative responses I’d consider. Firstly, fantasy environments as depicted in computer games are almost universally distopian and deliberately broken in some way. WoW is no exception with entire zones destroyed by war, plague or magic, races wiped out to the point of extinction, famines and natural disasters and wars ravaging every society and feckless adventurers going back and forth lopping people’s heads or hands or candles off for a quick buck. Yet precisely because these are fictional environments created to entertain or inspire, lack of representation for is effectively tantamount to violence against – going back to the idea of “privilege” here.
The second response, which I won’t attempt to go into in my already waaay too long comments, is much more complex and has to do with what makes us *us*, the effect that experiences which we may define as positive or negative have on our lives, and the whole question of teleology in suffering. Suffice it to say that I think there is value in both points of view on this second topic.
Charles´s last [type] ..Playing elemental on beta also- quests
It says that blind people are considered less-than in the present. That being blind is bad. Devalued. Marginalised. It says that eschatologists either consider an ideal world to be one in which blindness does not exist — which is an argument for genocide of blind people in the present as they are unnecessary for the ideal future and often resource-intensive in the present — or fail to be mindful of blind people and their needs when considering their ideal worlds. Both scenarios are bigoted; both scenarios are destructive in the present since structural inequities exist and are reinforced by acts of malicious or negligent bigotry. Which we know already. What on earth are you getting at?
And yes failure to be inclusive is violent. Thus my deliberate use of the word genocidal.
Heh, perhaps my post wandered around my point too much. I prefer to ask questions than give answers. Let me clarify.
Firstly: I think you raised an excellent issue with regard to the portrayal, or lack thereof, of conditions such as blindness in fantasy worlds, and the implications for the value of people with those conditions in the “real” world.
Secondly: my third paragraph was aimed at exposing the nuance of fantasy worlds in video games as beyond mere ideological environments. That is, they tend to be primarily narrative environments which exist for entertainment or exploration. Rather than nullifying the point about lack of representation in “utopian”-style fantasies, however, I think if anything it emphasises it because users are denied the opportunity to explore or at least be exposed to the topic via player characters in the virtual world. I don’t think that is so much an issue in any specific game as it is a more general issue with attitudes across the gaming industry.
Thirdly, my final paragraph was concerning the nature of “idealised” worlds and their relation to praxis in the real, concrete present. I didn’t state a point of view on the topic because I don’t think I could do it justice in the space of a comment, but I did state that I see merit in a multiplicity of viewpoints on the topic.
I’d be extremely nervous of carpet generalisations such as the one you make, however. For example, an idealised future would consider *everyone* in the world as “less-than”, which is no more or less an argument for genocide than the observation that the majority of people living in what is known as the “Global South” do not have enough food to eat. One solution to that problem would be to forcibly reduce the number of people competing for resources, but it would not be a very good solution. Rather, that observation is helpful for encouraging positive action by those who have the capacity for it.
Furthermore, not all eschatologies would actually feature a world denuded of the disabled. Futurism, eschatology, idealism etc are essentially neutral tools, much like technology itself: the value lies in the way the tools are used. Eschatological thinking has indeed been used to fuel attrocities and to reinforce patriarchal structures of dominance and violence, but it has also been used to progressively challenge and demolish those very same structures.
Thus I broadly agree with what you posted and think you highlight very important questions, but I would also seek to nuance the answers I’d give in a way which acknowledges the values brought by different perspectives on those questions.
Charles´s last [type] ..Playing elemental on beta also- quests
” I guess maybe the implication for the Goblin storyline is that you HAVE to have a trophy partner, and that Goblin society is heavily heterosexual, and thus it doesn’t matter what gender your partner is because they aren’t supposed to matter to you anyway.”
I don’t have the beta so I’m basing this on the quests that you linked but it sounds to me as if Blizzard are implying that Candy did matter to you. First of all, the rewards themselves have names like “jealousy’s edge” and “heartache dagger”. Yes it’s possible that the jealous element could just related to the business competitor aspect of the quest but when you consider all the evidence together, I wonder.
I did some digging around on WoWhead and found this (http://cata.wowhead.com/quest=25244) which appears to be the female version of the quest chain. Again, the text is emotive.
“I just can’t get over the fact that she betrayed you like that with your ex”
says the quest giver. The use of the word “betrayed” implies you still had feelings for this “ex”, otherwise how could Candy’s actions hurt you.
The quest to kill Chip if you’re a female Goblin is this one (http://cata.wowhead.com/quest=25202)
“That cold-hearted snake dropped you like a bad habit and now he’s working for the other team. I even heard he’s going out with that tramp, Candy Cane!”
That doesn’t sound like a purely trophy relationship. In fact I would argue it sounds like our goblin avatars cared too much. I would be a lot happier if the relationship was a purely business one. After all, killing the competition would probably make sense for a Goblin, ripping your ex’s still beating heart out less so unless of course you could sell it to someone for a profit.
On a slightly unrelated note, I’m not a great fan of phasing in the start zones. As someone who usually levels alts with friends, I really like being able to meet up in a certain zone at lv 1 or 2 (depending on how far you had to run) and questing together.
Erinys´s last [type] ..Love- Loathing and Escort Quests
FWIW, TotalHalibut on YouTube has the female version of this quest in his goblin levelling videos (it’s the last Lost Isles one, IIRC), so people can check it out. It’s interesting that in his narration he mentions a rumour that you can forgive your ex rather than killing him/her; dunno about the validity of that, though.
Dee´s last [type] ..Another post of art and random babble
Charles,
That is not entirely true. The quests could be set up so they run in parallel starting from a single questions.
“Yes, I agree young . It can be hard to have the passions of youth betrayed. Why don’t you go rip out heart”
Responses:
“Great idea”
” heart? I told you was the problem” (switches gendered response)
“I don’t like killing” – “Maybe not, but sometimes you gotta do it”
They have done multi-way dialogues before iirc, so adding this shouldn’t be that major, it could even be done via an item (one kills female, one kills male) so you can simply swap the item which again has been done if the text version is too difficult to manage. Wouldn’t be that hard to actually fix this issue overall.
In relation to the other question, I think you are trying to judge another society by our moral views. Goblin society may take a solemn vow to be a very serious issue (like our moral view on murder), and so breaking that vow especially in a public way is punishable seriously. To step into the Goblin’s shoes you need to look at their society rather than simply at ours, and I don’t believe we actually have enough information to judge them and their morality.
Except that everything about Goblins comes with references to the real world, with references to western civilisation, Capitalism etc etc. We can’t assess them in isolation, and fantasy tropes and worlds don’t exist in isolation from the culture that spawned them. Critiquing Goblin culture, that is a product and reflection of western culture, is not the same as (for example) a western feminist being prescriptivist about what is ‘right’ for Muslim feminists (or humanists) to do.
Also we aren’t exactly critiquing Goblin culture here, but Blizzard’s decision to immesh us in a particular aspect of ‘Goblin Culture’ in a way that the designers have never chosen to before and in a way that closely interacts with our own sexualities and ideas about domestic violence/’crazy ex’s/revenge.
I like the idea of multi-way dialogue, but I’ve never seen them give actual choices within a questline – the closest we come to it is the old Aldor/Scryer or Frenzyheart/Oracles (and possibly an old Centuar faction thing in Desolace?) Most of the dialogue choices in game are rarely related to storyline or quest choice – they just tend to be mechanisms for silly quests (e.g. chose the red beaker and the blue beaker) or for flavour. I do wish Blizz would use it more though, I LOVE those dialogue options.
I am genuinely upset about having a boyfriend thrust upon my character. I wish I could say that this didn’t bother me or bothered me less than it does. I have been looking forward to a legion of goblin alts. Honestly, it’s a race that appeals to me on a lot of levels. I love the moral ambiguity. (It’s one of the main reasons I chose Horde in general.) I love the parody of Western culture. I love the accents. I love the jokes and flirts. I love the way they look. (I have a slew of orcs. They’re my favorite of the current races. They’re strong, powerful warriors who stand on equal footing with their male counterparts. Still, I have a secret soft spot for gnomes. Goblins wed the aesthetics and personalities of both the green-skinned, muscular orcs and the pocket-sized, intellectually-inclined gnomes.)
It really sticks in my craw.
I’ve only RP’d on the side here and there, but I do have little stories in my head for each of my toons. Trust me: None of them are straight. It’s how I identify with characters who are so completely alien. They share my “personality” in the way they react to situations and who they’d choose to take to bed. It may not seem like much, but it’s important to me as one individual player. I’ve always appreciated the designer who chose to stick Kinelori and Quae together out in Arathi. I was so happy at a hinted lesbian relationship that I rolled an ally just to show my mom. :-/ It’s silly, but it meant something to me.
The fact that my goblins will all be at the very least bisexual… Well, it really puts a damper on what was a bubbling excitement at the thought of playing the tiny mad scientists.
Thank you for the well-thought-out and well-written article. I’m sort of skirting the “Still Beating Heart” thing, because it isn’t something that bothers me personally. Still, I respect the other points of view presented here and appreciate what’s been said.
Yeah. I’m kind of skirting the still beating heart thing because video games in general ARE violent, and I feel that it’s an additional worry rather the central point of my concern (re: Heteronormative relationships and forcing the player into any ‘relationship’.) For me it’s even worse because the Goblin jokes are generally highly sexualised and somewhat problematic. They really are such a parody of western culture that it’s…it’s just troubling.
Thank you for commenting, and taking the time to articulate why it bothers you personally.
It is in part based on western cultures but not having gone into it that much I can’t say which parts they took and which they didn’t. I was assuming that they did what the did with the majority of WoW races and we got some odd combination of racial stereotypes mixed with western culture and some truly strange parts just for fun. It isn’t the same as looking at a different culture, but it is also not simply a western culture so making it harder to simply apply the same morality rules.
We did get the slay your friend quest for DKs, pretend to be for animal rights, torture some guy you don’t know, and then the whole kill Malygos’ consort / replace her with Keristraza, and the torture the workers / hurt the knucklebacks kids / kidnap the wolvar’s children quests which I think also hit a lot of morality inducing questions for most of us. So there is precedent in the game for generally asshattery and anti-morality quests.
I am sure there have been some multi-way dialogues that actually did something (might be my imagination), didn’t we get a choice with the oracles and wolvar lines?
We did indeed do things as a Death Knight, but again I would say there is a difference between ‘killing things as a corpse under the control of the Lich King’ and having a choice about sexuality/relationships forced on us as living (if ruthless and horrible) Goblins. General asshattery in a computer game is another issue, and I’m largely picking on ones of identity in the context of that particular relationship.
Honestly there is very little about Goblins that isn’t plucked directly from Western Business culture, right down to the oil rigs, swimming pools, executive assistants and cars
And again here the assessment is made as it impacts players who do not conform to cisgendered or cissexed roles, generally in our western society, playing a computer game made by people heavily entrenched in that western society. We’re not judging the ruthlessness (or even the idea that they may be heteronormative as a race in general) we’re judging the storytelling method, in this case, as it impinges on the player.
We did get a choice with Oracles/Wolvar – we speak with one of them to choose our allegiance (or we save one) so again it’s regrettable that there isn’t a choice in this particular case. But I’m not sure, again, whether that wasn’t just a ‘pick the other quest’ type scenario
If their culture is based on Western businesses then the idea of having a trophy wife / husband might actually be important. There has been a lot of scandal in the past when someone in these roles hasn’t conformed. We have seen many “happy” marriages broken up because people actually accepted their sexuality and gender rather than toeing the line. Now its unlikely Blizzard put this in as a talking point (since mmo’s don’t really seem to include the idea of talking points in general in the story but rather try to push past the story to the mechanics of what we are doing), but in many ways it is a great criticism of the culture where you are forced to kill two people to avenge a slight because it became publically known. The hyper-normative/hyper-sexual stereotype and acknowledging the harm it does might actually be a good thing in the long run.
That’s an interesting slant on it, but I’m not sure that it is enough to justify the cross of the line to dictate the characters identity (beyond that which is expressed in the login screen.) For the Death Knight quests, aside from being a corpse and a former ‘hero’, the character is still very much a blank slate for the player to to fill in. The worgen starter zone has linearity and friendships with NPCs, but certainly not as full-on as the Goblin zone in terms of presumed prior relationships.
I get your drift, but I’m not certain that the quest is at all cast in a enough ‘critical’ light to really be the satire we’d want it to be, or that it will be taken as such, or that it makes the heteronormativity and ‘forcing’ of the relationship any better as story mechanism, especially if you aren’t heterosexual.
Without beta access I can’t say more. It might be played ironically, or very seriously (as much of business is). Till then I can only throw out potential meanings based on what little we have
.
Interesting read. Obviously I can’t speak for other gay men, but I couldn’t care less whether any goblin I started had a transient girlfriend or not (again skirting the pulling the heart issue). Most gay men I know started off with girlfriends and then discovered they had different interests, so I can’t see why it would be an issue as long as it doesn’t stay with you in the whole game. I’ve read posts from gay male gamers and female gamers asking for a male version of the warlock’s succubus. It’s a game, no one is being forced to change their sexuality in the real world. One of the things I like in WoW is that come the christmas quests you can /kiss any of the guards and get the same reaction
I would caution you against using ‘it is just a game’ in discussions on this blog. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves whenever it’s brought up in discussions of pop culture, and is dismissive of those who feel have a different opinion (and are passionate about new media, and the way it both reflects us and the culture of those who made it.) It’s not just a game, it’s a media consumed by millions of people, that contributes to the world economy, and is a BIG part of some players lives (not to mention the impact of the rest of the gaming industry.)
It’s a big part of my life too, so no disrespect was meant by my phraseology. I’m on WoW every day, raid 2-3 times a week and take it quite seriously. What I meant was more along the lines that it’s not a mirror of my life and therefore don’t mind playing something that I’m not
It’s interesting that Blizzard would have even included this quest from an RP point of view as well. While a small matter compared to concerns of gender/race/preference equality, I know few serious Role Players that enjoy having their characters “God Modded”. While you have to suffer having some of your history written for you due to the constraints of the game, this quest seems more like bad filler than anything else.
That said – so much of life can be bad filler that you have to wonder if the quest author was mixing work and idle revenge theory at the time.
Windpaw´s last [type] ..Randomly Oculus
Yes, this was what I was thinking… in fact, I’m considering writing up a post about it myself. This essentially implies that every goblin character is actually the same person, or at best, two characters one male and one female. So it gives you a big consistency problem when every other character you meet is also the ex of Chip/Candy. Either Chip and Candy were VERY promiscuous, or all those other goblins are just alternate versions of you… not other independently existing goblins in their own right.
Sure every blood elf pretty much killed Dar’Khan, but that’s a little different in a storyline sense. Chip/Candy are personal history, flavor almost, certainly not events of worldwide significance… Dar’Khan is the game’s path of heroism.
Rhii´s last [type] ..Epic Win and Epic Fail – The PuG Rollercoaster
Rhii and Windpaw, those are very interesting points, re: Personal Story vs Shared Narrative. It’s always been a central conflict when it comes to MMORPGs, that the boss never dies, that we’re all killing the same NPC time and time again. When it extends to controlling the character and identity that we’ve created for ourselves, is it a step too far?
Obviously for a lot of people it’s not going to bother them, but combined with the narrative arcs of the women in the game, the flagrant laziness when it comes to major female NPC models/skins, and the increased proportion of ‘fanservice art’ in the official Gallery (the proportion/number of ‘sexy’ art has dramatically increased in the last 2 years). For me it just kind of makes me feel like Blizzard is getting worse, rather than better
I did wind up going ahead and posting on the subject… it turned out LONG and wandered into a discussion of personal story vs canon, and single player characterization vs multiplayer characterization. But if you’re interested it’s up now, and inspired by this discussion, so thanks!
Rhii´s last [type] ..Goblins- We are an Individual!
A fascinating discussion. We can see this kind of “imposed background” in many MMOs; for example it’s generally hard to create convincing looking non-white humans in many games. Of course game designers might simply say that humans in world X *are* white, but on that basis one could also “lore-out” homosexuality.
From an RP point of view, my approach to imposed backgrounds of all kinds has always been to ignore them, just as I ignore the fact that I’ve killed the same boss every week. It’s a game mechanic that you’re forced to endure, but not one that you should necessarily include as part of your character’s official story. It’s something I do ooc, just as my raid chat is.
Of course none of that addresses the question of whether the game *should* include such scenes. I’d rather they didn’t (or at least provided alternatives), but I suspect we’re at the limits of what current MMO engines can handle. The lack of options may be more a software engineering issue than a social engineering one at this stage.
Yeah, the ‘lore out’ example is so often trotted out in an apologist method that I think it falls under the ‘not good enough’. I’ve not heard it said that creating non-caucasian characters is hard, it’s just not thought of – or the non-caucasian societies are appropriated into ‘fantasy’ races.
As for the moral issues of using ‘tough’ story lines in the game – I’m not one for removing harsh stories from games, I just think designers and writers need to present them with a bit more nuance and awareness of how they are contributing to the media depiction of certain things. This is not to blame videogames for all society’s ills (not at all, in fact) but to remind content creators that their stories don’t exist in a vacuum.
And lack of options/software limitation is a current accepted ‘excuse’, but again – when they can model boob jiggle to the nth degree (a different piece of software engineering) perhaps they need to look to other avenues to make games more engaging in future.
I don’t think the lack of options is just an excuse at this stage, it’s more about the multiplicative effect that choices have on game complexity. A single quest with two choices, double the complexity if it has downstream consequences; ten binary choice quests multiply it by 1024. That isn’t a problem if the choice only affects a single quest, but then you’re back into railroading, where the choices are only superficial cosmetic ones.
Boob-jiggle, gratuitous though it may be, doesn’t have that kind of knock-on impact on game complexity. It’s a one-off piece of coding.
Sven´s last [type] ..So let’s talk about the men in World of Warcraft
Indeed, but if we continue accepting that limitation, and game designers aren’t working towards improving it, then games are going to remain a one dimensional (or at least ‘default POV’)experience. Maybe we won’t see this change in our lifetimes, but in the meantime it continues to restrict the audience. I think part of WoW’s success has been that it mostly appeals to a broad range of people, and for me it feels like it is going backwards in that appeal rather than forwards.
It will be interesting to see how Bioware manage the choice issue with SWOTR. They’ve made grand claims about their plot and the degree of choice that will be available, but it remains to be seen how well that will work in practice.
Sven´s last [type] ..So let’s talk about the men in World of Warcraft
I agree, I have the same thoughts about how the personal storylines of Guild Wars 2 will interact with the persistent world that for me is part of the attraction of MMORPGs.
[...] so long ago, Rhii wrote an excellent post about the goblin starting area, inspired by an equally excellent post by Pewter. I’ve generally kept myself insulated from Cataclysm stuff, preferring to experience it [...]
Some of the quest designers at Blizzard are just young guys who simply don’t look at it the way you do.
Elfminster´s last [type] ..Rift- Planes of Telara & Abyssal Precipice
@Jen – Found my way here, wanted to note: the ripping out of someone’s heart is why I abandoned my first character in WoW, a blood elf warlock. To get the succubus, you need two pure male hearts, and…
I didn’t want power that badly. Turned me off of the class completely, and it looks like it might turn me off of goblins, too.
[...] Some people earlier this summer took offense to the fact that the Goblin starter zone pushed a heteronormative (and revenge-filled) agenda. For me, I take offense at [...]
I actually DID skip anything related to torture in WotLK. Felt they (Bliz) were grossly negligent for putting them in game. I was dismayed to find I couldn’t skip much of anything in Cata, specifically the torture quests in Deepholm, dangling the orc over the prop etc.
Cata basically has the feel of being designed by a bunch of immature young white males.
@Pewter – I don’t get what the big deal is with an occasional heteronormative reference in wow. Frankly most of the NPC’s sexualities are never divulged and, in case you hadn’t noticed, heterosexuality IS more common than all the other options combined which effectively meets social, scientific, and mathematical definitions for normal.
@Aym The point isn’t the heteronormative references, is the lack of non-heteronormative references, especially in a situation where Blizz specifically takes controls of who your OWN character has relationships with. Homosexuality is often consigned to subtext where heterosexual relationships will be explicitly referred to. This is a wider problem in the videogame industry, though I hope we will see a gradual change in the industry with less tokenism and subtext. The problem with referring to heterosexual relationships as ‘normal’ isn’t that it describes heterosexuality as the most common, but that it implies that other sexualities are ‘abnormal’ and ‘wrong’, when they’re perfectly normal (just less common.)
@bengstra That dangling moment aside, I have come across a few torture quests that allow you to be merciful. Options are more common.
First, there is no such thing as a “scientific” or “mathematical” definition for normal within the context of this article.
Further, asserting that there is a “normal” and it is what comprises the majority is highly offensive to those who belong to the minority because you are effectively labeling them as “abnormal.”
Please consider your words more carefully when composing your thoughts.
As for the issue of heteronormative/non-heteronormative options within the context of WoW:
I’m an openly gay male, in the real world. When entering a fantasy realm such as WoW, I basically temporarily forget that part of my identity and never try to weave it into my characters, or “make them like me.”
I’ve found this not only has to be done so heternormative subject matter hits me a bit lighter, but also as a defense mechanism for surviving the already rampant hate speech and bigotry that prevails the chat channels.
A sad reality, but our reality nonetheless.
Thank you for this article, it was a most interesting and thought provoking read.
You are most welcome, and thank you for taking the time to reply to Aym. I’m sorry you have to do that