Psychologists.. is McCree name change even helpful?

General Discussion
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You’re not familiar with healthily coping with mental issues. This isn’t your fault, but stop pretending like you have the answer, especially for something as petty as maintaining the name of a fictional character. Mental trauma is defined by being neuro-atypical. You can’t rightly apply mentally-typical concepts to it.

Yes, reparative therapy is important but it doesn’t work for everyone and is an incredibly long process at the best of times. In the meantime, not minimising triggers is an over-all bad; it just causes avoidable upset.

Avoiding triggers isn’t some sort of ‘fix’ for the trauma and the fact that it doesn’t fix the trauma doesn’t mean that any ways to make the burden lighter aren’t warranted. Therapy takes a lot longer when you’re having a persistent negative effect fighting against it. If you care for the health of the workers, you’d support the name being changed.

It doesn’t matter why anyone decided to change the name, changing it can have a measured, positive effect. Having a bad method doesn’t mean the outcome is necessarily bad.

Dude, shut the hell up. It’s not cool to pretend to understand mental health issues when you’re clueless. Anything can result in intrusive memories, especially over trauma and currently-existing mental disorders like anxiety and depression.

I still get intrusive memories about benign arguments and regular bus-rides. It doesn’t matter how light or bad you think you’d handle a situation, everyone’s different. There’s no relevant value in not changing the name.

You have no idea how thin that line is or how varied people are.

This “avoidance” isn’t supposed to be reparative, it’s supposed to give potentially-higher levels of comfort at next-to-no cost to aid those who seek reparative therapy (officially or individually).

It’s the comfort of the workers whom are affected or your silly little hero-name.

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It’s just the first step towards recovery and acceptance, not the last step.

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kinda, it shows that the overwatch devs despise what happened to the victims and so they wanna change cowboys name because cowboys name is affiliated with a horrible person who worked at blizzard.

like it was even confirmed that cowboy was named after a person who worked at blizzard and did horrible things to the female workers.

this isn’t for anyone else but for the victims and goes to show that the overwatch devs do care about victims.

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You don’t need a Psychologist/Therapist for knowing it doesn’t.

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The answer for you question is no it’s not helpful for those reasons. That said, they are not changing it for those reasons.

As for a physiological point of veiw. It would seem your taking the issue out of context either because your projecting some issue or that your seeking attention. I won’t go deeper than this and leave that with the professionals you already see.

Even nonsensical I will address a point. Name change or not putting that into context of adversion therapy is wrong. That’s not how that works. It can be done in controlled environment without overwatch.

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You’re wrong. It was already a news story that Jesse McCree (the character) was named after Jesse McCree (the person) and his cosby suite and all the rest. That was already in the public attention. It was already something people were raging about.

I don’t think you understand how the PR here works too well. Blizzard has been inundated with negative PR. So they want to put things out NOW that are “positive” PR. They want to control the narrative. Virtue signaling is a part of it, yes, but a much larger part is that they want the story to be “we’re doing good things” not “oh look, we’ve been shredding investigation documents.”

Whenever a PR nightmare is happening, the most common and most effective move is for the company to do something–anything–to create a new narrative and override the bad one.

You’ve hit the nail on the head here. the OW team has no say in matters like this. That’s why we know it WAS a PR move from higher up. Consider the fact that other references were also removed from other teams. WOW had a few in-game references to suss devs too, and those were announced at the same time.

I think the issue is in assuming that the OW team decided this without someone higher up saying, "we’re getting bad press, this needs to happen. The latter scenario is infinitely more likely.

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You do realize that Blizzard as a corporate entity and team 4 as a DEV team are two different things right? The message came from team 4 aka the overwatch team. With the situation Blizzard is in, there’s no way that they can force team 4 to make a change like that for PR. Unless you think that Team 4 is trying to get good PR for some reason.

Yes the story about Jesse McCree was well known but after he got fired no one really cared much about it. Sure there were some casters who didn’t use McCree’s name while casting but apart from that, there wasn’t really that much of a push towards renaming him. So bringing it up again is actually not that beneficial to them for PR.

Casters actually asked whether they should avoid using the name or not and they were told to just keep using it until the name was changed.

You completely missed the point here. What they don’t have an impact is on who gets fired etc. and the direction of the company. They can change the name of a character that they are developing. WoW has previously changed the names of NPCs named after people who turned out to be someone they didn’t want to glorify in their game.

While you could argue that they needed permission from the higher ups to go through with this, then that still doesn’t make it a change for PR, like I said in a previous post, it’s simply an unfortunate side effect of a change that was made with good intentions because you simply can’t make a good change that also benefits the company as a whole in some way.

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Let’s talk about PR, because I think a lot of people here genuinely don’t understand some of the nuance.

First off, is PR important for people from the perspective of buying products? The answer is, sort of.

SOME people care about the kindness/virtue/morality of a company when they buy products. Most people don’t. Take your apple example. Apple has had ongoing issues with morality for most of its existence as a company. Do you remember the story where they had to install suicide nets on the top of apple factories because too many employees were comitting suicide jumping off of them? Because they were criminally underpaid and worked for 18 hours a day?

Now, to anyone who actually researches and looks into companies, that would be obvious, and they wouldn’t buy apple products. Even to people who followed major news stories, it would still be obvious. And when stories like that hit, some people stopped buying apple products, not a lot.

This is how it works with product buying. There’s a small subset of people who actually care about the company’s morals. Most don’t, most just care about the company’s product. This is especially true in gaming, where the product is entirely unique to the company.

Now, if this subset is small like I suggest, why would PR be that much of a thing?

The answer is not about players buying their product, it is about stock prices. Negative PR will always hit the stock prices, but more than that, law suits like this shed doubt on the company’s future stability. When a company is sued, they can get broken up, they can get insanely big fines tacked on, they can get top leadership fired which takes years to recover from and destablizes operations.

So who is the PR move for, then? Not for the players. Not for the peopel buying the game, because let’s be real, most everyone would buy it regardless. No, PR moves are generally for the purposes trying to keep stocks viable.

They want to show that the company is “Moving past” the issues with sexual harrassment because those issues make the company unstable. They want to demonstrate good faith because it helps them plead their case in the ongoing lawsuit.

And it’s working. Blizzard stock dropped drastically when all this law suit stuff came out, and after their PR, it has finally started stabalizing again. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453393-activision-blizzard-is-back-in-buy-territory

Your argument is flawed because you assume PR moves are a virtue signal for the players. That is definitely a benefit, but the real issue is demonstrating stability for the stock market.

Also, your argument is flawed EVEN IF I ignore everything I just said, because when people look up “why did McCree’s name change,” they will find Blizzard’s statement about how they want to be a company that values inclusion and good things in the work force, etc. They will find that Blizzard “used” to be awful but has now mended their ways. That’s the narrative they will find.

An admission of past guilt with the promise of becoming better is actually a net-positive for most people’s image. If players actually research this (which let’s be real, most won’t), they will find a narrative that is ultimately positive for Blizzard. Most people assume that companies have skeletons in their closets, admitting to those skeletons and “moving past” them is actually a fantastic PR play.

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As a mccree fan and someone who has been infatuated with spaghetti westerns. I can care less about his name. He loosely based on the man with no name anyway.

I think the faux outcry because of the name change is silly. He’s a made up character and this is not the hill to die on.

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It’s far from the only reason I’ve seen people bringing up, and it’s not the one that the Development Team put forth when they made a statement on how and why they were changing it.

They don’t want the character to be associated with the real life human and his actions. Leaving the name as-is would leave that association in place. Changing the name will help to begin removing the association, and if Overwatch manages to be a long term franchise then in 10 years people won’t even remember the origins of the Cowboy’s name, he’ll have a ‘clean slate’ of association because he’s a video game character and cannot do bad things unless he’s written that way.

It seems like a pretty straightforward and simple thing to me, as someone who works regularly with franchises and knows about licensing, you want your characters to be as far removed from problematic people as much as possible. Batman got a pretty bad ding in his popularity a while back when Frank Miller came out with his version of Batman that was off the rails, homophobic and hated Rock’n’Roll - it took them quite a while and a few films to right that ship.

Characters and how they are percieved by the world at large is important, and has consequences on the options you have with them in the future.

Smash bro’s isn’t going to want McCree on their roster, but if you rename him to Cowboy there’s now a chance he’d be considered, etc.

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I mean I didn’t read the original post from cosmic but there’s no need to be rude. Honestly, like most psychological disorders, addictions, etc everyone has their own idea of what it means … some of them are more or less completely reliant on self diagnosis. To you and me, PTSD could easily entail for example from my life, when I used to be addicted to drugs, do things outside of your moral landscape cause you have to get it or be sick, day in day out is prolonged stress which results in something similar to PTSD some might call that PTSD I kinda consider it PTSD – but I’m pretty sure the publicly accepted usage of it is referring to acute instances of extreme panic or danger. While prolonged continuous anxiety might result in a very similar malady – that would be more along the lines of what sexual harassment is commonly thought of but you are correct everyone does experience it differently…

To address the other points however, I actually kinda fully disgaree with thinking that this is actually a move by the Dev team or Blizzard for the employee’s ‘simply cause they said it was’ BUT

if anyone was going to convince me this is the right move it would be more along the lines of … we wanna change it because when people sit down to play a video game they do that to forget about all this IRL bs and just enjoy themselves… its an escape and we felt that mccree’s name being attached to it (even though we haven’t put forth any hard evidence of him doing much wrong-- I do have problems with this common practice as a society but diff topic for diff day) and even though its not literally based off of Jesse mccree that it’d be best to just let everyone enjoy the game without it even being a topic… like that I can get as someone who’s literally been depressed for a decade or so but beforehand was quite sociable sometimes people just wanna play games to avoid politics/seriousness etc.

Speaking of which man I have seen some deplorable names in Valorant … Like I’m here arguing that a name isn’t a big deal but when I saw ‘George Floyd Cop’ as a teammates name I just threw I wasn’t going to play with someone who purposively would bring that into a conversation a month or two after the incident. Most of the time I can just mute and forget that Im playing with someone who’s named after the extermination of my religion as a name followed by #gas … but I dunno I do feel like these are slightly more hyperbolic in nature, and are done purely for reaction. I know people complain a lot about how Blizzard doesn’t take care of things like this enough, but compared to other companies they kinda do.

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I don’t think it’s any singular reason. From what they have said, it’s a combination of many.

There’s one thing we don’t know for sure - that this is for the team themselves. I’d imagine them having female developers on the team would give that assumption credibility.

But we do know for a fact it is based on community feedback that sparked the discussion internally (they confirmed this), and the nature of this all is going to be PR whether that’s intended or not.

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@ OP, I’m not a psychologist by any means. But I have been sexually harassed at the first corporate company I worked for, and I can share my perspective as someone in the middle - not rallying for the name change, but also not against it. Let me know if you’d like me to since it’s not exactly what you asked for. lol

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nah its been most mainstream new, even non ow players know about the crap poop culture blizzard was having.

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cause it was china, foxconn manufactures for a lot of companies not just apple and they are supposed to be one of the better companies in china so apple doesnt have much of a choice, no one else can manufacture at that capacity.

even if you open a foundry in us it will take years before it goes into production.

Its just acceptance when there is not much that can be done.

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people just need to grow up

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Get out of your gamer-news bubble. Most players don’t follow ‘gaming news’. Most don’t know.

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So it became from most overwatch players to most gamers now, you don’t need to follow anything if you had searched anything about overwatch or games it will show up in your news feeds.

Most active overwatch playerbase will know it.

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No, I said ‘most players’, not ‘most gamers’.

And I’ll stick with what I said. If your experience with Overwatch starts and ends with the Battle.net app on PC, you don’t even know that McCree’s name is being changed yet.

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If you mean you don’t own a mobile then it would be true