Selective Memory and Blizzard's goldfish community

I’m noticing a sad trend from Blizzard and it’s community of gamers around various controversies of Blizzard and past Blizzard events.

With the recent return of Chris Metzen, I’m seeing mostly praise by the players base and content creators, saying that Chris is the face of WoW, and he can do no wrong etc. These same content creators who are praising his return so fondly now, also criticized his in-action during his time at Blizzard in leadership when the sexual assaults and harassment were happening.

By Chris’s own words, “I offer you my very deepest apologies for the part I played in a culture that fostered harassment, inequality, and indifference.” https://twitter.com/ChrisMetzen/status/1419076394546470913

But I guess we can just move on and forget all that because WoW is great and our Thrall is back!

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Sounds like you’re pretty convinced that he is guilty of serious wrongdoing just based on a vaguely written apology.

What if I’m a parent who looked away for 5 seconds while my kids were playing in a playground and “allowed” my kids to be kidnapped? Am I bad person, or a bad parent, who deserves to be forever banished from having kids? In that scenario, I would feel extremely apologetic towards my kids, and certainly I would feel that I could have done better, in a manner similar to what Chris conveyed in his open letter. But at the same time, I think it’s fair to say that most parents in the world aren’t going to keep their eyes on their kids literally 100% of the time. I just don’t think judgment of a person is as simple as you’re making it out to be based on the lack of information available as to what the situation was like from Chris’s PoV.

22 Likes