I’ve been seeing a lot of chat spam lately for people looking to group up to do the latest dungeons. One of the new dungeons is called “The Slave Pens”. For those who do not know, the Broken (a sub-race of the Draenai) toil away here in service to the Naga.
While these folks are doing nothing wrong spamming LFG, Trade, and General to try and form a group to this particular instance you can, at a minimum, see how this might be problematic or triggering.
My humble request is for this name to be reviewed and potentially changed to “The Subjugation Pens” so as to be a bit more sensitive to the different backgrounds of those that enjoy the game.
But they’re literal slaves in the pen regardless of the history of the united states slaves in this sense are the literal definition of somebody working without any regard to their health and they’re seen as tools.
They’re also literally being subjugated.
Slaves have been used by many different countries throughout all of history. There are a wide variety of different cultures and peoples who might be triggered by this verbiage. World of Warcraft is enjoyed by many with a wide variety of backgrounds. Please keep that in mind.
The US needs to read some World history as well, slavery sucks for sure but it isn’t something we came up with all on our own. This fear of words is a small-minded thing. Words have meanings and are used to communicate, nothing more. Having issues with a word is silly when your real issue is the person communicating with you.
@ Cruelîntent
Thank you so much for the thoughtful and well-reasoned post. I want to reiterate that this has nothing to do with any one specific country, place, or people - simply the verbiage. While you’re right that words are used to communicate they also have power.
If a word is capable of triggering somebody then there is a problem with it.
People do not find a reason to become alarmed, distressed, or anxiety-ridden. These things happen without a person willing it to be.
There is something wrong when a word has the power to conjure up these feelings in people. At a minimum it should be looked at - that’s all I’m saying.
Video games in fictional worlds dont need to be changed to be morally satisfactory, as long as the people playing it are sensible enough to not take it to the real world. Even if small children were playing this game, which I highly doubt, theres nothing relating to the history of slavery on Earth.
This is incredible, the only slaves (similar to the broken) left in the world are in places that have no access to WoW like the people being forced to labor for diamonds under pain of death by their African warlords.
Just about every single race and people have been enslaved at some point in history either by their own people or another nation as means of cheap labor. They’re all gone and dead and their children are gone and their grand children either dead or in their 70s-80s.
This is such an absurd request that to insinuate that people to this day in any civilized country are defined by a history of slavery is insane, every last person in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, Poland and even those of Arabic decent who’s nations were the last to officialy give up slavery are all free of those chains and are not in anyway defined by them.
To ask for this is not only trolling and ignorant its just plain racist to say that any group of people in any country with access to WoW is in any way shape or form still connected to slavery. Are you telling me that when you look at a person that slave comes to mind?? There are no slaves in the US or any other western country for generations.
I submit that problem is purely with the listener.
Our language has evolved to allow us to communicate with each other with as much precision as possible. Haptics add even more to our attempts to communicate but the variety of words we have that have the same, or very similar, meanings is just a means of adding nuance verbally.
Again, words are things that communicate meaning so the real issue when you are offended is not the words themselves, but how the person communicating with you used them.