I think if the survivors who are trying to form a union are saying that boycotting Blizzard doesn’t help them we should listen to their needs.
I haven’t resubbed however, I’m giving myself until the last possible week.
Because while I, as a survivor myself, do feel a desire to express solidarity, the reality is that this whole dynamic has also confirmed for me:
- Blizzard has less than 5% probably people of color employed (people from the Questing, QA, and Encounter Design teams replied to me saying over the 10+ years each of them were employed, there were no more than 2-5 people of color among HUNDREDS of members of their teams, and every image of the staff is almost all white)
- There is recognition that these sexist/racist people had control of the story, and it is unclear what parts of the story were caused by who
- The current lore is horribly mishandling multiple themes and topics that are important to me, notably the trope of genocide (how they’ve handled Teldrassil), African/Indigenous religiosity (the mishandling of Tauren/Troll lore in particular, based on my IRL cultures), and Catholic-derived soteriology in the metaphysics (the metaphysics of sin within WoW is copied and watered down Catholic theology)
In real life, I have to deal with racism regularly, and people mocking my cultural heritage also regularly. In real life, my grandpa fled his reservation because of massacres caused by government funded paramilitaries razing everything to the ground with fire and bombs. In real life, I am regularly going through “Dark Nights of the Soul” religiously speaking because I am Catholic and suffer from Chronic Depression among other things.
The game has chosen, instead of being an escapist, idealist fantasy, to replicate motifs of IRL racism, replicate and mishandle IRL genocide trauma, and replicate and mishandle IRL religious dynamics of sin/suffering.
So while I support the survivors, and if I do not resub I would definitely give the same 15 bucks monthly to the union, the developers have not convinced me they recognize these problems.
In fact, Deondra recently tweeted how when she started, the creative team was majority men, and how she pointed out it was inappropriate for all these men to be writing women dealing with trauma.
So I asked, and how many people of color are in that room, besides herself, how many Indigenous and Black people specifically, at the very least, given the company is in the US? What is the racial/ethnic breakdown of the Blizzard employees?
I did not get a single response, but my tweet has since gotten THOUSANDS of interactions, well above my usual tweets, and I am confident they’ve passed it around internally.
So we’ll see.
But I also recently found out Golden has me muted, so here we are.