BioWare's Old Republic policy on homosexuality reconsidered

by Alexander Sliwinski on Apr 29th 2009 11:15AM

Recently, Star Wars: The Old Republic's Community Manager, Sean Dahlberg, stated that he'd filtered out words like "gay" and "lesbian" from the game's forums because "these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars." ... And the internet gasped.

Turning things around faster than the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel Run, Dahlberg issued an apology to accompany BioWare's removal of the filters. Although Dahlberg likely had the best of intentions in forming the policy, it helps if MMO community managers learn from a time not so long ago nor far, far away -- World of Warcraft tripped over a similar drama three years ago. More recently, Microsoft's Xbox Live handled a less clear case of discrimination just this year.

Source

Tags: gay, glbt, juhani, lesbian, sean-dahlberg, star-wars, star-wars-the-old-republic, the-old-republic

Reader Comments (55)

To add a little context: Dahlberg arrived at Bioware after a number of years as a community manager and, later, junior designer at Shadowbane's Stray Bullet Games. For a time, he was the lead moderator on the Ubisoft forums, as well as the SBG forums.

In further explanation, Shadowbane is (for 2 more days) a brutal, FFA PvP MMO with very intense player politics, and "Forumbane" is considered by many enthusiasts as equally important as defeating one's opponents on the battlefield. Vicious, escalating insults, posts of private Ventrilo recordings and unflattering photoshops of RL pictures were often the order of the day.

Being familiar with his past actions, I strongly believe that he was (misguidedly) attempting to keep the TOR forum community from devolving to a similar, hostile and *unfriendly* state, not to offend or alienate anyone.

The only thing being discriminated against is the English language. There's a difference between "You can't be gay" and "You can't say gay".

"Turning things around faster than the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel Run"

You sure you're not a Homer-sexual?

--or--

Y'all niggas are gay.

looks like that thread in which the Mod apologized has devolved into people bashing gay/bi/les/trans people. I was going to join the community, but nah.

Do the terms "forum" "internet" "xbox" "PC" and "swine flu" exist in the star wars universe?

Cos if we can only use words from the star wars universe its gonna get very tricky communicating in ours.

"I'm just hyperspacing down to the local Death Sticks Dealer to pick up some stim-infused-caffine-mix"

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