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Mike Morhaime on Combating Racism in Hearthstone
There's been a lot of discussion regarding the recent DreamHack Austin Hearthstone event, but unfortunately not all of it has been positive. During the event, Twitch chat was filled with blatant racism during matches featuring Hearthstone Pro, Terrence Miller, which was not moderated well.
Today, Mike Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment's President and CEO, issued a statement about the event and clarified that the company is investigating ways to deal with discriminatory behaviour in the future.
- The use of a Twitch pilot program to help moderate streams/ban evades is being looked into.
- Esports tournament partner policies will have stricter checks and penalties to provide a better chat experience.
Quote from Mike MorhaimeWe’re extremely disappointed by the hateful, offensive language used by some of the online viewers during the DreamHack Austin event the weekend before last. One of our company values is “Play Nice; Play Fair”; we feel there’s no place for racism, sexism, harassment, or other discriminatory behavior, in or outside of the gaming community. This is obviously a larger, societal problem that affects us on many levels. We can only hope that when instances like this come to light it encourages people to be more thoughtful and positive, and to fully reject mean-spirited commentary, whether within themselves or from their fellow gamers.To help combat this type of behavior during live events, we’ve reached out to players, streamers, and moderators, along with partners like Twitch, DreamHack, and others, to get consensus and collaborate on what to do differently moving forward. To that end, we’re investigating a pilot program that Twitch has in the works to streamline moderation and combat ban evasion. We’re also updating our esports tournament partner policies with a stronger system of checks, balances, and repercussions to provide a better chat experience around our content.
We believe these are important steps to take to help address the related issues, but we acknowledge that they only address part of the problem. This is ultimately an industry-wide issue, and it will take all of us to make a real impact.
Additionally, GamesBeat reached out to Twitch who had the following to say.
Quote from TwitchWe take harassment very seriously and understand how important this is for the entire Twitch community. We currently approach chat behavior by providing broadcasters tools, education, and autonomy to police their own channel. While in this instance the broadcaster was unable to fully prevent the described behavior, Twitch has a responsibility to broadcasters and players to provide a welcoming environment. As such, as Blizzard noted, we are exploring new tools and processes to increase awareness and mitigation of these issues, and will continue to take action against chatters who committed reported violations. We can’t comment on specifics at this time, but we do have a team dedicated to improving these aspects of the chat experience with a lot of internal progress already that we hope to share with the community soon.
Don't forget to add homophobe, misogynist, misandrist, transphobe, bigot, and all the other epithets you can think of. Maybe that will make you feel like you are in the right here.
Spamming ANELE = fine
Spamming TriHard = racism
Coming up next:
"Spamming Kappa = discrimination against colorblind"
"Spamming HeyGuys = sexism"
Perhaps there's a middle ground here to be made, disabling chat by default on the event and allowing people with a warning check box with a caution that chat can say anything. This way the general consensus is that people are removed from chat unless they specific want to join a warning chat and wouldn't have to default look onto the arguably atrocious chat. This is a place where people who want to troll and say what they want or act look hooligans can be grouped with like minded hooligans and share their merry ignorance together away from everyone else without being utterly ignored.
Racism, sexism or other discrimination based behavior that is either baseless or inaccurate is just that, foolish and baseless and those who sincerely believe in it clearly have a false perception of the world. However, it feels inherently wrong to tell people they can't think or feel a certain way, while comments should be directed else where, completely silencing a group of people because they disagree with the majority of people and viewing them as inferior or lesser people is imo on par with the ignorance of racism itself. I'm not suggesting we be tolerant of the act itself but suppression and witch hunting is a bit extreme, especially permanent IP bans or people suggesting you register your address to join the chat. Angering people or provoking them might even encourage them to spam more offensive things knowing they are getting attention and tricks like using a VPN to avoid IP bans and making new accounts circumvent the current system. There really is no flawless and/or perfect utopia of chat as long as people disagree about issues but perhaps something will improve.
A way to clean up chat and let trolls have their own space away from everyone else seams lie a fair compromise. If we start being the thought police and weed out everyone who thinks differently were going to have an Orwellian experience and I'm sure it will drive the popularity of the site and events down. That being said I still sympathize with the people who have been offended and feel wronged. It isn't right to judge people on their out of control attributes but the nature of people being offended is complicated. What people find racist, funny or offensive is subjective in a lot of cases. There's also a big difference in actually being a racist who believes your words and being a hooligan who just says offensive things to get attention or try to be funny. Yelling the N word in chat is offensive and pretty insensitive of other's feelings (disregarding past tension also) but at least from my perspective it isn't racist.
However as a business maneuver it's very good PR on Blizzard's behalf and will at least make the company look pretty good. It is common practice in the business world to self police and as long as Twitch and Blizzard agree on these terms for their event, they do have every right to do this. The question though is should they? Let's hope it's enough to appease everyone and strict but not brutally harsh.
I mostly watch Twitch in full-screen and ignore chat altogether. Why? well, most of the time it's just too busy to follow anyway, but, mostly because I know that the chatters are usually brainless fools sitting in their dorm rooms trying to one-up each other with quick hits of moronic posts. There are very few streamers left who rely on chat to really build a "good" community (im looking at you HotForm).
I submit, though, that the steamers themselves are half the problem since in many cases, they perpetuate the infantile chat by responding or joining in the "fun." Once you acknowledge the slimy remarks, unless to condemn them, you give these people their "15 minutes" and leave them wanting more. Streamers need to be more careful.
All they need to do is give channel operators an option to turn off chat (Is this not an option? It feels pretty obvious). Tens of thousands of viewers don't chat at all and if it's turned off on a channel that doesn't even acknowledge chat then it's no big deal.
Chatting and reading chat is an important part of entertainment on twitch.
Using the word "cancer" in a gaming subtext is another thing which is totally BS. Hope you understand that cancer is a serious disease.
that doesn't invalidate the point that the level of "cancer" within a chat forum is what attracts many viewers to particular channels.
Not everyone thinks Forsen in the best player in the world and watch him to learn. Many many many are there to party and spam and spew terrible things. Those same people are not showing up for Hotform (let alone do they even know who he is, despite him placing 2nd a the World Championship) because his chat is pretty well behaved and he's fostered a more positive and less accepting of "cancer" than many many many other streamers. Yet, Hotform is one of the smartest and best players out there, he teaches as he plays, etc. etc.
Big problem is that there really isnt any oversight on Twitch in the sense that most streamers (though many are on teams) are really in it for themselves. Even Raynad, who is salty as hell and owns the team, doesnt seem to really care to promote a professionalism that would be expected in real world commerce.
But, hey, what do you expect from a "sport" that is run by and millennial dudes with cash to burn.
At least the casters of the major events have become more professional.
read the second definition
All this hate, racism, sexism, homophobia, you name it, everywhere on the internet just because people are who they are. We don't choose skin color, gender, health etc when we're born, yet we're all more or less hated for it. And everywhere you just meet the mentality "lol man up, it's the internet". That's the exact mentality which allows the hate to keep growing. Instead of telling everyone to ignore the hate, tell them it's not ok and start with yourselves by not thinking negative about everything and everyone by default. Or go say the same things to your parents that you say in chat and see if they laugh about it.
I didn't mention freedom of speech or liberty. Nor political correctness. What I said was just common sense, something parents should teach their children these days so they don't waste their time spreading hate on the internet when they could do good things instead.
Woah!
"KEEP YOUR HATE SPEECH OUT OF TWITCH!!!" almost sounds sounds as good as "KEEP YOUR HATE SPEECH OUT OF THIS CAMPUS!!!"
To be fair though, the person, muttering the latter, was too afraid to take other's opinions, which is much worse than just being offended by stupid racist jokes made by twitch chat.
Twitch has every right to remove hate speech from their site.There are consequences to freedom of speech.You can't just go on a forum and call somebody a nigger and monkey without consequences.
What's hard to understand about this ? Free speech protects you from the government and that's it .
If some random guy comes to your premises and starts shouting nigger what would you do ?
Watch as my neighbors tear him to shreds.
Seriously, everyone is going to see something sometime somewhere that they don't like. Even those who are considered to be CIS, white, christian, and/or male are made fun of somewhere on the internet. *cough* tumblr *cough* So, why does blizzard care what a few trolls say in twitch chat? Twitch chat is already notorious for having not super friendly language all the time... I really don't get why Blizzard is virtue signaling here. Especially since they don't own twitch.
Your fan base does not need your protection, if you want to respect us, don't treat us like we're all insecure people who are triggered by everything. As a white transgirl, who is having trouble transitioning, I've heard everything in the book as far as insults; but ya know what, I'm not insecure about myself, so I don't care about the opinions of some random dood on the internet who will forget about me in less than 2 minutes after our interaction ends.
Don't treat your fans like they need you to baby them blizzard. You are not their parents. As far as most people are concerned, you're just part of the entertainment section of their internet life. That section of the internet is going to have to occasional bit of speech doods don't want to see. Assume your users are smart enough to ignore doods, either with chat tools or just in general, or have thick enough skin not to care. I've said my piece now. Have fun with Hearthstone all.
If Blizzard wants Hearthstone events, and twitch wants esports in general to be taken seriously, they have to do more than what they're doing now, which is basically nothing. Getting rid of the toxicity in the community isn't for protecting people, it's just the decent thing to do.
Ignoring, for a moment, that saying "toughen up" is a horrible way of dealing with this problem...
The main issue is the business side. You want eyes on this stuff if you're Blizzard/Twitch. More eyes = more money, from advertisers and products. Rampant racism and douchery is going to alienate *some* people.
The racism was bad i get it but the fact they banned a certain emoji because the emoji was black was ridiculous im all for disabling all emojis as that is fair enough but choosing to ban certain emojis due to the color portrayed the dreamhack mods as racist themselves
Really glad Blizzard and Twitch are taking action. Obviously this sort of awfulness has happened before, and that's part of the problem. We're talking about it now, which means action can be taken to improve future events.
Let's be honest, if you screamed half the stuff that's said in twitch chat at a live sporting event, you'd be thrown out, no hesitation. Sub chat is one solution, but you also need organized mods, tools to block ban evaders, and a policy that keeps mods on the same page, and the willingness to ban sub offenders.