After a Hearthstone player became the brunt of racist comments in a chat during a gameplay event, Blizzard plans on creating a new program with Twitch to tackle how to deal with that sort of racism and harassment.
The incident occurred during the Dreamhack Austin event when players started throwing out racial slurs about Hearthstone player Terrence "Terrence M" Miller. Not only were the comments disparaging and probably even against the rules, but not a single moderator stepped in to stop it.
"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," Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said in a statement. "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."
Morhaime then reached out to players, moderators and Twitch to help create a new program that will give such chat sessions better moderation and prevent users from evading bans. Blizzard will also change its policies to have a better system in place to tackle such harassment head-on.
This sort of experience is hardly new, though: there's a long history of racism, sexism and harassment in video games. Even before GamerGate, players were subjected to name-calling, harassment and threats. It's also why many gamers don't chat during events and play sessions at all.
Blizzard hopes that its new program will help alleviate some of the problems in its events that have chat, but such attitudes in the gaming community still persist, and until the gaming community as a whole deals with it, this kind of thing will always be a problem. It's a start, albeit a late one.
"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," Morhaime said. "This is ultimately an industry-wide issue, and it will take all of us to make a real impact."
