Design doesn’t always agree with Customer Service. We live in the ivory tower, and they live in the trenches. They have to deal with the script kiddies, the racist jerks, and the epiphets against their mother. We get to play in clouds, and fix the design when they finally say ‘enough, this is a problem, make it go away’.

Still, it’s unfortunate to read about World of Warcraft’s decision to ban ‘gay-friendly’ guilds (InNewsWeekly broke the story, Terranova’s got commentary). The short form is: guilds who advertise that they are Gay Friendly might invite abuse and discord upon themselves, so better off they just keep things quiet.

Which is, in fact, exactly the same rationale of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ employed by the army. Vulnerable to all of the same complaints, too, namely that it doesn’t really seem like you’re dealing with the people who are the actual problem.

In Blizzard’s response on the matter, they basically say they’d treat a ‘Christian-friendly’ and a ‘liberal-values friendly’ guild the same way. Whether this is true, who knows, but now the person whose guild was shut down is trying to get the ACLU involved.

Also in the forum post, Blizzard essentially says that the problem is not the guild’s existence, but the fact that it is advertising in an open channel. Presumably, according to them, you could post such information on the WoW recruiting boards, also controlled by Blizzard, and everything would be dandy. This seems… inconsistent to me. Is it enough? I don’t know.

Whether or not your customer is gay or never wants to think about such squishy topics, one thing is undoubtedly true: Players who find like-minded players to game with are going to be happier, and be more likely to stick around. Now, most people tend to identify themselves as a gaming style like Casual or Raider. But on the other hand, to other people the gameplay is almost auxiliary. They are there to socialize, and them finding other like-minded people to do so with is going to make the game stickier. In the case of homosexuality, especially gay teens who have trouble finding acceptance with themselves in their schools and homes and are, in fact much more prone to suicide than your average teen because of it – well, it’s possible they’d just like to find some people to gain a few levels with who don’t call you ‘f4g’ every time you accidentally pull one too many Murlocs.

Original comments thread is here.