Bad Blizzard

For many months now Blizzard, the game company behind behemoths like Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and other iconic games has been mired in controversy and legal trouble.  The state of California is suing them for a variety of things including sexist hiring, promotion, and pay practices, failure to resolve sexual abuse complaints properly, and destroying documents  to cover up their problems.

After reading the court filing and hearing many of the complaints brought forward it is clear that Blizzard has enormous problems with entrenched sexism at the company.  There was one senior executive in particular who was widley known to grope many women at Blizzcon in particular and people regularly had to pull him off of women when he was drunkenly grabbing them.  Nothing was ever done about this, it was simply accepted as the way things are.  There are no end of other horrendous stories though, like women being sexually assaulted and then moved to other teams to spare their attacker from facing any consequences, as well as regular events where male employees would go on drunken 'cube crawls' to harass the women working there.

It is a neverending parade of awful.

Blizzard's initial response was to deny all allegations and blame overzealous regulators in California for overreacting.  The media, player, and employee response to that was *extremely* negative thankfully and the people in charge quickly decided that heads had to roll.  You know you have to do something when the people playing your game are killing an NPC named after one of your executives over and over again just for spite.  They fired Blizzard's CEO and the head of HR and began terminating all kinds of other employees caught up in the scandal.

That is all well and good.  I want those people fired, and prosecuted where appropriate.  This sort of thing is never going to be quickly or easily resolved though.  Entrenched cultural norms take a long time to change, and a rapid leadership swap just isn't going to fix everything.

The question is, what should I do about it?

Complaining on the internet is my first response of course, but should I delete all Blizzard games?  Should I refuse to ever give them money again?  I thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that other game companies are often bad in similar ways.  Decamping to one of their games isn't really helping anything.  Awful treatment of women is extremely common in that industry.  Most likely what I would be doing is supporting a game company that just hasn't been caught yet.

I think the thing I should focus on is not trying to punish Blizzard, but rather to create a community in WOW that has the values I support.  I should speak up about sexism wherever I see it.  I should refuse to accept it from the people around me.  I should do this both in person and on forums that I frequent.  This is something I have always done to an extent, but I should push it harder now that I know just how bad things are.

There are a lot of people whose response was 'Burn Blizzard to the ground'.  I am not going that far.  I want the leadership purged, and I want to see huge numbers of abusive people get fired.  I am totally willing to accept slower content updates and worse response time as Blizzard sorts itself out and restructures.  I want the games I love to be built by a company whose values I can get behind.  That isn't true right now, but I have hopes that this will be the catalyst for it to be true in the future.