Moral Relativism: WoW Classic

It was something of a surprise for me this morning to find a bunch of "Boycott Blizzard" and "I'm quitting " posts in my RSS feed. In the handful of days I was away something blew up.

The whole thing appears to be layered in the way WoW Classic's servers aren't supposed to be any more. There seem to be freedom of speech issues going on here, political footprint issues, and draw the line issues.

There are also potential legal and commercial ramifications for Blizzard, who, at the very least, seem to have handled the whole situation in a hamfisted manner. The company now has a familiar task in front of it: rehabilitate their image in a highly volatile and emotional marketplace.

We've seen this repeatedly over the years as video game companies fail to behave in the manner their customers imagined they would. It's happened to just about every major developer and publisher and most of the minor ones too.

Blizzard is one of those companies that has been able to leverage an extraordinary degree of customer loyalty for a surprisingly long time. I thought Everwake put it particularly well:

"Nothing Blizzard is doing is different from what western companies have been doing for the past 3 decades. But we care more about this one because Blizzard was special. It created games, worlds, and memories that we could pour ourselves into. Turns out Blizzard wasn't really worthy of that love."

It's all about projection. Companies have "Mission Statements" and "Corporate Values". I remember very distinctly when I first came across the concept. I was working for a smallish subsidiary of a major international insurance company when we got our first official "Mission Statement".

I can't now recall what it actually said, only that, as Marketing Director (a more junior position than it sounds) I had to proofread the thing in a number of documents. I do remember thinking it was fatuous and taking the mickey out of it with colleagues who found it equally vacuous and self-serving.

Since then I have always assumed that all corporate statements of social intent are valueless ciphers, intended only to enhance the company's ability to make progress in spheres where income otherwise unavailable might be be found. It wouldn't occur to me that any company, charities and "Not for Profits" included, would have, at the level these shiboleths are signed off, anything other than direct, corporate advantage in mind.

Consequently I have never entertained any illusions that any company providing me with services or products would hesitate to throw me - or my loyalty - under a metaphorical bus if it would serve their purposes. Brand loyalty is nothing more than a psychological device designed to enhance corporate stability and provide a predictable income stream.

That said, it's also fun to have favorites. I have consistently said that my favorite MMORPG producer is and has always been Sony Online Entertainment and their successors Daybreak Games. That remains the case, even though SOE were responsible for some of the most egregious and unforgiveable betrayals of trust in the genre and DBG have obfuscated their corporate ownership to such a degree that who my money is going to when I pay my All Access sub is all but unknowable.

Slaying the Corporate Ogres with the Sword of Moral Indignation.

I don't expect companies who get my money to behave well. I expect them to sell me things I want at prices I'm willing to pay. Any other layer of emotion above that is a game I'm consciously playing with myself for my own amusement.

With no illusions of kinship between consumer and producer, the question remains: how to react to perceived transgressions? To what standards of corporate responsibility does one hold a notional aggregrated entity?

I have always been deeply uncomfortable with un-nuanced, absolutist stances on ethical and moral issues, even when I find myself intrinsically in agreement with them. The Specials uncompromising statement ("If you have a racist friend/ Now is the time, now is the time/ For your friendship to end.") in the song "Racist Friend" always bothered me and I found it highly instructive to discover that Jerry Dammers, who penned the lyrics, also found himself troubled by them:

"...for Dammers, who confesses he is "not a confrontational person", the song was substitute for a more direct challenge. He never actually got to tell the person why he had broken off contact.
"He actually died a few years ago. I didn't see him for years and years afterwards. When I heard that he'd died, I felt terrible that I hadn't told him that the song was about him, and why I'd cut myself off from him."

It's often easier to take the moral high ground and disengage than to stay and argue your case. Which is more likely to have an effect on the transgressor?

Another response to offense that I've never found convincing is the setting of boycotts. Boycotts generally seem to me to have the primary effect of making the person doing the boycotting feel better about the situation and about themselves. It gives the impression of action and allows the boycotter to regain some sense of control in a situation where otherwise they feel powerless.

Some boycotts do have effects. The long sporting strangulation of apartheid South Africa, together with the numerous economic boycotts that were sporadically effected alongside it, reportedly contributed significantly to the eventual fall of that despotic regime.

How effective the multifarious lockdowns attempted on individual companies over the years have been is much harder to parse. It always seems to me that "voting with your wallet" is about as likely to have the desired effect as casting your democratic vote does when the prevailing majority prefers another candidate to your own.

What often does seem to have a visible and meaningful effect in these situations is withdrawal of commercial support by peers, not customers. When advertisers and sponsors start to withdraw or cancel their contracts and make public statements dissociating themselves from their erstwhile, now errant, partners, then we do sometimes see a change of direction and even a contrite apology.

This is because significant sums are involved and corporate futures are in doubt. In the case of Blizzard, calculations will be made - will already have been made - around the relative potential damage to income streams that come from offending Western customers as opposed to appeasing China.

Blizzard-approved cultural stereotype.

Cancelling subscriptions and refusing to play Blizzard games sends a message but unless the commercial fallout is likely to be more damaging than the loss of income from sources under control of the Chinese state authorities, it's a message that can readily be ignored. Time will inevitably see any such strong reactions fade amongst most Blizzard subscribers to the point where continuing a boycott will seem as quaint as do the cadre of SWG veterans that still won't buy Sony products.

There are corporate actions that would spur me to cease doing business with a company. Not in the expectation that doing so would make them see the error of their ways but more selfishly and solipsistically because it would make me feel more comfortable. I wouldn't play a game that actively endorsed moral choices I reprehend or one whose developers or owners did so as a matter of course.

Ironically, given that I'm writing this and posting it on the World Wide Web for anyone to read, freedom of speech isn't one of my trigger issues. Contrary to popular belief, citizens of the United Kingdom, where I live and have always lived, have no formal right to "freedom of expression" and it forms no part of my culturally dictated belief system.

On the contrary, we have what are known, in somewhat Orwellian fashion, as "negative rights": there are numerous legal proscriptions on what U.K. citizens can say or write in public. I agree with the existence of such enforceable limits and indeed might well support their extension to include more restrictive legislation on public discourse, depending on what those restrictions might be.

I am very much not in favor of the so-called "right to offend". It's my feeling that there's a very great difference between the invaluable existence of the kind of "freedom of the press" that existed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a general free-for-all, where anyone can express any damn thing they please regardless of the effect it has on those who listen.

Bringing this all back to video games, what spurred the controversy was the banning of a Hearthstone player and others for expressing solidarity with the ongoing campaign in Hong Kong against further erosion of the freedoms supposedly guaranteed under the exit agreement that was negotiated with China, when the former British-ruled colony reverted to Chinese governance in 1997. The moral question is whether players of Blizzard's games should either cease to play them altogether or at least cease to pay for those parts which require payment.

That in itself is a nice moral choice: you could argue that to play the games and not pay for them would be a neat way to punish Blizzard. Only World of Warcraft requires a subscription. Everything else is either free to play or required a one-time purchase that would have been made before the controversy arose. Why not use their resources while giving them nothing?

I logged in to get a screenshot of populations in the hope of making some kind of point on the effectiveness or otherwise of the boycott, only to find Blizzard have changed the way they represent server load. I'm guessing "Layered" means a lot of people still.

From my perspective I see two valid reasons to cancel a subscription and/or stop playing Blizzard games:

1. You believe doing so will have a meaningful impact either on Blizzard's future actions or the actions of similar companies in equivalent situations;
2. It makes you feel better about yourself.

Neither of those applies for me. I think Blizzard will take whatever public relations steps they feel best mitigates the damage, while doing nothing whatsoever to diminish the effect they intended to create by their original action.

If they'd calculated that supporting the protestor would have been in their financial interest, that's what they would have done. Unless that balance changes, which appears unlikely, corporate decision-making will be unaffected, although they may make some changes to how they present those decisions in future.

As for making myself feel better I'm fairly certain I'll feel worse for denying myself the pleasure of playing the MMORPG I'm currently enjoying the most. It's not that I deny the satisfaction that comes from feeling morally superior (or at least consistent) nor the power of the illusion of self-worth that comes with donning the hair shirt, but this is not a hill on which I'm prepared to pause and self-evaluate, far less die.

It's a self-serving and morally questionable response but I make those every day of my life. This is just another in the never-ending chain that binds us to this imperfect existence we call life.

For what it's worth I think the protestor was entirely justified in his actions and from what I've read he clearly understood the implications. What's more, I'm sure he'll be delighted that Blizzard made the fundamental mistake of inflating his actions with the industrial wind-machine of publicity. Had they taken no action and made no comment at all, none of us would even know any of this had ever happened.

And now I'm going to go level my Hunter. I haven't played for three days and I'm itching to get back to Classic.