white people in denial about blatant racism on online games

talldarkbishoujo:

At the beginning of the current WoW expansion, monkeys were added to the classes of animals the Hunter class could tame and use for combat pets. I am not exaggerating when I say that I was putting in report tickets near daily, I saw so many Hunters running around with monkeys named after either famous black people or what they believed to be “black names” (“Laquisha”, etc). Even on my server, that is known as a beacon of progressiveness among WoW servers, for our huge LGBT population. (racism in MY LGBT community?! heh)

Before monkeys were tameable, it was gorillas named after black people. “Obama” was especially popular. To their credit though, whenever I submitted these tickets I never got the standard cut-and-paste response, I always got a personalized response from the GMs apologizing profusely, and I knew they took it seriously. But still, it happened. A lot.

And before players of other MMOs get smug and start talking shit about WoW again, I saw similar shit in “mature” games like FFXI and City of Heroes/Villains back when I played them.

This is what it’s like being a black online gamer. This isn’t the sum total of it—but this is the kind of thing you have to steel yourself against.