Microsoft Confirms Support For Displaying Sexual Orientation In Xbox Live Profiles
At yesterday's GLAAD Panel discussion about homophobia in virtual communities, Xbox Live's head of policy and enforcement Stephen Toulouse reiterated Microsoft's commitment to giving gamers the ability to identify their sexuality in their profiles, and invited out own Fruit Brute out to see the changes they're planning in order to implement this. Hopefully it's not some kind of trap, and we'll get our founder back safe and sound.
Apparently using "sexual" terms in gamertags and regular profile fields and text boxes will still be off limits, but this sounds like a (tenitive) step in the right direction. At least they've got plans and aren't just hoping we'll go away and make their lives easier. After he gets a peek, I'm sure Fruit Brute will have more to share about their solution.
Besides having Brute on the panel itself, writers Pixel Poet, Asterick, and Sgt. Sausagepants attended the discussion, which was recorded and should be up on GLAAD's website by next week. If any readers happened to be there, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, and if you didn't make it, keep your eyes open for that video.
Dawdle
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany on 19 July 2009
· Comments (17)
Other stuff like this: gay, glaad, microsoft, xbox live
I'll just put not a breeder in my profile. They will have no idea what the hell that is. LOL
Thats great!
Someday I can put in: I love to f***k my sister and my dog. Thank you Glaad! Finally I know my sexuality is good!
If they add location aware services then this could be used for dating.
Just because you can list your sexuality doesn't make it "good."
Congratulations on the extreme logic fail, Bang.
Is this really a good idea? I mean I'm all about being out and proud but it can work both ways. Oh look i'm gay! Spam my message box and make fun of me. We all know how mature xbox livers are.
Oh, thank you so much, Microsoft, for your generosity in allowing me to identify who I am, as long as it's hidden from immediate view. I feel so liberated.
"We all know how mature xbox livers are."
But we all do know how Microsoft handles immature people who would spam people who's profiles say they're gay. I mention I'm a gaymer in mine. I'd say go for it, and report people, and help MS make their gaming service more friendly. That's what they've been trying to do for a long time.
Is this really a good idea?
That's what I've been wondering since I first came to GG and started seeing all these articles.
Yes, alot of the immature 360 livers need to be bashed over the head and put in a silent time out for afew years, but is being able to put your sexuality in your gametag [I]really[/I] necessary?
To be brutally honest [may be mildly offensive], but if all you can think for a universal gametag is your sexuality, then that doesn't say alot about you, or even good things about you... [it reeks of sadness to me, personally]
Chooseoneknuckles: Perhaps you missed this part..
"using "sexual" terms in gamertags and regular profile fields and text boxes will still be off limits"
As a form of entertainment and escapism, I find it problematic that homophobia and other forms of discrimination and marginalization have become as pervasive and accepted as it is now in online gaming environs like XBLA and MMOs. I heard about this panel discussion from Kotaku, and I was excited to see that GLAAD had brought together a great panel of industry insiders to discuss what I consider to be a significant issue in online and social gaming.
Fruit/Flynn, you did a great job up there, and I think you represented 'the player' on the panel well. Although I did feel like the only straight guy in attendance there, I still felt like my concerns were voiced.
I think M$ showed that they're really committed to making XBLA accessible and friendly to all markets. They kind of receive the brunt of criticism for enabling the worst of homophobic online spaces, and as one of the real pioneers and biggest player in this space, they have the largest burden and responsibility to confront this problem. I believe they truly want to step up.
They sent the right guy to the panel (their head of online policy and enforcement of XBLA), and I felt that he was truly genuine. I go the impression that it's not entirely that M$ doesn't want sexual preference identifiers in gamertags as much as they are powerless to 'disarm' those terms. Terms like 'gay/faq/queer' have been co-opted by bigots to have all kinds of pejorative meanings, and there are no interpretive/syntactical tools to ensure proper usage without going through and reading every one, and then possibly going back and interviewing people as well. I agree that the proposed 'self-tagging' concept sounds weak, but I think that its a path worth exploring. If implemented well, it could open the door to all sorts of self-identification options, like being able to immediately identify yourself as a knitter, and a vegetarian, and gay (or whatever combination) and find similar gamers out there. In that sense, it could be a great tool, but we'll have to wait and see.
Even though the ESA has been on my hate-list for a few years now, they sent a great rep, and he was a great contributor.
I have had the rare privilege of working with Caryl briefly on Spore, and so I already have an immense respect and appreciation for her. When I read the description of the panel, I knew it was her.
Overall, I think that this was a great start, and hopefully we'll see more movement in this direction in the near future.
I was there, and I thought Flynn did such a great job of representing the site and being a voice for gay gamers. He was especially good at expressing *why* a gay gamer would want to express his or her sexuality in such a simple thing as gamertag or profile to Stephen Toulouse.
All of the contributors seemed genuinely concerned about the problem, and I think we have some good allies on our side, judging by the people on the panel.
This was a good first step, and I hope that they have more events planned that will show the progress of all of their combined efforts. Continuing dialogue is always good.
Attended the panel, ruminated, have a few things to say.
First and foremost, to all the people saying that gay gamertags make someone "pathetic", what the hell is the big deal? Maybe the person's really into politics or something, or just coming out so he/she thinks it's a Really Important Thing, but who cares? Unless the term "gay" is somehow offensive to you, then why SHOULDN'T someone use "gaygamer" as a handle? I mean, by all means raise an eyebrow at that person for having clear issues, but don't censor them outright. (Don't censor "straightGamer" for that matter. I mean, yes, who's he trying to fool?, but censorship is not the answer.)
Second, there are standard algorithms Microsoft can use to automate the detection of hate speech. All they'd need to do is apply ordinary audio fingerprinting techniques and store the results in a bloom filter. If Shazam can handle music detection requests from 250 million cell phones, matching against their database of 6 million partial tracks, then Microsoft certainly has the capacity to match a potential 8 million users against a database of a few hundred slurs. The error rate on the detection algorithms can be washed away by the sheer prevalance of these slurs on XBox live -- if your record indicates that you've used forty slurs every single time you've logged in over the past month, then your account should probably be reviewed by a human being to see if you should be banned. Using a bloom filter means that there's a constant cost per customer in terms of storage -- trivial to budget. And if you didn't want to monitor all 8 million of your users, you could just do random spot checks against (say) a thousand per day -- again, whatever can fit your budget for CPU/bandwidth.
Third, the idea of a police blotter makes a lot of sense. "We banned 30 people today for using racist slurs" would go a long way towards indicating to the Live community that racial slurs are not allowed.
Fourth, in general it'd be nice if Microsoft could remind people what the rules are. Every time I fire up my XBox I get the dashboard screen that has all sorts of promotions and upsells. If Microsoft added a "these are the rules" kind of ad in that space -- even just once a month -- I think you'd see better behavior. Actually, maybe just a once-a-month blotter as described above.
Fifth, I'd just like to shout at the top of my lungs that Microsoft's approach right now DOES NOT WORK. It does nothing to prevent majoritarian excess, and does much to exacerbate it. The woman from EA talked about the Sims, which has a much better mix of male/female (I think it's like 40% male) so relying on the community to report misogyny will probably work there. But XBox live is like, what, 98% male? There's no way women/minorities can possibly hope to report everyone. Worse, the bigots can randomly report anyone they want for any stupid reason they want, and get anyone banned if enough of them gang up. You CANNOT rely on community self-policing when the demographics are so stacked in favor of bigotry.
Sixth, I'm glad Microsoft is exploring solutions but they've had over a year since the gay ban made headlines, so it's about time for them to, you know, actually do something.
Seventh, I'm amazed no one mentioned Gabe's Internet Dickwad Theory during the event.
Great panel, bravo to GLAAD, to Mr Bute, and to the rest of the panelists.
I thought the panel was great overall, though I wish there had been more focus on specifics. The warm fuzzy "we're trying to do the right thing, and we even think we have a business justification for it" was appreciated since we haven't gotten a whole lot of that publicly. However, given the amount of online community policy expertise on the panel, I would have liked to have gotten some more details on processes and policies they've tried or are thinking about and why they might or might not work. They started to get into a little bit of that, (and I can understand not wanting to promise people anything that you're not sure you can deliver on) but I would have found more discussion in that vein useful.
I also would have liked them to address the issue of how they're going to make it clearer to us what we are and aren't allowed to say about our orientation. I asked a question about this, and while I appreciated all of the stuff the Microsoft rep said, I don't really feel like he addressed that. While I totally agree with Flynn/Fruit Brute's sentiment that it *is* fair for people who break the rules to be punished, that only really works when people have a good grasp of the rules.
For example, I think that a gay gamer who hasn't been privy to this whole discussion isn't necessarily going to, say, read over the XBox Live Code of Conduct (http://www.xbox.com/zh-SG/live/legal/codeofconduct.htm) and understand that they can't use the words "gay" or "lesbian" in their gamertag or profile. There's a sort of generic bit about not making something that "other users may be offended by". The couple of things that they call out which might be applicable are "hate speech", "topics or content of a sexual nature", and maybe but hopefully not "controversial religious topics". From the panel, it seems like "hate speech" is the thing they're most worried about with respect to "gay" or "lesbian" in tags/profiles, but what gay/lesbian person in their right mind is going to think that being open about their orientation is going to get them in trouble for "hate speech"? If the issue is being "sexual", as Dawdle alluded to in the original post, then that's part of the bigger problem of "gay always meaning sex" that we really shouldn't let stand. And if we're really expected not to "offend" *anyone*... I mean, our very *existence* offends a bunch of people... that's just kind of a nonstarter.
I know that it is an impossible problem to write a document that addresses every possible situation, but I think they need to find a much better way to provide us with guidance so that we can be "visible" in the way that everyone on the panel seemed to think was going help in solving these homophobia problems.
@Paul Jack
Yeah, I *really* would have liked them to speak a bit more to the "majoritarian excess" problem. I get the impression that they kind of sort of intuitively get it, but I would like to know that it is concretely a part of their discussions about potential new policy. I also would have liked them to directly talk about how while only having 2% to 5% false positives may generally count as good for something as fuzzy as conduct enforcement, if that 2% to 5% turns out to be 50% to 60% (or even 20% to 30%) of some minority group, then that group is going to feel under attack.
@Paul Jack said:
"Seventh, I'm amazed no one mentioned Gabe's Internet Dickwad Theory during the event."
Disinhibition through internet anonymity came up like, what, half a dozen times? They didn't mention Gabe specifically, but this effect has been studied by psychology for years before PA did a strip on it.
Here's just a quick google search result from 11 years ago:
https://www.msu.edu/user/trescami/thesis.htm
But this is actually the same as a much older phenomena referred to as deindividuation that has been studied for decades, long before the internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's (just kidding, DARPA's) eye.
LOL, check this link where they made a quite funny image mixed up of theGayerGamer+Minority Report = Gay Minority Report -
http://www.mmogrindhouse.com/game-news/articles/microsoft-supports-against-sexual-defamation-through-xbox-live/
Very nice site!