Yelling at people

I have been hunting for an online home in World of Warcraft.  Finding the right guild to settle into is not an easy affair because there are so many things that can make a guild a bad fit for me.  You need to make sure the people in the guild are playing for the right amount of time, at the right time.  You also gotta find folks that are doing the sort of playing you are doing, at the right level.  Matching all the basic logistical bits is tricky.

But those aren't the only sort of considerations.  I had been in a guild for six weeks or so with everything seeming quite reasonable and then it went from fine to disaster in a tiny span of time.  One raid night one of the raiders starting telling risque jokes, which generally I am fine with, and then graduated to telling jokes bashing gay people and people with disabilities.  I got pissed and told him to stop.  

I don't have any sort of authority in the guild.  Other people can ignore me unless management is willing to step in, and management seemed to have nothing to say on the matter.  Still, apparently my grumpiness was intimidation enough, and the jokes stopped.  Temporarily.

The next raid he started up again, and after the raid I wrote a post talking about how much I cannot and will not tolerate such things.  Both on a political / philosophical level, and also on a deeply personal level.  Even if I would be fine with gay bashing jokes generally (I am categorically NOT fine with it) there is no way I could tolerate it because of the people close to me.

The guild management made it clear to me that they were going to make gay bashing comments now and again, and I could either be cool with it or leave.  They also made it clear that I was making people uncomfortable by calling this sort of thing out, and they weren't happy about it.

You see, they play WOW to relax, and they don't want to feel judged while playing.  They want to be a fun, no politics, no drama sort of guild.  That means gay bashing has to be tolerated, because after all, it is crucial that the guild be a easy, welcoming place for straight people who want to be bigots.

They also chastised me for thinking only of myself, and not taking anyone else's feelings into account.

It made me sick to my stomach.  Obviously that attitude is wretched, and I am well rid of them.  However, I hate having to find a new place to hang out, and I hate not knowing if I am getting into a nest of vipers when I am doing it.  Guilds all claim to be fun, easy going places.  Nobody advertises "We are a bunch of bigots, come take a dump on minorities here."  Nor do they say "This is a place where we do not tolerate bigotry."  They just talk about raid times and what bosses they have killed.

In both board games and computer games I keep seeing this idea floated that gamer communities are the most accepting communities.  It is so obviously nonsense.  They *are* the most accepting places of being a gamer, that is for sure.  Accepting of other things though?  Not so much.