Completely escaping my attention, in the beginning of March, Microsoft reversed a long-standing policy against the inclusion of qualifiers for sexual orientation within Xbox Live profiles. Though there were several cases of players having their accounts suspended over this, the issue really came to a head last February when The Consumerist ran a story about "Teresa" who allegedly had her account banned following habitually abusive behaviour by other players because she said she was a lesbian in her profile. When she reported it, she claimed, Microsoft suspended her account instead because her profile was in violation of their policies. There was some question as to whether or not "Teresa" ever existed in the first place (in a blog entry on his personal site last year, Microsoft's Stephen Toulouse doubted the authenticity of The Consumerist's source material, though that entry seems vanish'd now) but I still considered it a positive thing at the time that Microsoft chose to enter into discussion over the issue all the same.
Backstory out of the way, last month Microsoft updated their Xbox Live Code of Conduct to say that the old policy had been revoked, and now gamers can feel free to include "lesbian," "gay," "bi," "transgender," and "straight" in their gamertags and profiles without fear of reprisal, unless they're using those terms in a derogatory manner. I learned of this update through an opinion piece on Bitmob posted Tuesday covering the issue from three points of view. Although I bristle at the phrase "sexual preference" being written by an apparent gay man, overall I agreed with much of what Kevin John Frank had to say about the policy shift.
As was the case with Valve censoring the phrase "gay" on their official forums, and BioWare censoring it on theirs, Microsoft's original policy was an attempt to prevent rampant bigoted language that inadvertently got out of hand. But while I think this is a good start, I also agree with Kevin John Frank where he said that overall, this won't really change anything on Xbox Live.
It's good for companies like Valve and BioWare to remove a discriminatory policy that forces minorities to hide themselves or use special re-spellings/codewords to just tell people that they're gay. You can't use machines to auto-correct bigotry out of asshats, and turning "gay" to "***" won't keep juvenile assholes from being juvenile assholes. So in that respect, Microsoft has done something good. However, I suspect that Microsoft will also follow in the steps of Valve and BioWare and leave their policy change where it is now, with absolutely no further enforcement against players who run around making disparaging and hateful comments towards LGBT players. Valve stripped the word filter from their forum, but didn't address the very real and very rampant homophobic mindset that is pervasive within their community– and indeed, they wouldn't even bother to respond to polite requests for comment on the subject before and after the word filter was removed. Similarly, this policy change is pretty superficial if Microsoft won't back it up with a concerted effort at directing their community towards a more civil and mature atmosphere. People aren't stupid. Whether or not someone lashes out at another person with "faggot" or "fa**ot," the recipient of that message knows exactly what was said to them and that won't change no matter how many passive-aggressive asterisks are substituted for letters; changing the particular arrangement of characters doesn't change the intent behind them.
Xbox Live by all accounts holds a ghastly collection of people to play games with. Exacerbated by the prevalence of voice chat, my limited experiences with it have been demonstrations of how nasty and rude people can be whilst playing competitive games anonymously with one another. I'm still pretty thrown as to why Microsoft doesn't do a better job of policing it– 99% of the time I see anyone making a comment online about XBL, it's along the lines of, "It's so hateful and racist, I never play on XBL except with my friends." It's not enough for Microsoft to just drop this ban against self-identification of sexuality in profiles on their social network, but that needs to be reinforced by a concerted zero-tolerance policy against players who've failed to evolve into the twenty-first century.
Nevertheless, it's at least a positive step. I don't think it will progress into anything more, but I don't think it will cause the sky to fall and LGBT players to be specifically targeted; those people who want to be hateful will still be hateful unless Microsoft (and other companies) take a firm stand towards booting these people off of their networks. And the people who regurgitate, "Wah, I don't care about your sex life in a video game," will continue to miss the point, but there's nothing to be done for that.
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