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World of Warcraft Director: “We’re Careful Not to Hire Too Many White People”
https://archive.md/YUOYN
What follows the usual wokespeak
GamesBeat: You mentioned making the team more diverse. Can you talk more about that effort?
Hazzikostas: This is something that has been a goal of ours for years. We have a number of women leaders, people of color across the team. These are areas where we continue to look for a team that represents the players we want to play our game. Part of why diversity is so important is that I, and we as a team, firmly believe that it makes a better game, makes a better product. We’re trying to make a game that’s not for a niche audience. We’re making a game that’s played by millions of people around the world, of all genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, backgrounds in general. To better understand and have a connection with that range of perspectives, we want a team with that same range of perspectives.
Recognizing that the game industry has had certain skews — male-dominated is one obvious one, especially in design — we need to work harder to build and find the qualified candidates who are out there. We can’t just open up a position, take the first couple dozen resumes, look through them, and pick someone out of that pile, because we may just get a couple dozen white male resumes. And it’s not that we wouldn’t hire someone who’s qualified for the job. We will. But we’ll be limiting the range of perspectives that come to our team. Again, this is not about any preferential decisions in the hiring process itself. It’s about working harder to understand how our job descriptions, the way we’re sourcing candidates, the way referrals work, and all the rest are filtering out qualified candidates of other backgrounds before they even make it to us. And then once we’re interviewing people, we’re going to pick the best person for the job at the time, but doing that extra work up front, we have found and continue and find, leads to a more diverse team that is more reflective of the country that we’re in and the player base that plays our game globally.
GamesBeat: The World of Warcraft team has been changing or removing some of the game’s emotes and art. What’s the thought process behind those changes?
Ion Hazzikostas: As we said in, I think, a brief blog, a forum post, this has been a process that has been ongoing as a result of an internal period of self-reflection over the last few months. These are changes that are coming from the team as a whole. In the discussions we began internally in the aftermath of the lawsuit and everything surrounding that, on many levels, trying to understand how we as the current leadership of the team could do better — better for our team, better for our community. One thing that came up is that there are pieces of our game that, over the course of 17-plus years now, that were not necessarily the products of a diverse or inclusive range of voices, that did not necessarily reflect the perspective of the current team and of many of our players. There are things that people on our team were not proud to have in our game. These are many things that people, over the years, have pointed out in the community, but we didn’t necessarily listen in the way we should have at the time.
What we did was we just set up a process internally for folks across the team, as well as sourcing some feedback from the community as a whole, to flag pieces of the game for review, whether it’s old quests or specific lines. As a random example, there were a number of jokes and references made a dozen years ago about how feminine male blood elves were, mistaking male blood elves for women, just poking fun at that in a not necessarily good-spirited way. That doesn’t sit right in 2021. That’s the sort of thing that was reviewed by a broad group that reflects the diversity of our team today. We made decisions on whether to leave some things standing, because they’re borderline, but we’re not looking to reinvent everything, turn over every single stone and rewrite 17 years of WoW. It might be a little bit juvenile. It might be off-color. But this isn’t something that is really making our game feel less welcoming for people, which is what we’re aiming to change. Those things we left. Others were removed, others were rewritten or changed accordingly.
Because of the nature of the feedback loop in the community and the way we publish new builds during the public test realm cycle and fan sites data mining them, every one of these changes ends up getting a huge spotlight shone on it alongside class balance changes or new systems we’re adding. This is a massive patch, but this is not something that took the entire team offline. In the grand scheme of things these are small changes. Many of them would probably go unnoticed if not for that spotlight being shone on them. But they’re things that were important to the team, and we’ve heard from many in our community that they’re important to them. This isn’t necessarily something that we expect to do in every patch going forward, to have a bunch of changes along these lines in it, but we want to be more sensitive to how the content we make is received by our team, and by the global player base that calls Azeroth, World of Warcraft home.
GamesBeat: What’s the community reaction to these changes been like?
Hazzikostas: Mixed, right? Some of it is confusion. Changes started to be seen before we explained why we were doing what we were doing. There’s a range of folks. You have folks who see this as political or unwelcome. “Just focus on making a fun game. I don’t care about this stuff.” On the other end there are those who have expressed concern that we’re almost doing this as a smokescreen. Rather than actually tackling the hard issues, we’re just changing some words in a game. This isn’t an “or.” It’s an “and.” We understand that we’re not fixing systemic injustice by changing an emote in World of Warcraft. But why not do that while we’re also working on larger cultural unity and diversity and safety issues and more? As we’re improving our processes for evaluating managers, for sharing feedback with the team; as we’re improving our recruiting and hiring to build a more diverse team, let’s also turn that same eye on our game. That’s one thing that may be more visible in the short term. But in the long term we understand that what we’re going to be judged for as a team, as a company, and as a game is far beyond that. That work is still underway.
GamesBeat: You mentioned how some people say, “Why do this instead of that?” One thing they mention is tackling in-game toxicity. Can you talk about what Blizzard is doing to combat that inside the game?
Hazzikostas: For many people, their unpleasant, their painful WoW experiences aren’t the result of a line an NPC said, but something that was said to them in party chat or jokes they saw in general chat or otherwise. We’ve been working to improve our handling of this on all fronts. We’ve been consulting with the Overwatch team and our broader shared tech group to use machine learning to better catch a lot of these things in real time, as opposed to relying on a very manual reporting-driven process. That’s what WoW was built around 17 years ago, and that sort of process maybe works well with someone who’s spamming sales or whatever in Orgrimmar, but it doesn’t work so well when it’s a one-off hateful comment that’s just written to someone, or something said in party chat in a dungeon.
We have a lot to do here, but it’s a number one focus for our customer support, our tech groups, and everyone involved in the social side of WoW gameplay. We want WoW and Azeroth to be a positive place, an escape from the trials and tribulations of the world. We need to do a lot more to insulate players’ experience from others who are coming in there to actively cause harm. We want to identify those people, hopefully reform them, but if not, remove them from the community, and the game will be better off for it.
