Thanks to Jill Pantozzi over at The Mary Sue, I was recently pointed in the direction of a new campaign put on by a fantastic, crusading gamer called Gamers Against Bigotry.
Gamers Against Bigotry was started by Sam Killermann, and is a website dedicated to asking gamers to sign a petition promising they will not use inflammatory language against other gamers, even in jest, during online gaming or in online threads. The site merely asks for your name and location, as well as a confirmation email, to grow the campaign. Thus far, almost 1,000 gamers, including myself of course, have signed the petition.
I’m very late to the dance because of how busy I’ve been lately. Since this campaign started, Killermann has launched an IndieGoGo campaign, asking for the funds needed to turn Gamers Against Bigotry into a legally binding non-profit organization, hoping to spread the word against the usage of bigotry, sexism, or inflammatory speech in the gaming community – a community with large patches that for whatever reason, tend to embrace sexism, racism, homophobia, and other hateful ideologies. In my personal community, I’ve never experienced this, but I have seen it, heard it, and heard horror stories from minorities and women in gaming.
For this reason, this is an attempt to form a group of the more enlightened gamers – the majority of us – to put a stop to something that is a real problem, and a blemish on the otherwise wonderful advancements in technology that has made the world such a smaller place.
I encourage you to go to the site and sign the petition, and also, if you can donate anything at all to Sam Killermann’s cause over at IndieGoGo, I ask that you do so. Will this campaign really make a difference? I don’t know, but at least one dedicated, enlightened person is trying.
For more information on G.A.B., please visit the official site. You can follow GAB on Facebook here, and find them on Twitter @GAB648 and @Killermann.
Nerd Monkey 