DOMA and Prop 8. Both History.

[LemmingofGlory]

The gaming communities you participate in tend to be more mature, so you don't notice it as much.

Intelligent forums can spoil you to a lot of things, like expecting people to understand the difference between attacking their idea and attacking their character.

Now, often those rules are a result of a female raider's actions leading to guild breakups/drama; perhaps you've heard of the horror stories of the Female Raider Who Sleeps with the Guild Master for Perks. Those stories, however, ALWAYS blame the female and never the male, as in "that wench seduced our GM and broke up the guild." Takes two to tango.

I never got into WoW, so these kinds of Yoko Ono stories are all new to me. I don't really understand guild power structures. When last I played online, Bnet channels were used to organize gaming communities, and hardly anyone had voice chat capabilities so everyone was sexless sentient text.

It may be that the guilds you describe are essentially like the tribe of Bushmen in "The Gods Must Be Crazy," except considerably less charming. A glass coke bottle falls from the sky, and everyone in the tribe wants it because it is so special. This causes fighting. The only solution is to call the bottle an Evil Thing and throw it off the edge of the world. In this context, the group shows inadequate sophistication to adapt to changing circumstance and their response is conservative: return to the status quo. I guess a profound lack of insight goes hand-in-hand with people who've never had to stop and understand the world from an entirely different point of view.

As far as the Lounge goes, when I think of LemmingofGlory, I think "mature, well-written Diablo 1 fanatic with nicely thought-out posts" more than I think "gay gamer." As you said, with gamers, social backgrounds tend not to matter since it's the games that bring us here. Then we stay for all the political bickering anyway.

I've had the crappiest unique item in Diablo as my user avatar for ten years and I'm being accused of maturity? Well, maybe that is true. I mean, I'm resisting talking about Turkish incest even though it sounds like somebody's hilariously specific search history.

-Lem