Just by being a part of the starcraft community, you are providing support to activision blizzard.
If we were talking about offline-only non-community driven content, sure... but this is a company that is almost entirely driven off of multiplayer games.
Going back further in time will only make you miserable if you hold the work closely accountable to the person. Terrible people can still say really good things, and I don't believe it is different with games or modern entertainment in general. Old Blizzard games are still good, and old Louis CK sets are still funny.
At the end of the day, another player booting up an Activision game is another (tiny) data point that says whatever activity Activision/Blizzard is engaging in is a-ok with that player. It’s not revenue driving right now, but in 6-12 months, this has blown over and enough of the tiny subset of temporarily outraged players will eventually start to generate revenue. That’s what they’re banking on.
Decide what you care about or don’t, but at least accept/own the impact of your decisions and don’t conflate the situation with century old authors.
This is definitely how Activision/Blizzard will interpret it. However, not every single gamer is tuned into these kinds of stories about the game makers. Some will be totally unawares of any of the shenanigans that occur behind the game. Not everybody has the time and/or interest for that. Just like people do/don't care about Amazon, Walmart, Nike, etc. Someone that does care will bring to light something that may garner media attention. Some people will see that, and get worked up about it. However, the majority of people will be just as happy to put their head back in the sand and continue on with their day-to-day.
I also came here to see if anyone else was calling that Activision/Blizzard's next move were to call in the Pinkertons.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water here. This case however is a pretty simple B2C relationship and if a consumer is aware of what Activision is up to and continues to support through revenue or engagement, simply accept that you don’t care about these issues enough to change your behaviour, we all make compromises in life.
What I’d like to avoid is consumers deluding themselves into thinking that playing Starcraft is fine because it’s the same as people buying the books of dead racists.
ACTI doesn't have that excuse. They're all with us now, and their actions don't have the shield of being reasonable in the society they exist in.
Opinions of celebrities don't exist in some sort of extra-dimensional cloistered thought bubble; they influence other minds and affect society in very real and measurable ways. Amplifying the celebrity status of these individuals by cherry-picking their acceptable works will in turn, unavoidably, also amplify their less-acceptable opinions -- though probably not by the same magnitude. But in general the masses are terrible at sorting out "oh, this is a righteous opinion that I should listen to" vs "this is a despicable one by the same person, but I have the intellectual & emotional maturity to be able to compartmentalize it". We're too tribal a species, on the average, for that. Our brains, societies, and cultures have not evolved to effectively handle multiculturalism well, ivory-tower internet freethinkers notwithstanding.
The flipside of cancel culture is moral nihilism, in which speech has no consequence and exists purely as a form of harmless intellectual exercise. But that's just not how it works in the real world. Speech has consequence, and for those wishing to prevent those consequences, sometimes ignoring the speaker and refusing to amplify their voice is the only realistic option they have, if they have no power to censor them outright or sufficiently amplify contrary opinions of their own. A canceled author isn't really very different from a boycotted company; it's a moral vote by a like-minded mass of humans who together value their version of morality more than that author's impacts. It's really not that difficult to not be an outspoken asshole.
Saying "I don't want to read this book" or "I don't want to play this game" because you don't like the author's values is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It's very different from, say, government ban lists. So what if someone doesn't want to read Harry Potter or watch Weinstein movies anymore?
Back to the first question: why ought greatness be the measure of a person, instead of righteousness? Our species is largely full of mediocre apes with mediocre thoughts who nonetheless manage to coexist and thrive to some degree, yet are all too often led astray and into peril and evil by the "great" Machiavellian few among them. How does that help anything at all?
Not being able to relate to an other if they are not pure is a failure in having strong enough ego boundaries. High functioning requires complexification of our boundaries; a confidence in deciding what goes in and what doesn't on the fly without requiring rigid codification of rules, which ultimately requires a confidence in ourselves; what we are and what we are not.
All-or-nothing purity is a way of keeping things simple and reducing the complex calculus the reality demands. Not saying this in a demeaning manner, because we all do this in varying degrees. But if one can't tell if they are being a "bad" person or not for making use of a "bad" person's valid idea/product, that could as well be a shortcoming of their own self-conceptualization than the "badness" of the other.
Why spend the limited time you have in this world on consuming the works of terrible people? There is more out there than you could possibly experience in a lifetime. Why not dedicate that time to people who are not awful?
There is only one of any given person, that is not an argument to read them either.
On the contrary, real insights tend to stand the test of time, which is why Nietzsche continues to remain relevant and timeless. Lysenkoism, not so much.
Your logic is exactly the reason many people tell us we shouldn't bother learning too much about, say, the founders of American democracy.
You should have a strong moral compass, and you should be able to tell right from wrong, and awful from decent. And you should let that compass guide you in everything you do, including who you give the precious resource that is your attention to.
Framing it as "other people consider awful" makes it sound like you do not actually agree that awful people are all that bad, and that is a moral failing on your part.
Everybody has done and said awful things. If you don't want to read the works of sinners, then you won't be able to learn from anyone.
My example highlighted folks like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, unrepentant slaveholders who happen to be keystones of American democracy. They said and did awful things in life. Do you think therefore that you have nothing to learn from them?
Also understanding the enemy.
Also not all “consuming” of work is for “entertainment”.
We still celebrate conquerers like Genghis Khan after hundreds of years, even though they brought a ton of misery (especially Genghis, who was known for his cruelty) to the people they conquered and often to their own people. The pyramids, great wall of China etc were all built on the death of tens of thousands of workers.
Sometimes the more we learn, the more depressing it gets (Ignorance is bliss? lol)
I’d like to have a database that tracks the C-Suite employees. I’d personally boycott any company that hires any of them. Their careers should be over IMO. I wish we could take away Bobby’s money too, but that’ll never happen.
We should totally not give our money to shitty companies. But global commerce is so intertwined that it would quickly become very difficult to buy anything if we start closely looking at every company we give money to.
I don't know what the solution is. Boycotting is a start.
Sure, we may have somewhat high manufacturing standards in the US, but take a step into foreign soil and all the sudden all the rules are out the window. With companies specifically using countries with the weakest safety regs to cut costs.
It's why walmart keeps getting busted for using slave/child labor.
Do you have a citation?
At the time of this writing I had 13 upvotes for a mostly wrong take. Still maintain that the jail time puts Kelly closer to Cosby than Jackson.
I also think that these kinds of products, because they are indivisible creative works, suffer from rotting from within. Where you might be able to use the "reasonable" parts of Facebook or Google, once you start to think about a core element of a narrative as being in-geunine or compromised, that can undermine the other elements of the story.
Especially in this golden age of game development, I think there are many other alternatives to Blizzard's games that allow people to think less and escape more.
I just don’t believe that’s how the vast majority of people live their lives. OP did what they did because the status quo made them uncomfortable. People don’t have to be soldiers in a mythical cultural war, sometimes they’re just people. Whenever anyone invokes “virtual signalling” I think they’re inadvertently explaining a lot more of their own world view than they are anyone else’s.
This is because the people who use the term 'virtue signalling' consider morality to be transactional and cannot comprehend the idea that someone might actually be virtuous or have moral standards beyond which they will not tread. The term itself has now become its own 'virtue signal' to people who hold a particular viewpoint.
There was a time when one had to actually do things to be virtuous.
Sometimes people just want to share their opinions, and they actually feel those feelings. Sometimes those feelings are about ethical issues.
In other words, people don't seem to be saying they shouldn't have shared their feelings, but when they did they should have been ready to receive the criticism especially on logical results of their reasoning.
Not using products you've already purchased and enjoyed is most likely not an act of virtue, it probably changes nothing materially in the world to make it a better place. However, it is a display of purity in protest, which might inspire others to take action to the extent they are impressed by it, but it mostly feels egosyntonic for the person who does this demonstration.
Hence the criticism of virtue signaling; it is not the virtue bit, it is the signaling bit, divorced from the essence of being virtuous.
So IMHO games are a really good example - buying and playing games is a rational allocation of time and money if and only if the outcome (or, to be accurate, the sum of outcomes over long term) of playing games is more fulfilling than the alternatives; and it seems quite plausible that the enjoyment gaining from playing games may be very different for two completely rational actors and thus even from a completely rational standpoint they should make different decisions on whether playing games is a waste of time and money or a great use of them.
No rational argument can change the original non-rational utility function. And no, there's no "virtue signalling" involved.
Like there’s an evil genius(es) with ulterior motives behind it all.
Could just be my cynicism though.
In a sense, I think there is. Instead of a cabal, it is just our collective intelligence getting lost in attractive pockets of irrationality.
I think virtue signaling could be as old as humans, because there are social and psychological benefits to being seen virtuous, without paying the costs of being virtuous.
The more it is demonstrated that people can get away with it, the more we are trained to consider that as an alternative, that we can get away with it too, and collectively we converge to a pit of empty appearances.
That said calling out something as virtue signaling also has failure modes; it is ultimately an accusation of duplicitousness and we can't really be sure of people's intentions. It can also have a chilling effect on genuine enactments of virtue.
The outrage generated by all the mass media is not good as far as I'm concerned and it's good to remind people of that.
Sure, if a company does something that you find reprehensible, not giving them further money (or attention) is certainly a reasonable -- and honorable! -- thing to do.
But if you've already purchased a standalone[0], non-subscription product from that company, and that company doesn't gain any benefit from your further use of that product (or lose anything from you stopping use), I feel like you're only hurting yourself if you stop using it.
I will concede that if the act of playing one of these standalone games makes you think of the bad thing the company did and makes you angry/upset, I guess it makes sense to stop playing them. But unless the bad thing they did is something personally/viscerally important to you, it feels like that's a bit of an odd trigger.
[0] If the game is multiplayer, and connects to a company-run server, I guess you could make the argument that they benefit in some way from their active-users numbers being higher. I personally don't find that argument all that compelling, but everyone can of course decide where the cutoff of benefit is for them.