Okay well multiple issues here.
I rarely comment on the podcast, but I figured a few things needed to be said.
For one, I think the actual issues involved in the whole Blizzcon speech are being sidestepped. What is going on here is that Blizzard has created a competitive game, and shows outright favortism to one side over the other. This has been a known factor for a very, very, long time, with the guys at "Penny Arcade" even calling rolling Alliance one of the biggest gips in gaming in their strip at one point, and so called "Alliance Syndrome" becoming synonymous with horrible game balance in a compeititve game due to developer favortism both in the design, and the way the game is administrated. Without focusing on specific issues (which I could go on about at length), I will say that Blizzard has created an enviroment of institutionalized bullying, and encouraged it, it's no surprise that this spilled over into the internet at large, and then into real life. Blizzard's spokespeople taking this attitude is only a slight elevation of their normal behavior, with someone verbalizing the attitude the company has been showing towards the game since day #1. You can't seriously discuss what happened here, without looking at the overall situation (and that would ger very long, both in a serious podcast on the subject, and in making this long post even longer).
When it comes to Batman, to be honest I expect criminals to use rude slurs. It's ridiculous for anyone to think that hardened inmates and violent mental patients would take the time to be politically correct. The very fact that we have discussions about the slurs being used and who they might be targeting shows that political correctness has gone too far.
As far as Batman fighting random crime goes, understand the enviroment and the locaton. On top of that ALSO understand that if someone actually DID make a game like that anyone who is going to get upset about insensitivity towards women here, is so politically correct that they would freak out if we actually saw Batman engaging in vigilante activity as per the comics. Guaranteed some politically correct sorts would notice that Batman is a billionaire philanthropist who makes the city a better place by basically going into the ghettos and beating the living hell out of people. Granted in the overall scheme of things there is much more to him than that, but at it's core this is what Batman's approach to fighting crime randomly involves. Batman literally heads for the bad section of town, hides on a rooftop or whatever, waits for some gang members with their flags and colors to come by, or someone to step out of line, and then BAM he comes out of nowhere and beats the holy hell out of them. This is to say nothing about his attitudes about wiretapping and surveillance and whatever. Guaranteed people would be screaming about how horrible this is because it's an insensitive take on "complicated issues"... even before you get into the ethnicity of the the thing.
That's right, ethnicity. See, in an attempt to be fairly realistic Batman's Gotham is largely ruled by ethnic gangs. We have Italians and Greeks running the mob (and look at the horrible reactions shows like "The Sopranos" for this... OMG The Mob is Italian, stop the presses!), and we have Chinese, Latinos, and Blacks all running their own gangs like the "Burnley Street Massive" and so on. Brought out as a video game, the random crime fighting is going to doubtlessly involve painfully stupid political correctness (white members of what are supposed to be black gangs) and even then get complaints like "Resident Evil 5". I honestly think this would be the beginning of a timer before we saw someone commenting on how if your a minority your a random criminal, if your a white guy your a
super villain or get a chance to henchman for one. The fact that Ethnic gangs are pretty
much how reality is, and how Batman has tried to reflect this, and other such common sense probably won't matter if a big-budget video game with the resulting exposure gives politically correct types a chance to whine their way into five minutes of fame. The problem of course compounded by the simple fact that the white/aryan type ethnic gangs would probably be omitted for reasons of the same political correctness to begin with. You can get away with a black gangsta being racist towards whites as a bad guy, but you bring in bad guys who are white and racist towards minorities the same way, that's a no-no. If people are complaining about some of the things said about Catwoman, wait until Gotham's Aryans start throwing the N-word and other racial slurs around regularly... heck simply not being able to do it right (he's a POLITE Neo-Nazi) is enough reason in of itself to not put in such gangs for balance, albiet they have a limited prescence in Gotham to begin with, while they have appeared, the comics themselves have generally not wanted to go there.
I'm just saying, I think there are good reasons why we've seen the recent Batman games taking place in prison-type enviroments, as opposed to a free-roam enviroment set out in Gotham itself. Batman's approach/style (not just personally, but the harder/slightly more realistic presentation of crime in his titles) is going to raise a lot more eyebrows than when it was done with Spider-Man or Superman. Among other things Spider-Man or Superman are basically nice guys, Batman might be a goodguy overall but he's not a NICE guy and even if
he shares a world with Superman, he occupies a far more gritty portion of their shared reality.
It might occur to some people that games like "Grand Theft Auto" and "Saint's Row" involve ethnic gangs and random battles with them as well, but understand that those games have been magnets for contreversy to begin with, both in how they present crime, and the general levels of violence in the content to begin with. The racial issues have kind of been sidestepped for the most part because the politically correct crowd can find so many more general aspects to complain about. "Protect The Children" in a general sense gets more attention than an outcry against racism, and these guys pick their issues and approach for maximum impact, because it's about the attention, not the issues.
