Xbox Live asks gay, bi, curious, allows sexual orientation on profiles

Today, a letter from Marc Whitten changes the way Xbox Live users identify themselves.

Once a way to get yourself quickly banned, now users can input there, race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation on their Xbox Live profiles.

This is a huge turnaround in policy and is a great identifier on Microsoft’s policy. It’s good to see some common sense and actual human sensitivity brought into a community that’s over 23 million people strong. If you want that community to grow, you don’t alienate people, you embrace them.

Marc summarizes things in the following way “Under our previous policy, some of these expressions of self identification were not allowed in Gamertags or profiles to prevent the use of these terms as insults or slurs. However we have since heard feedback from our customers that while the spirit of this approach was genuine, it inadvertently excluded a part of our Xbox LIVE community.  This update also comes hand-in-hand with increased stringency and enforcement to prevent the misuse of these terms.”
That last line is important. Anytime you try to do something nice, people will undoubtedly abuse it. It’s good to see MS not turn a blind eye to the douche-bags of the Internet.

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