Until recently, Twitch’s “blind playthrough” tag was used to refer to content in which players try out a game they’ve no familiarity with. However, following community feedback, the streaming platform is now removing that tag and recommending alternatives in order to be more “inclusive”.
As spotted by PC Gamer, Erin Wayne, Twitch’s director of community and creator marketing, tweeted, “Happy to see Twitch has listened to everyone who shared feedback and removed the “Blind Playthrough” tag to encourage more inclusive language for our community.” In the tweet, she also recommended the term “First Playthrough” or a combination of it and “No Spoilers” as alternatives.
When asked by a Twitter user why the term “blind playthrough” was an issue, Wayne highlighted a tweet made by AbleGamers COO Stephen Spohn. In that tweet, which was part of a thread on ableist language, Spohn said that the term could be replaced by others like "No spoilers playthrough", "Undiscovered", or "first". “A blind playthrough would be to turn your monitor off, and that's not what most mean,” he added.
Spohn also said in that thread that “using disability terms as an alternate word for a negative situation or feeling is common in today's language”. “But just as we stopped saying gay to mean bad, we can stop saying these words too,” he wrote. “Think about the words you choose.”
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