I buy your claim that high fantasy wants to use “race” as a metaphor for certain ideas or characteristics that may not sync perfectly with real-world conceptions of “race.” Actually, that notion explains really well why the the Alliance races and the Blood Elves represent various stereotypes of whiteness (which I talk about it in more detail in the conclusion of my “Representations” chapter). About the Humans, however, I would say that it’s not how white they are compared to the other races that’s important; it’s that such an obviously representationally white race gets the name Human. And I’m not saying that there’s racism in the racials; I’m saying there’s racial essentialism there – a particular way of defining “race,” featured in WoW and other high fantasy texts, that has historically enabled all kinds of racism.

I think you’re getting at the central conundrum of MMOs, warfare, and identity: the player has to have some enemy to identify himself against, so the game can either present NPC monsters that are threats to all players, or divide its players somehow so they can fight each other. WoW does both; but in the case of player division, Blizzard has chosen to use racism (and nationalism) as the skins for that division, the cultural templates that make sense of it for us. And of course, those templates are standard parts of the larger genre template of high fantasy.

What you’ve got me wondering about is whether there could be a fantasy MMO that represented identity and conflict another way. Or an SF MMO. Or an MMO in any setting. Or I guess, I’m not wondering whether such a game could exist, but what it would look like.

I almost wrote a longish rant about paladin identities and stereotypes in the game, but I deleted it because it felt a bit pointless. So I’ll try with another angle – did you read any of the Warcraft books?

In the game, equal opportunity is needed to keep it balanced, but the lore itself (and the books are considered canonical) has no such restrictions.

Straight from the horse’s mouth, “Blood and Honor” (written by Metzen himself) was truly a truly horrific read for me. Ignoring how badly it was written overall for a moment, consider that the hero is cast out of the Order of the Silver Hand and cut of from the Light because he dares to consider not exterminating a lone old orc on sight.

In “Day of the Dragon”, Rhonin seems to barely avoid inquisition by those pesky paladins again (my favorite class to play, but…) just because he’s a mage. The hot nelf huntress saves the day multiple times just because she’s hot (and of course, the protagonist gets her in the end).

“Lord of the Clans” describes Thrall’s rise from a slave to warchief, so it shows orc abuse aplenty, but the treatment of women shown in that book is almost as bad.

“The Last Guardian” is a bit better – what with the tolerance of mages (both Medvih and the protagonist), Garona the half-orc, etc. Except it turns out it would have been better not to trust either of them (Medvih opens the portal to Draenor, Garona murders the king). So it’s a bit strange how tolerance backfires even there…

I haven’t read the “War of the Ancients”, but I imagine the old world it shows is not much better.

The fact is, the whole world-building in WoW and around it is based on xenophobic premises – humans show (as you pointed out) medieval levels of ignorance and intolerance, and other “races” / backgrounds are not much better.

If the world was full of enlightened, tolerant, open-minded friendly people – it would look significantly different, and would be called… PeaceCraft? But it’s full of prejudice and xenophobia of any kind you care to name. Or, it’s shown as such, because all the friendly, trusting, tolerant people have been exterminated in wars past and present.

And if a certain level of tolerance develops (Jaina and Thrall, Garona and the king, …), things are considered “boring”. If characters have been shown as tolerant, then external “evil influences” (demons, old gods, …) are used to destroy it. Or new intolerant characters are brought in (as seen recently with Garrosh and his counterpart) and given the spotlight – exactly because the world “needs” to be in the state of constant warfare. Not to get to philosophical, but there’s only so much evil you can attribute to external influences – in the end you need evil or considered-evil groups, organizations, “races”… And players can participate in those.

Others have said it better in recent and old gender discussions, but the status of women in the game is not much better than what you have shown here. Obvious by looking at female NPCs and male heroes with named fathers and side-lined mothers. Sometimes I think the only reason female PCs are tolerated is because of their powers – and really, isn’t it true for all PCs? Maybe NPCs are friendly to us because we’re soldiers fighting for them (i.e. we’re useful), and if we were playing non-combat roles, we would see how the society really functions?

My impression is that the average inhabitant of Azeroth is prejudiced against other “races”, systems of belief, genders – you name it. A thin layer of political correctness is added by the game mechanics regarding balance, and certain saccharine moments in the books/lore.

If we consider Tolkienesque high fantasy to be an escape from confusing modern progress into simpler “golden ages” of old (which were simpler in large part because… women, immigrants, atheists etc. “knew their place” or were insignificant), Warcraft is simply playing genre cards.

But even if it was an SF game set in a highly advanced future, where gender/species/belief equality has reached asymptotic levels – there would still be enemies / “the others”, if there was combat in the game. And if there was PvP combat, you can bet that the lore/game system would be set up to lead players down the path of conflict. Even if the lore shows <somebody else> to be worth respecting and looking up to, what does it matter if players can kill them and spit on their corpse? And if they can’t, what gameplay choices are they given?

I didn’t set out to write an essay or stop at this particular conclusion, but apparently I’m setting out to write a non-combat cooperative game

Baldur’s Gate was never a MMORPG. Just sayin’.

Until I started PvP. Then I got jealous of the Horde for being so much better, and so when my best friend and brother switched factions to join some server first guild, I went with them and changed from an NE to an Orc. I dig him – he’s all tough and shit – and the change of scenery. The people seem the same, just going about their WoW lives. We win more at PvP, I guess, but not by as much as I thought it would be. Though there does seem to be more confidence, come to think of it. So my main is Horde but my alts are still Alliance. ($30 bucks a pop – damn, Blizz.) It’s just as well – I dunno if I’ll like Goblins or Worgen more when Cataclysm comes out. And I’d love to hear your take on the Trolls, as I think they’re the most problematic of the game’s races.

Regarding your comment about “African American Language” vs. “African American Vernacular English,” I meant no offense. But your comment made me wonder if I’d been lazy with my terms, which are important, and rightfully so. AAL was the term used by my grad professors in rhetoric and composition at Washington State, and my understanding was that it was a more inclusive and up-to-date term than AAVE. This is born out in a definition by Geneva Smitherman:

African American Language (AAL) is characterized not only by patterns of grammar and pronunciation, but also by distinctive words and styles of speaking shared by African Americans from all walks of life. Further, many of AAL’s words and phrases have crossed over into mainstream use and enrich the language of all Americans.

So AAL exists, in the lexicon of Afican American Studies scholars. Now, you could argue that, given this definition, I was using the term AAL incorrectly in my work here, as I am looking solely at grammar, and not “distinctive words and styles of speaking,” in the way Smitherman eloquently goes on to define it. I was pretty much doing some light linguistics. So I wanted to be right.

I did some digging today and found that some linguists, like H. Samy Alim, use “African American Language” but acknowledge its other associated, if not equal, names in the common parlance: “Ebonics,” “Black English,” “African American English,” and “African American Vernacular English.” But most linguists do define each of these terms a little differently. The clearest explanation I found was from Peter L. Patrick:

One reason linguists don’t use the term “Ebonics” very happily is that it is very vague, and so such questions are hard to answer. We generally use the term “African American Vernacular English”, or AAVE, instead to mean the kinds of speech characteristically spoken by working-class U.S. African Americans, within their community, at occasions calling for intimacy or informality.

Linguists know very well that there are African Americans who cannot speak this dialect with native fluency; that there are some non-African Americans who can (though very few); and that almost all African Americans have some command of other forms of English, including Standard American English. In fact, there are characteristically African American ways of speaking the latter – which means there is a Standard African American English, too. A very large number of African American adults are perfectly at home with both AAVE and Standard American English, and are skilled at using each in the appropriate circumstances.

It seems sensible, then, to speak of a generalized family of dialects – AAE, or African American English – which includes all the various ways of speaking characteristic of African Americans: standard and vernacular, working- and middle-class, in settings formal and professional or informal and intimate. It is sensible, also, to use the term AAVE for a particular branch of AAE. When people say “Ebonics,” they often refer to this system, which linguists have studied the most.

These seem like solid and well-thought-out distinctions, and they would say that I’m definitely talking about AAVE, not AAL. So I’ve changed the terminology in the chapter.

Thanks for your perceptive correction on my terms. You were right: the sources were out there.

Oh, and: The Man did in fact come from Stormwind.

Being a minority gamer, I have a really complicated love/hate relationship going on with race in WoW. Personally one of the reasons I prefer playing Horde is because the Alliance, barring Night Elves and Draenei, seems like the Boring White Guy Faction. Human architecture is bland assed stereotypical medieval Euro-based fantasy right out of the tired Tolkien model. Their religion, despite the actual Taoist/Zen trappings of the philosophy, is portrayed as the same kind of pseudo-Catholic Church common in Western fantasy. The Alliance has a clear numerical majority over the Horde in the lore sources. If this universe had a “The Man”, he’d be human and probably living in Stormwind. I honestly believe this is why Alliance players generally don’t feel the same kind of pride in their faction (catchy slogans, etc) as the Horde does. It’d be like “White Pride” or “Straight Pride” or “Christian Pride”.

The Horde, OTOH, are the minority, they’re the downtrodden outcasts that have banded together to survive. You have the indigenous folks, folks that lost their culture and are struggling to find it again, folks that fled persecution, etc. Yes this frequently descends into problematic Noble Savagery, particularly with the Orcs and Tauren, but still. The collection of Horde races is very much coded as the Other and as a quad minority (black, female, queer and non-Judeo Christian) that is something I definitely relate to. That story speaks to me even though it has issues (I won’t get into my love/hate with the Trolls, that could be a whole comment by itself).

On a pure gameplay level, I do find it sad that no matter what race it is, 99% of players will by default choose the lightest, most Caucasian-looking skintone possible for that race. It’s especially sad to me considering how ugly the human models are, imo the only way they begin to look decent is if you give them dark skin and hair. You can play this game for months and months and never come across a dark-skinned human toon, despite a handful of dark-skinned human NPCs. Even the Night Elves and the Draenei, who are generally *purple*, get this sort of thing. Tauren also, even though that’s changed somewhat thanks to the new Druid models’ color being tied to skintone. White is still the default and what is considered desirable even in a universe with goat-legged aliens and elves that turn into cats and bears.

“Race” in the fantasy sense is a metaphor. Tolkein’s Elves don’t represent a particular ethnic group (or even borrow much imagery from one) they represent a particular set of ideas (wonder, magic, mystery). Tolkein’s races of *men* are a different matter, but his non-human races are designed to represent concepts (wonder, wisdom, evil, rural England) not real life ethnic groups.

Looking at WoW as a more specific example, I don’t think it’s true that the Humans code “white” more consistently than (most) of the other Alliance races (which isn’t the same as saying I don’t think Humans code as white, they clearly do, but so do Gnomes, Dwarves, and for that matter Forsaken and Blood Elves). I’m not sure it’s useful to identify “racism” in the fact that Dwarves are good at finding treasure and shooting guns, while Draenai have an Aura of Heroism and Humans are good at Diplomacy, because within the Alliance “race” is essentially a code for “what your character is interested in and good at”.

Essentially “race” in fantasy often means “archetype” – are you a bold warrior (Orc), creepy and sinister (Forsaken), proud and vain (Blood Elf), quirky and into gadgets (Gnome) or noble and in tune with nature (Tauren). The problem comes with the way some (but not all) of the “archetypes” presented by WoW races overlap with *stereotypes* of real world races. I don’t think it’s racist to have a type of player character which is characterized by “savagery and dark mysticism” – what’s racist is the fact that the “savagery and dark mysticism” is *specifically* coded as African/Caribbean.

Does that make sense?

1. I hadn’t thought about the interbreeding thing with WoW. You’re right – it’s there in the lore, but not very much. (WoWWiki’s entry on Half-Elves suggests that they’re all over Stormwind, but I never noticed.) Thing is, the ability for two organisms to reproduce doesn’t necessarily make them a species. According to Wikipedia, that’s no more than a working definition amongst scientists. There are lots of organisms that don’t fit the definition for one reason or another – some members of different species are able to interbreed, while some members of the same species reproduce asexually. I’d still be inclined to say that, say, the Gnomes and the Draenei, who not only have drastically different bodies but in fact come from different planets, are different species. But actually, whether they are or not isn’t really my point. My equation, race=species, is an imprecise way of summarizing my observation about game’s use of the concept of race. By having characters with appearances and abilities that are firmly linked to something it calls “race,” WoW posits that race is a biological concept – maybe not the same as species, but like it. Maybe race=subspecies?

2. Definitely! In fact, I usually call my own game alter-egos “characters.” The delineation between “avatar” and “character” comes from a delineation between “game” and “story,” the idea being that a game is a sequence of events that its participants enact in the present tense, and a story is a sequence of past events that its participants are recounting. But then of course videogames contain both games and stories, and a lot of the actions we take in them are performances of characters in those stories, so it’s all kind of muddy. So it goes with a new medium – we’re using terms from older media to describe new-media features that are, well, new.

3. My readings of the Horde females aren’t personal judgments of their attractiveness, though I find it interesting that there’s debate about that. (I hadn’t heard about the one “pretty” Troll face, actually.) I’m just saying that the Horde females (except the BEs) are purposely designed to fail our society’s mainstream definitions of beauty and femininity, and that we’re supposed to notice it. (Conversely, how many of the male characters’ /silly jokes refer to their attractiveness, or to their appearance at all?)

4. They both look awesome! It’s really interesting, too, that the Alliance will get a scary monster race to choose from. It reminds me of how the Horde got one pretty race with the Blood Elves. Flipside of the same coin, maybe.

Thanks again for reading, and please do pass this along. And I’d love to hear more about how you feel about your own avatars – the game “text” offers us a set of meanings, but we always bring our own meanings in too.