Multiculturalism in World of Warcraft

Abstract

There is a scandal in Azeroth. The problem, one critic recently noted, is that racial representations in the World of Warcraft seem to be based on racist caricatures and cultural stereotypes at work in our own world. The voodoo-practicing "Barbarous and superstitious" trolls come from islands "renowned for their cruelty and dark mysticism," says the game manual.notenotenote Blizzard, World of Warcraft Game Manual (Irvine: Blizzard, 2004), 186 (hereafter cited in text).note1note They speak in a seeming African American vernacular, saying "aks" for the standard English "ask." "That explains it," concluded this commentator: "Trolls talk like black people because they're superstitious jungle savages." As he also noted, the tauren race take their reference not from the minotaurs they physically resemble, but from "Native Americans of the Mix-n-Match tribe. Environmentally conscious citizens of the plains, they live in both tipis and longhouses, and carve totem poles. And their signature greeting is 'How!'" notenotenote Matt Ruff,"Wow"note2note With their orc and undead partners, these four races of the "Horde" are rendered as the evil and uncivilized other to the good and civilized "Alliance" races, which include elves, dwarves, gnomes and (of course) humans.gloss chainGLOSSgloss Andrew Burchiel: World of Warcraft, or WoW, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), a genre of computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world. The game's community website can be found here: WoW Community Site and its wiki here: WoW Community Site As it turned out, this reading was debatable, with another commentator arguing instead that Blizzard, the creator of World of Warcraft, had taken pains to portray the races in a more complex light, with the trolls, tauren and orcs representing indigenous peoples trying to resist the encroachment of the colonizing Alliance. Superseding the good vs. evil narrative was thus a clearly multicultural and postcolonial paradigm of cultural respect, resistance, and the questioning of supposedly civilized values. "Blizzard not only acknowledges the existence of different cultures - something most fantasy games don't attempt - they treat them with respect and use them to seriously consider the embarrassing (and ongoing) exploitation, subjugation, and disrespect for indigenous people."notenotenote "Trolls and Taurens: Racist stereotypes in World of Warcraft?"(August 12, 2007)note3note That sympathetic reading also found support from the game manual, which explains that At one time in Azeroth's past, the Horde was a force of evil, and the Alliance was a bastion of good. However, in today's war-torn Azeroth, such black and white distinctions are gone. Both factions are simply fighting to preserve their way of life in the wake of the Chaos War. (14) World of Warcraft's language improbably echoes that of our world of multiculturalism: groups are "simply fighting to preserve their way of life" (14), and a player's character enters the world by first watching "a movie introducing your racial heritage" (15). Blizzard's formulations seem to follow an established vocabulary of cultural contestation, more structured by Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations than by President Bush's speeches on the war on terror.notenotenote Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).note4note But of course we should not be surprised that an online game is a site where these questions of racism, cultural stereotyping and group representation get hashed out. As Lisa Nakamura reminded us at the beginning of the twenty-first century, "The Internet is a place where race happens."notenotenote Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002), xi.note5note If Michael Omi and Howard Winant were correct in their classic 1986 study Racial Formation in the United States, that "Race will always be at the center of the American experience," we should expect to find race happening online in 2010, perhaps especially in online gaming.notenotenote Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986), 6.note6note The racial fantasies that play out online are only part of the ongoing process of what Omi and Winant termed "racial formation": gamespace, in other words, is only another social site where the expectation that race matters takes place, where race is socially constructed. And World of Warcraft promotes a particularly American racial logic to the planet: of its 11.5 million active worldwide subscribers (in December 2008), it has about one- quarter in Europe, about one-quarter in North America, and more than half in Asia.notenotenote See Press Releasenote7note. Indeed, race is a core game concept in World of Warcraft and the genre of fantasy role-playing games that it most famously represents. World of Warcraft is like an online game version of Lord of the Rings: in a fantasy world called Azeroth, a player creates a character and adventures with others in a virtual setting, fighting monsters, performing quests, and perfecting skills. Choosing a character's race is the first thing a player does: it comes before a character's profession, the mix of magic-use, physical prowess, or stealth that characterizes a style of play. In Azeroth, of course, race is not understood as socially constructed, but rather to be a biological fact. Composed of inherited, immutable, essential differences, race in Azeroth is the old-fashioned (which is to say, nineteenth and early twentieth-century) notion that the outward packaging signifies an inner reality, where the differences are. But such is only to be expected of the genre, given its genealogical descent through pencil-and-paper role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.notenotenote For an excellent account of the influence of pencil-and-paper role playing games and civilianized late nineteenth and pre-World World II wargames on World of Warcraft's development, see Henry Lowood, "'It's Not Easy Being Green': Real-time Game Performance in Warcraft," in Videogame, Player, Text, ed. Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzwynska (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 83-100.note8note Indeed, what's even more like Lord of the Rings online or Dungeons and Dragons online than World of Warcraft is Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online, less-popular but similarly-premised massively multiplayer online role playing games based on Tolkien's oeuvre. Tolkien imagined his races as fundamentally and intrinsically different. The dwarves are strong and hardy, making them particularly tough fighters; the hobbits are small, quiet and stealthy, making them particularly good thieves; the elves are wise and agile, making them particularly good with magic or bow; and so on. Some critics see Tolkien's work as intrinsically racist for these and other reasons, while others defend him from such charges.notenotenote For examples of critics, see, Niels Werber, "Geo- and Biopolitics of Middle-earth: a German Reading of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings," New Literary History 36 (2005): 227-46; and Sue Kim, "Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Films," Modern Fiction Studies 50:4 (Winter 2004): 875-907. For contrasting views, see Brian McFadden, "Fear of Difference, Fear of Death: the Sigelwara, Tokien's Swertings, and Racial Difference," in Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 155-69; Jane Chance, "Tolkien and the Other: Race and Gender in Middle-Earth," in Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 171-86; and Anderson Rearick, "Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc? The Dark Face of Racism in Tolkien's World," Modern Fiction Studies 50:4 (Winter 2004), 862-74.note9note But my point is not so much that Tolkien was or was not racist; it is rather that race remained a powerful idea and conceptual category in his fantasy world, the world from which fantasy role playing games descended. Thus, as Niels Werber suggests in New Literary History, through reading Tolkien's novels, seeing the movies, or playing computer games like "The Battle for Middle-earth" (EA Games, 2004), one is introduced into a certain bio- and geopolitical knowledge: first of all, races are different not only in terms of skin color or height, but in moral worth, refinement, wisdom, and political integrity. The races are either hereditarily good and wise like Elves or genetically evil and dumb like Orcs, and therefore they make "natural-born" enemies. The absolute and insurmountable hate between Elves and Orcs is not outlined as a consequence of political decision-making, but as a result of their opposing DNA sequences. To pass off contingent, historical, and changeable political differences as "natural" or "given" oppositions is paradigmatic in discourses of social Darwinism since the mid- nineteenth century.notenotenote Niels Werber, "Geo- and Biopolitics of Middle-earth: a German Reading of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings," New Literary History 36 (2005): 227-28.note10note This is the generic legacy of the fantasy tradition in which Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft and many other games take place. The games encode this logic of racial difference, a logic that players rehearse during play, learning and nurturing the expectation that phenotype signals crucial inner differences. Thus, one commentator uneasily reflected about playing Lord of the Rings Online, "In the real world, defining someone by his or her race is considered a classically illiberal act. But in games, racism - making snap judgments about someone based solely on their skin and e