Virtual world race war

From John Dowdell, I found a terrific article on race-relations in the massively-multiplayer online game Lineage. Apparently Chinese gamers like to play on South Korean servers because they can simultaneously have fun and make money from selling rare items to the South Koreans. However, they lack basic game etiquette and don’t speak Korean – so Korean players have organized to track them down and kill them.

Very interesting, how a complaint about a behavior (in this case, greed-motivated rudeness) gets associated with a particular group and then transforms into a bias against an ethnicity. But this has already been extensively discussed elsewhere, and has been happening offline for a very long time. What hasn’t been discussed is how much the success of World of Warcraft depends on its own ‘fantasy’ race war, and whether that has any implications for its players.

Some background (for people who tend to ignore this sort of thing: the World of Warcraft world is divided into two factions, Horde and Alliance, consisting of four races each. The Horde has the Undead, Orc, Troll, and Tauren races, while the Alliance has Humans, Dwarfs, Night Elves, and Gnomes. Players can play on either side. However, players on the Alliance side can’t communicate with players on the Horde side in any way, and on player-vs-player servers, they are able to kill each other on sight. It’s a race war, plain and simple – and based on the chat on my server both sides get rather into it. (As an undead my main WoW character technically hates everything living – but she particularly dislikes gnomes.) The game mechanics encourage this – even on the less conflict-ridden player-vs-environment servers, hefty rewards are available for being an efficient killer of the other side.

I suspect this racially-based Horde vs. Alliance conflict is a large part of World of Warcraft’s success. I know I enjoy punting a gnome or two around the battleground. But it does raise some questions – are enthusiastic participants in a virtual race war more or less likely to have prejudices in real life? Do one’s pre-existing petty hatreds get reinforced by stabbing other races in the back, or does kill-collecting serve as a type of catharsis? Should we be at all surprised when players bring their own outer-world prejudices into the game, given the subject material?

I’ve got no good answers, just the standard anecdotes about comments in the chat. But I wonder just how far one could take the in-game race war motif before Blizzard – World of Warcraft’s publisher – became uncomfortable. If I were to create an undead character on a role-playing player-vs-player server and create a guild explicitly dedicated to exterminating humans, would Blizzard step in? What if I were to use language with real-world racist parallels? “There is no danger that anti-humanism will disappear, for it is the humans themselves that fan its flames with their corrupt and degenerate behavior…” I don’t think that’s outside ‘the spirit of the game,’ if I’m understanding the backstory correctly, but I strongly doubt it’d be tolerated. There’s a sociology thesis in here somewhere…