I fell from sleep when the car stopped, cringing at the fluorescent glare of gas station floodlights. Acrid tobacco smoke curled like cream through a dark brew of muttered conversation. The windows were down, and even at four in the morning the South Texas air weighed warm and damp on our shoulders. The car emptied, three grown men unfolding themselves from the bench seat in the back. I’d had the foresight to call shotgun back in Houston. A battered passenger van sat alongside us at the pump; a dozen migrant laborers milled about, crunching on bags of Doritos, their Spanish soft like they feared waking the sun.
Ten hours and a hundred dollars in bribes later, across the Rio Grande and past the seething, desperate border town of Reynosa, Eric’s dusty red station wagon soldiered along in the 115 degree Fahrenheit air. Shrubs, grasses, and stunted trees hugged the ground around us—all shockingly green for a murderous Mexican August. The air conditioner roared against the heat with all the success of men cursing God. Heat had long since pacified the conversation when the car swerved dramatically to the right. We flailed about and were pulled left again, correcting back to the center of the road as Eric cut loose with a stream of incredulous profanity. “The dogs,” he bellowed when at last his brain made sense of things. “Dogs in the road!” And suddenly we were turning around, pulling a U-turn on the two-lane highway.
“Horns?” asked Tim from the front, too distressed to recall Eric’s real name, instead abridging his gaming handle, “Hornsbuck.”
“Look at this!” Eric insisted as we roared back to the spot. The hazard came into view: three dogs in the center of the highway. The one with the white-blond coat was the biggest. She lay dead in the road, the victim of an earlier passing motorist. The others had discovered the body and were attempting to mate with it. The little black one had climbed her corpse and now worked furiously at its summit. The ragged brown mutt sat patiently in the median, waiting his turn. The asphalt’s heat rose around them in shimmering waves. The regal iron-gray ladies of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains sat in quiet judgment. In the car, the odor of weed resin mingled with hours-old sweat. We turned around once more on a dusty service road, and as we continued on our original course we got a third and final look. Brett insisted the little black dog was “lined up wrong”; the humping was just a display. I’ve chosen to believe him.
Our house outside Cadereyta was a pastoral dream of white stucco and cerulean tile inlay. A fountain loomed by the front door, dry and spattered with road dust. Storm clouds had begun to churn in the distance. Our hosts came out, and we exchanged greetings in the withering heat. They introduced themselves with the names we knew, names attached to a virtual world. This man was Modu; that one Plastico. We responded in kind, discarding the given names we’d used in the car. It was instantly comfortable; they said there would be a mariachi band at dinner. When your World of Warcraft guild holds a retreat in Mexico, video games will not be the first priority.
Inside the ranch house waited a dozen young men. Many appeared to be Mexican and spoke Spanish, while others had the lighter pigmentation and uprooted bearing of foreigners. Some assembled a battery of computers against the wall while others napped on a flotilla of mattresses arrayed across the white tile floor. We’d never met, but we knew each other well. Plastico sidled up, put his arm around my shoulders, and pressed a cold glass bottle into my hand: Tecate, a Monterrey-brewed beer I’d only ever seen in cans. He clapped me on the back and wandered off—the only acknowledgment I’d see that week of the burden we shared. Leadership was a mantle he wore unconsciously, almost obliviously, and one I’d taken up only recently and only in desperation.
I sucked down my beer and luxuriated in the air-conditioning. A very thin man from Singapore (“by way of Malaysia,” he explained, in a prim accent, “before it went to the fucking dogs”) introduced himself as Malicia. A warlock: one of our best, meticulous in his preparation, unforgiving of sloppy play. We shook hands, and his was clammy with sweat—he’d overdressed for the heat in a long-sleeved white linen shirt and black slacks, and flowing strands of black hair clung to his cheeks. A shock of dyed magenta hair ran tastefully over his scalp. Not wanting to refer to this man by his female in-game handle for the next week, I asked his real name. He wouldn’t tell me. Once, months before in the heat of battle, I had said some intemperate things to Malicia. He seemed disinclined to forget them.
Stepping out the back door, I took in the expansive coral-painted deck. There was a pool, its bottom striated with dark blue tiles matching the house’s facade. Leaning against a tree in the backyard, admiring the wide landscape swollen green by recent rains, I felt a hard wind pull. A pair of threadbare ranch dogs sprinted past, one nipping at the other’s flanks. The clouds had descended; tall trees thrashed in the gale. I didn’t know the time of day. A peal of thunder set the dogs to yelping. The smell of rain weighted the air and I stumbled inside, where my fellow gringos had busied themselves with what seemed like miles of Ethernet cable. Wire cutters in hand, they snipped and stripped and threaded the copper entrails into square plastic heads. Tim did his best to converse in Spanish with Plastico, who would occasionally break the conversation to bellow good-natured abuse at us.
“’Ey, Ghando!”—he addressed me as my avatar. “I hear you so long, and I imagine your ugly face, and now I am in love,” the last word pronounced lub. He was a small man, short and sporting a nascent gut, but his voice boomed nonetheless, the way I’d grown accustomed to hearing through my computer’s headset. I had always assumed he kept the microphone too near his mouth. Clearly I was wrong.
“Plas, I can’t believe how short you are,” I replied. The cheapest shot, the quickest, the lowest-hanging fruit.
Plastico threw back his head for a belly laugh. “Ghando, I punch you in the head.” Our juvenile exchange was utterly in character. The man was a constant joker and hated nothing more than discord, ill feeling, or unpleasantness—feelings he derisively lumped together with the catchall term “drama.” It was therefore crucially important to him that everyone had as much fun as possible at all times. He was the life of the party, his magnetic online charisma translating perfectly to this tile-floored, air-conditioned room in the mountains of Nuevo Leon. He pushed more Tecates into our hands. Sleep-deprived and dehydrated as I was, the room quickly grew fuzzy. The floor mattresses beckoned me. I felt like they might honestly save my life.
Memo woke me up: a snaggletoothed young man with a long, thin face and wide white eyes. “Time to eat, pendejo.” Memo was a priest, a fellow healer and one of the guild’s junior officers. I stumbled after him toward the patio, peeling my eyelids back with fingertips, letting them snap back to moisten my sandpaper contacts. The rain had come and gone, though giants stirred above us. Tables were set, with all the deck illuminated and coals smoldering in an enormous grill. The iron was raised with a hand crank; Plastico held half an onion in each hand, waxing designs on the surface that quickly hissed to fragrant steam. My guild scattered themselves between tables adorned with bottles of tequila and more Tecate.
“Drinking Tecate is a must,” Plastico explained, quoting the guild’s official theme song. While some guilds might play their favorites over private voice chat servers (where we could don headsets and banter out loud like friends in a bar) we had our own original track, written by a hip-hop producer in Los Angeles who in a past life had pulled duty as a backup dancer for Vanilla Ice. Watch music videos from the old days and you’ll see him. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, the “Go Ninja Go” sequence: he’s there, lean and young in parachute pants with a killer faded flattop. Kojak, as we called him, had a wife and kids keeping him rooted at home and away from Mexico. Into my brain popped a question about the week’s raiding schedule1—if we had computers set up, after all, might we be able to clear some dungeons? This was how I’d started thinking in the months since taking charge. The game always ran in the background, persistent in my brain the way it was on countless server farms, seeking the sharpest edge or the freshest goal. But Plastico’s happy glow kept me silent. He wouldn’t countenance shoptalk, not with tortillas to layer like fish scales over the raging grill.
The guild’s founder—a wealthy electronics retailer with a round belly, scruffy beard, and easy smile who’d fronted the cash for this adventure despite rarely having time to play the game anymore—stood up at the start of dinner. Slipo was more than our patron for the week; he was the patron, the guild’s spiritual father, held in a kind of reverence that extended beyond the game. His ex-wife, still a close friend and the guild’s honorary mother, sat nearby with their beautiful children. Though Slipo spoke some English, he insisted on Memo translating for him. A man in his position does not stand before guests in his own homeland to struggle with a foreign tongue. He thanked us for being there, for traveling so far as many had. He bade us eat and drink, he introduced the band, and then he sat. With the first round of quesadillas in my stomach, I felt sturdy enough to sip Tecate with lime. It suddenly seemed very natural, being in this place with these people. Shared time and sacrifices had brought us here, and I decided I wanted to stay. Not just at the ranch house—everything already booked and planned—but in this guild, with these people, with their warmth and what we’d built together. I’d given so much already, holding things together when any sensible person would have walked away and done something easier. Did I not own this thing, whatever it was, as much as anyone?
The music kicked up. It played soothing and busy, the singer’s ululations and the sharp slaps of his palm on his guitar binding up time like leaves of paper. For the first time in my life I understood why people enjoy mariachi music. Eric threw Plastico in the pool about an hour later; Brett, short and round and red as a tomato with liquor’s flush, declared he would fight anyone who tried the same on him. Gnats cavorted overhead through the beams of buzzing electrical lamps. The band played with barely a breath between songs, but never for a moment did they rush.
One doesn’t find oneself attending a weeklong World of Warcraft party on a lark. It takes a long time to plumb that particular depth; one makes a great many choices on the way. Personally, I never planned to play WoW. It wasn’t my type of game, I declared, having never played EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot or any of WoW’s other competitors in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) genre.
“But Tony,” Chris pressed his case across the table at a Friendly’s diner in Waltham, Massachusetts, eighteen months prior to my Mexican excursion. “It’s going to be really great. Noah and I are playing with some guys I met playing StarCraft. The game world is huge, like the size of a real continent. There’s all these classes, with dungeons and other people to fight against. You won’t have to play alone. We’ll own noobs together! I know how you feel about noobs.” I don’t wish to belabor this common Internet jargon; suffice it to say that anyone less skilled than the speaker at a given video game is a noob, and to beat a noob is to own him.
It was Thanksgiving, and I’d come back east for the long weekend. The nation had just seen fit to reelect George W. Bush and I was visiting my New England hometown, seeing friends before returning to college in California. In the end, those friends convinced me to play WoW. We went to a local mall together to pick up our copies, forging between us a Musketeerish brotherhood. We approached the game, even then, as something inherently dangerous. Like if we didn’t cling together we’d be washed away by the vastness we knew awaited us in WoW’s virtual world, or possibly addicted to software as mind-warpingly powerful as any drug. These seemed like real possibilities.
By the time I booked my trip to Mexico I was the last one standing—the last still playing. That night at Friendly’s was long gone by then, buried under a new history I’d made for myself, so distant it may as well have happened to someone else. I had new friends. I lived a different life, into which the Cadereyta convention became an initiation. This trip was my personal portal—a threshold crossed from one world into another.
The metaphor ran deeper still; just days before setting out for Mexico, I’d walked in my graduation from Stanford University. Tom Brokaw spoke, for some reason. His trademark nasal thrum fused with the suffocating Palo Alto heat, and it became remarkably difficult to stay awake. A bruising hangover didn’t help, and all I really remember was an admonition not to become overly consumed with technology. You can imagine how well this message went over with my cohort, an overwhelming number of them bound for jobs at Google and Facebook and Apple. This was 2006—just at the cusp of the mobile revolution—and more than a few of them are now millionaires. I knew I’d never join them.
School always came easy to me, and I’d chosen to direct that talent toward a degree in English with an emphasis on creative writing and a minor in astrophysics. I was then, and remain now, functionally unemployable. Still, I beat the odds and secured a position at the bottom rung of a small Bay Area film company, earning $1,000 per month before taxes. For $400 of those dollars I secured a basement room in colorful conditions of hippie squalor. I returned from Mexico and jumped right into “real life,” cutting video by day and slaying digital monsters by night. I would build a creative career alongside my online reputation as coleader of T K T, the world’s top Spanish-speaking guild. That was the life I wanted.
For years this second life ran in parallel to the first, buttressed it, stole from it, informed it, and on occasion threatened to swallow it entirely. I stood as one of millions and stood apart from those millions as one of their highest elite. I plunged down the deepest of rabbit holes, laughed and cried and triumphed and despaired, paying a fifteen-dollar subscription fee each month for the privilege. I’m ashamed of how much it mattered. I would do it all over again, and I still enjoy WoW today. I wouldn’t trade those times for the world.
And I’m not alone.
Everyone who ever entered the World of Warcraft did so on equal footing. There may have been a box or a digital download; perhaps one read, as I did, the ponderously, tantalizingly thick manual printed on glossy paper designed to resemble parchment. Once the software installed itself and your credit card information had been verified, you selected a “realm server” on which to play. The World of Warcraft is actually more than a hundred identical worlds, each separate from the others. This breaks up the titanic player population into technologically manageable chunks, keeping communities small enough to feel intimate. A player’s WoW identity is strongly linked to her realm of origin.2 Three types exist, corresponding to the game’s three major avenues of achievement: player-versus-player (PvP), player-versus-environment (PvE), and role-playing (RP). The first allows players to battle each other with few restrictions, while the latter two allow PvP combat only under special conditions. Role-playing servers observe unique rules for player interactions and are covered in detail in chapter 9. At launch, North American players could pick between forty-three PvP realms, forty-one PvE realms, and five RP realms. In practice, you played on whatever server your friends used. For me that meant Sargeras, a PvP server where Chris’s friends had already started a little social group named T K T.
Logging into a realm server for the very first time, everyone meets the same screen: a dizzying palette of choices to help you fashion yourself a character, an avatar, what some colloquially dub a “toon.” For those familiar with traditional role-playing games, the process was second nature: cycling through hair colors and goatee styles, skin tones and tattoos. But the game’s highly effective marketing campaign drew in countless new gamers—people suddenly forced to make intimidating choices of identity with very little information.
Which of the game’s two warring factions to choose, the traditional high-fantasy heroes of the Alliance or the darker, more outwardly barbaric Horde? From there, which of eight distinct classes to pick, determining the character’s abilities and basic play style? Which race of fantasy creatures to pick, knowing each race conferred certain bonuses, not knowing which was best? Some people spent hours customizing their characters, from eye color to hairstyle, and this made sense at a time when every cosmetic choice was permanent. That would change, years later, but at the time each decision felt like it had to say something about my identity. When anyone looked at my character, they’d see neither my personality nor the contents of my heart—only an anthropomorphized bull standing on two hoofed feet, great muscular neck dipping like it bore the world’s weight, yellow eyes glaring under a charcoal shock of mane. They would see the tauren shaman Ghando of the Horde—named for a friend’s Great Dane, itself named after a Norse giant. Satisfied, I clicked the fat red button marked ENTER WORLD.
Ghando appeared, as have five hundred million other WoW characters to date, in a strange and open land wearing nothing but rags. As a tauren, he arrived in the Horde territory of Mulgore, with just a crude mallet in his hand and some meager provisions in his backpack—his only wards against the world’s cruelty. Turning my new character in a circle, I spotted a fellow tauren, albeit one controlled by the game (a non-player character, or NPC). She offered me a quest: exterminate a bit of the local wildlife in exchange for a few copper coins. I accepted and surveyed my surroundings, flushed with purpose. Flat grassy plains stretched in all directions, budding groves of tall conifers in the spots where they edged up to meet the encircling mountains. Brightly painted canvas tents and mighty totem poles had been arranged around a dusty playa to form the settlement of Camp Narache. A few other tauren players ran about, bounding about with determined gaits, marked with names meaning nothing to me. Eager to connect with my friends Chris and Noah, I opened the game’s Social menu and tried to message them. Both were offline; I was struck by a sudden and very surprising sensation of loneliness, facing a world both strange and vast with no friends and barely any tools. Then again, I reasoned to myself, you’ve got this mallet, and those animals aren’t going to bludgeon themselves.
After successfully slaying several large, flightless birds, I began to grasp the game’s most basic combat mechanics. Though defeating the feeble things wasn’t much challenge, I quickly ran into a conundrum: there weren’t enough of them. Oh, at some point in the past there might have been, but at present the plains of Mulgore were dotted with avian corpses and my fellow players hunting them down as quickly as fresh prey could materialize into the game world. New “spawns” were snatched up before I could close in to malleting range, and only rarely could I score one for myself.3
What to do? I considered teaming up with one of my fellow players, allowing us to share credit for each dead bird, but decided against it for fear of rejection. This is a recurring issue in my life. The next-best option seemed to be running in circles, seeking out new birds as the game materialized them into being, using a magic spell to zap the birds from long range and claim them for myself—but the first time I did this, another player responded with a breathtaking stream of textual profanity. Though he wasn’t allowed to attack me, he clearly wanted to. In the end I wandered off to find my own section of plains on which to hunt, and completed the quest. But in just a few minutes I’d managed a serious violation of the game’s unwritten social code! I felt like a feeble waif. In video gaming culture, the adage goes, anyone who’s played the game five minutes less than you is a noob. Anyone who’s played five minutes more is a nerd loser with no life.
No single feature sucked me in during those first hours and days, but neither could I deny the game’s infectious quality. WoW has always offered players a very pleasurable loop of gameplay: you engage a monster, use various damaging spells and abilities to reduce its hit points to zero, and loot its corpse. The red health bar dwindles to empty, loot box opens and closes, and you pick the next monster. All the while colorful visual effects pop to emphasize the damaging strikes back and forth between opponents; they fit in nicely with the bright, welcoming, slightly cartoonish environment. I always appreciated that WoW never really punished me for making mistakes—even death only meant a ghostly jog from the nearest graveyard back to my body, which cast the world in soothing shades of spectral gray and offered a few moments’ reflection on what I’d done wrong. And in the cities where players gathered to chat and trade and shout the latest online meme, a social order slowly assembled itself.
The moment anyone entered the World of Warcraft, she began a performance. Until the moment she logged out, every word she uttered and every action she took reflected, in some small way, her identity. At any moment, she might be subjected to withering criticism from a crowd of total strangers. Yet the game offered few hints on navigating this constant emotional minefield—certainly not in the manual, which was long on the history of the game’s locale, the war-scarred planet of Azeroth, but short on useful social tips. Players found themselves awash in possibility but lacked the tools to successfully deal with each other. They had to carve out their own spaces, to define social norms, to communicate and enforce them.
More than a decade later, online communities and social networks are old hat. We have all become cyborgs. Facebook started as a convenient way for college students to check whether their crushes were single, but its early adopters have long since watched in mounting horror as their parents and grandparents made accounts to post old photos. We have watched countless careers implode because of tasteless Tweets. The organic process of building self-regulated and self-sustaining online communities has been reduced to flowcharts in Silicon Valley boardrooms, though anyone who can actually pull it off is still worth millions. But back in 2004, before Twitter’s founding or the very first iPhone, this process was far from established. It wasn’t understood even by those actively participating, and so the task of defining personhood in WoW fell to the players themselves.
This is no easy task, laying down a society’s rules. Typically, societies come together from groups of people sharing some commonality: geography or ancestry, faith or ideology. WoW’s disparate and varied player base had none of these advantages, and further complicating the matter was the game’s very unreality. Virtual interactions don’t carry the same weight as those in real life, so getting players to agree on social norms became all but impossible—they couldn’t even agree where reality stopped or started! Nowhere near consensus, players did what human beings often do in such situations: they balkanized, establishing their own separate organizations (“guilds”) with independent rules and agendas. With dozens if not hundreds of organized guilds on every game server, necessity birthed a new generation of leaders practicing a different style of leadership. Teenagers led guilds of grown men through sheer force of personality; paraplegics charged into battle freed from pitying gazes. Most guilds, even casual guilds, boil down to a lively assortment of individuals who gather for light, semianonymous socializing after work. Think of the classic sitcom Cheers, without that whole boring mess between Sam and Diane. The Guild chat channel was the place where everyone knew your name—or at least your character’s.
WoW is an emotional escape vehicle for the vast majority of players, and the more hardcore the player the more he tends to value the separation—though it’s possible he develops those attitudes to validate the huge amount of time invested in the game. Decoupled from the worries of real life and an economy that’s shunted young people into unsatisfying part-time work, Azeroth becomes a magical, welcoming place filled with eminently achievable goals. Its systems are logical, comprehensible, and reward players for diligent work. Losses are temporary, gains are permanent, and an essentially limitless stream of entertainment is available at your fingertips for less than fifty cents a day. Players love the portal because everything on the far side is so appealing. This is, by the way, why most people consume any kind of immersive entertainment. Casual smartphone games are portals. Books are portals. MMORPGs are just another variant on the form.
WoW’s publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, produced a fine piece of entertainment software, but its true function was that of a community-building platform. Ultimately these communities would become the most valuable part of the game, fueled by players chasing their own ideas of fun. Millions of people sunk huge amounts of time and energy into this game; many don’t regret a moment. Ask them why and you’d get no single answer. Every one of them has a story, an explanation of why and how this video game came to mean so much.
So what happens when the portal’s breached? Intense feelings not deeply felt are the essence of WoW’s appeal. Once the game starts to hurt, it’s no longer healthy. But conflict cannot be excised from the human condition. If hundreds of guilds and thousands of people occupy the same virtual space, they will eventually collide. The terms of those conflicts derive from the established values of the guilds themselves—wildly variable, never more so than during WoW’s early years. Given the massive emotional investment by many players in the game, tragic misunderstandings were inevitable. Some even rose to the level of atrocities.
The outside observer’s biggest hurdle to appreciating the World of Warcraft has always been the simplistic objection: But it’s not real! If one were to concoct a one-sentence argument against this book, one would start there. A philosopher might reply with penetrating questions about what constitutes reality and what separates it from the alternatives. I point instead to a very famous, highly polarizing event from WoW’s history that made news headlines, offended the moral sensibilities of millions, and brilliantly bridged the gap between real and virtual events. Half political speech and half act of terror, it was immortalized by its perpetrators on the Wittenberg church door of their age: YouTube.
We begin with lilting guitar strings in a minor chord. Paul McCartney soon joins in dulcet tones, picking his way through a wistful melody, pining for a day not too long departed when all his troubles seemed so far away. The screen displays text, a series of posts from World of Warcraft’s cavernous online message boards: rage and castigation, denouncing unnamed individuals in the harshest possible terms. They call for the agonizing deaths of close relatives followed by funereal desecrations. The juxtaposition of soothing music and inchoate rage is vaguely artistic, like a bedroom decorated by an angsty teen.
Finally we get a scrap of context. It’s an earnest message of mourning from a player on the US-based realm server Illidan:
On Tuesday of February 28th Illidan lost not only a good mage, but a good person. For those who knew her, Fayejin was one of the nicest people you could ever meet. On Tuesday she suffered from a stroke and passed away later that night.
I’m making this post basically to inform everyone that might have knew her. Also tomorrow, at 5:30 server time March 4th, we will have an in game memorial for her so that her friends can pay their respects. We will be having it at the Frostfire Hot Springs in Winterspring, because she loved to fish in the game (she liked the sound of water, it was calming for her) and she loved snow.
If you would like to come show your respects please do. ☺ Thanks everyone.
And then—timed by the video’s anonymous editor to coincide with the end of McCartney’s classic tune—a follow-up posting on the same thread by the same warm-hearted person, with a concluding sentence that should make the heart of any experienced online gamer drop like a stone down a well:
We’re planning some cool stuff and we’re going to make a video of it to show her family. ☺ So I would appreciate it if nobody comes to mess things up.
Smash cut to a wide earthen tunnel carved through a mountainside. A driving bass line tumbles from a fuzzy vac-tube amplifier. The singer is now Glenn Danzig, boisterously belting the first verse of the Misfits’ “Where Eagles Dare.” We see at least a dozen WoW avatars riding an assortment of colorful beasts: tigers purple and white, armored white horses, even a tiny gnome astride a mechanical birdlike contraption evidently powered by steam. They are heavily armed and armored; a ruddy-bearded dwarf spurs his big-horned ram, his brow adorned by a crown of pure fire. They ride with swift and terrible purpose. This is a war party.
Smash cut once again to a serene snowscape: the Frostfire Hot Springs in the far frozen north of Azeroth’s westernmost continent of Kalimdor. Steam rises from water bordered by thin ice crunching under heavy boots like spun confectioner’s sugar. Mozart’s serene if trite Requiem has replaced Danzig’s aggressive tenor. At the lake’s edge stands a slender female figure clad in a dress of snowflake white. This is the avatar Fayejin, of late owned by a late woman whose name has remained mercifully unyoked to the events described. Mourners have assembled themselves into an orderly line, paying their respects one by one to the dead woman. Most are Horde members, like Fayejin herself; most eschew armor and weapons for black-tie dress. The avatar filming this shot, a human rogue of the Alliance, takes her place at the end of the line.
“Nice day for a memorial,” she remarks casually.
“Guess you could say that,” her neighbor in line replies, seemingly put off by her wording but unwilling to make a scene. It is a somber occasion indeed.
We see the war party once again, now clear of the underground tunnel and riding amidst comically engorged conifers towards the Frostfire Hot Springs. They are less than a minute out. Danzig declares he “ain’t no goddamned son of a bitch!” Nobody at the funeral has any idea what is about to happen.
Cut back to the funeral, where our rogue heroine has slipped away from the crowd under cover of Stealth mode. She creeps invisible up to Fayejin at the water’s edge, avatar for a woman recently deceased and obviously beloved even by people who never met her face-to-face. Strings, brass, and chorals crescendo . . . into the sudden psychic arrest of a vinyl record scratch. The rogue’s knives come out; Scatman John’s ’90s novelty nonsense hit “Scatman” erupts through the speakers. Instantly and with a savage coup de grace, the rogue drops Fayejin’s hit points to zero. She dies; the game accords the murdering rogue an appropriate number of “contribution points.” For a moment nobody seems quite sure what to do. A tauren warrior—one of the very few attendees equipped for battle—approaches with his weapon drawn. The rogue slips past him and lays into the nearest mourner as the video’s frame rate slams to single digits. Arcane energy flares in lashing purple novae. A dance beat undergirds Scatman John’s infernal gibbering. The war party has arrived.
What follows is not a battle but a massacre. Most mourners are butchered in the first fifteen seconds, and the rest soon follow. That first warrior, having actually worn his armor, is among the last to die. A warlock’s demonic minion, a giant, flaming infernal, runs about directionless, a headless chicken without its dead summoner, until at last the murderers spare themselves a moment to crush it. Dark crumpled bodies dot the snowscape. The rogue, still filming, approaches Fayejin’s fallen form.
“She loved fishing,” she says to the dead and also to the living, those she knows will be watching. “And snow. And PvP,” slamming one scornful nail after another into the bloodlogged wood of this coffin.
“Sorry for your loss,” a white title snarks against a black background. Another follows: “Yes, we know we are assholes :D” The murderers announce themselves: the guild Serenity Now of Illidan. This video, headlined “Serenity Now bombs a World of Warcraft funeral,” accumulated several million views on the now-defunct Google Video service before its migration to YouTube, where to date it has over six million views. These figures do not include the video’s many popular online mirrors, adding millions more.
The events described took place on March 5, 2006. They would not become widespread public knowledge for some time, as the tidal wave of outrage spread from the Illidan server’s provincial forums to the larger WoW community and online society at large. And by far the most common reaction was indeed outrage. The term “funeral bombing” has a way of taking on moral weight.
What really happened here? Examined in a vacuum, the deed seems so obviously wicked it barely warrants discussion. Civilized people do not, as a general rule, assault funeral parties. Even bitter enemies grant each other quarter to retrieve and honor the fallen. A woman of the Horde was dead; surely the Alliance owed them the favor of peace in which to mourn.
That judgment rests on a crucial assumption: that the death in question is real and equally acknowledged by both sides. As noted, the early World of Warcraft was short on consensus and long on combat. Fayejin’s friends placed little space between the woman and her avatar; Serenity Now saw little connection between the two. With such fundamental disagreements over life and death, some players were bound to cross social lines. But who was really right and who wrong? Brutal though Serenity Now’s tactics were, the massacring party arguably deployed a more accurate moral compass than the massacred.
The bombers operated under a code of conduct solely defined by the virtual world of Azeroth, in which the game’s hard rules are the only guide. Under this code, opposing players are fair game at all times. To condemn Serenity Now is to hold two moralities: acknowledging the virtual world’s unreality while also asserting real-life morality as a guiding principle. Game philosophy theorist Stacey Goguen coined the term “dual-wielding morality” in a 2009 paper to describe this idea. As WoW characters may wield weapons in each hand, so too must human beings engaged in virtual worlds always wield two distinct types of moral agency. They may slaughter their foes but must ultimately check themselves before virtual slaughter becomes genuine abuse.
After some discussion of the Serenity Now incident, Goguen decides this dual-wielding morality is the best approach; “the humorous, light-hearted aspect of the ganking*4 is apparent. However, the fact that actual people had a request to respect their grieving disregarded outweighs in significance the humorous aspect of this issue . . . yes, this story is funny, but the members of [Serenity Now] are still jerks for what they did, and what they did is not an acceptable ethical interaction between people, even if it is within a computer game.”
Goguen makes a good argument, insofar as she attempts to define a universal standard of virtual conduct. One ought not, as a general rule, hurt the feelings of others. But never did WoW attempt to lay down such a standard, and never did the community evidence any collective desire for one. Numerous provisions governing interplayer conduct appear in the official terms of service, but overwhelmingly they refer to verbal harassment of other players via in-game text message—particularly harassment of a sexual, racial, homophobic, or otherwise hateful nature. Thus Blizzard Entertainment signals to its customers even before they enter the game world that speech is to be regulated, actions not. Perhaps this smacks of a corporate lawyer’s cold calculation, but solid game-design reasoning lies behind: verbal abuse is no fun, not even for those stunted, angry people inflicting it (about whose opinion few care anyway). What’s more, the harms of offensive speech aren’t much mitigated by a virtual portal. Text is virtual by its very nature—at this moment you hear the voice of a virtual author in your head—and so it hurts equally whether on- or offline.
In a video game, however, physical adversity isn’t suffering. Instead it’s a challenge, one the player generally has the means to overcome. In gaming, you don’t get mad; you get even! A player ganked repeatedly by other players could flee the area—or she could have fun with the situation, hunting down her attackers. Outnumbered, she might call in support from her guildmates or cleverly employ local monsters as a distraction. The game’s wide-open “anything goes” nature was precisely what made it fun. Many of my fondest WoW memories were enormous brawls sparked from isolated, unremarkable gankings somewhere in the literal Hinterlands of Azeroth’s Eastern Kingdoms. However twisted Serenity Now’s motivation in attacking Fayejin’s funeral, her friends had the opportunity to fight back. They could have hosted the gathering in friendly Horde territory, rather than the contested zone of Winterspring. Nobody made them remove their weapons and armor, and no one coerced them into prioritizing the snowy setting over safety. They were merely operating with different intentions and values—values Serenity Now had no obligation to respect.
One group of people tried to use a video game for mourning while another used it for fun. Ask yourself, whose values are more aligned with “real” society? From the massacre itself to the YouTube video’s perfectly silly music selection, Serenity Now certainly knew how to have fun. Outrage didn’t fuel those millions of views; amusement did. A certain kind of gamer—and here I admit I am this kind of gamer—sees it and breaks up belly laughing. Personally, the request “I would appreciate it if nobody comes to mess things up” strikes me as so jaw-droppingly naive it practically begs for transgression. To issue this plea and expect it might be honored is to assert one’s particular values as universal, but in the World of Warcraft that was never going to happen. Existence in Azeroth was a constant negotiation between many poles, many agendas, many ways of thinking. It was, in other words, a premonition of the ever-connected and multidetermined world we now experience every day.
To this point we’ve considered the experiences of millions as they entered the World of Warcraft and examined the consequences when their competing moral universes inevitably collided. From a great height, large populations may seem homogenous—great herds driving up mesas of dust over a wide plain—and even as a conscientious author it’s easy to wrap messy reality in gauzy conclusions. Every one of the millions of WoW players built and lived an avatar as unique as though etched in nucleic acid. Though we live in an age of breathless confessionals (“I Spent My Twenties in the World’s Biggest Game and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”), this approach shrinks the world and trades its most fascinating features for a self-aggrandizing promise of brutal honesty. Not everyone who passed through the virtual world felt the same way about it.
Max is a soft-spoken young man with a conspiratorial smile, hair shorn to a buzz, and a thickness of limb suggesting he enjoys the gym. The letters PUNX sit tattooed across the knuckles of his left hand in homage to Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong. Max got his MMORPG start as a high school sophomore, dabbling in several games before joining World of Warcraft at its North American launch in fall 2004. He made his home on the Illidan server, joining the successful raiding guild Saga—ultimately a sister guild of sorts to Serenity Now. Players from both guilds often collaborated, particularly on “world PvP,” the unstructured open-air battles with other players of which Serenity Now was so fond.
Max describes the relationship: “We were friends with them because they were all funny bros, but they were kinda shitty.” Elitism runs bone deep in gaming, and even Max can’t help noting Serenity Now’s players were neither particularly skilled nor dedicated. Their material accomplishments were few—but then, as I’ve theorized, that was kind of the point. Far from the “power guilds” Max played in and I’d come to lead, Serenity Now was a collection of puckish figures committed to their own amusement.
Though he wasn’t at the bombing and doesn’t appear in the infamous video, Max was aware of the events in real time as Serenity Now mustered over the voice chat server the guilds shared. Voice-over-Internet programs, VOIPs, ran on private servers with monthly fees, so guilds often shared voice chat venues. Many competitors exist, from TeamSpeak to Ventrilo (often shortened to Vent) to more recent inventions like Curse Voice and Blizzard’s own in-game voice chat. Saga’s well-equipped fighters, busy in a raid dungeon, could not make an appearance. They were aware of Fayejin’s funeral in advance and considered the plea for comity absurd. “I saw the forum post . . . talking about the funeral and asking politely to keep things respectful . . . and I knew the guys at Serenity Now. It was very much something that they would do.”
He wholeheartedly approved of the funeral bombing and its accompanying video. “I think it’s a game and you can do whatever you want. If you want to host an in-game funeral for a friend, that’s fine. But if you host it in a contested zone and then essentially announce on the forums where and when a bunch of unsuspecting Horde [players] are going to be, then don’t get mad if someone is playing the game in a different way. . . . Blizzard designed the game to be open so that different groups of people could have fun in different ways. Some people thought it would be fun, or honorable or whatever, to host a funeral, and some people thought it would be fun to sneak attack it.”
For Max, the game’s appeal lay in its wide-open, persistent nature—in the limitless possibility it promised. Being ganked was itself a formative experience; upon venturing to the contested zone of Arathi Highlands as a low-level character, he was immediately slain by a wandering band of Horde players. It felt like the Wild West. He was hooked. Asked to describe his fondest WoW memory, he cites a guild-on-guild battle in the verdant woods of Feralas. A large green dragon carrying particularly valuable loot had appeared among the old elvish ruins in the forest’s northern reach, and several guilds from both the Horde and Alliance were interested in its spoils: “We showed up late and there was already a Horde guild working on the green dragon.” A deep moat ruled out a mounted assault. Approaching on foot, Saga’s force would be seen and engaged by outriders. They needed the element of surprise.
The Twin Colossals rise above the forest floor: two earthen mounds hundreds of feet high, bracketing a slender thread of a road, offering commanding views of the elvish ruins where green dragonkin congregate. Saga summited the eastmost Colossal, and with the help of parachutes and Slow Fall spells, Max and his guildmates took a leap of faith. Gliding at a low, leisurely angle down toward the green dragon and the engaged Horde, they swept right over the patrols erected to rebuff them. In moments they’d crossed the water to land directly in the Horde’s midst, laying into warriors already strained and depleted by battling the dragon. What’s more, Saga made sure not to lay a finger on the dragon—a single point of damage would turn it on their own force, and even if they killed it, the Horde would still be able to loot its corpse. Only by slaying all the Horde and leaving the dragon untouched could they claim total victory.
That’s exactly what happened. Saga slaughtered their enemies with the same brutality Serenity Now deployed on the funeral, though at least these opponents were armed and armored. With the Horde players’ disembodied spirits hustling up the very long way from the Feralas graveyard, Saga quickly engaged and slew the dragon before they could regroup. Max and his guildmates were thrilled. Having participated in similar tactics on my own server, I can testify to the utter elation one experiences when they work. Grown adults chirp and roar like over-caffeinated teenagers. Describing the Feralas air raid years later, Max exudes palpable excitement.
From what you’ve read of Max, you’ll naturally assume he’s a hardcore gamer. He agrees with that assessment, estimating that he played WoW for at least six hours per day during his two years of membership. He approaches the game’s morality from a hardcore mind-set. But he hardly views his time in WoW through rose-colored glasses. He acknowledges he “didn’t spend any time hanging out with my real-life friends and I also wasn’t focused on school as much.” Getting a girlfriend while attending the University of California at Davis strained his free time to the breaking point, and so Max quit. “When I quit,” he recalls, “I also started doing infinitely better in school and became generally a more well-rounded person. . . . Not to be a downer, but WoW didn’t contribute anything positive toward my life, it just put everything on hold. It was fun to play but that’s it.” Max acknowledges that he has “an addictive personality and that I should stay away from games like WoW. Now I just play games that I know I can walk away from when it’s time to do something else.”
These are hardly the words of an unrepentant goon, the sort of person you’d imagine enthusiastically supporting notorious online funeral bombers. This person, however precisely you conceive him, is not Max. Max is kind and thoughtful, easygoing, instinctively eager to please. He doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, selecting as his primary vice an unhealthy appetite for Monster energy drinks. The sugary, caffeinated brew helps a great deal with his long hours; Max is a genetics researcher at the Broad Institute in Boston, a joint research venture between MIT and Harvard. Between his work, his girlfriend, and interviewing for doctoral candidate positions, his time is spoken for. Max is the youngest of three brothers: the baby, the pleaser, the diligent student, the peacemaker. He returned my extensive written questionnaire within a week and apologized for not getting it back sooner.
I asked him if his opinion of Serenity Now’s funeral bombing had changed over the intervening years. His answer: not at all. “I thought it was hilarious then, when the forum drama was going on and the video was released, and I still think it’s hilarious.”
World of Warcraft’s many millions of players lived full lives both in and out of the game, upheld their own values, and told their own stories. These people built friendships, built guilds, populated hundreds of servers the size of small cities. Without the slightest inkling of how to build a society (nor even the inclination to try) they nonetheless blazed a path for every online community that would follow. Even an event as superficially sophomoric as Serenity Now’s immortal YouTube video cast colorful characters into important moral quandaries. For the millions of players in the game’s vast galaxy, each day was a new adventure with family and friends. Each week was a fresh struggle to advance, to accumulate power and treasure and prestige. So the rhythms of the game became bound up with the passage of time—those little milestones of personal triumph and tragedy that teach and change us and slowly accrete into a Real Life. We lived WoW, as surely as we lived our own lives. We did and felt these things, and if you think otherwise I’ve got a few dozen of my closest friends to back up my good word. As years passed and the game’s popularity waxed and waned, as players drifted in and out of Azeroth, each of us left a little piece of ourselves anchored in that world.
For my own part, I’ve come a long way from Cadereyta. I’ve seen and done a lot in the intervening time—a decade, more than long enough to build a modest career and quit and build another, to get married, to have kids if I’d wanted them—and Ghando’s still there. The puppy for whom I named my avatar grew old and passed away, but when I look at my big, black cartoon cow I can still see him. I’ve gone years at a time without speaking with Plastico and Slipo, with Tim or Brett or Eric, but any time we meet we’re those brash young kids again, cramming lime wedges down the throats of our Tecates under Nuevo Leon’s towering volcanoes: a mongrel crew of upstarts, slaying dragons and saving the world, building our little club into a powerhouse and doing whatever it took to keep that dream alive. Video games don’t change the world, but they do change the people inhabiting it. The millions of us who played World of Warcraft wouldn’t know ourselves—and cannot honestly tell the stories of our lives—without it.