A man named Barack Hussein Obama won the presidency of the United States. I know this because I watched it on television. You’ll be aware of this too, via some holographic archive buried amidst the moss-grown rubble of Western civilization, but at the time the fact was really quite something to absorb. That this fresh-faced beanpole of a junior senator might mount a stage to face America as its first black president was a strange and almost radical theory until suddenly, in the campaign’s last weeks with a formidable lead in the polls, it wasn’t. Even so I went to cast my ballot that morning gnawingly unsure of the outcome and remained so throughout the evening. Network cameras focused on Chicago’s Grant Park, where droves of Obama supporters had begun massing. One battleground state after another turned blue and the crowd swelled, pushing up against hastily installed security barriers, emitting a buzz that was thrilled but also distinctly nervous. Again, until CNN swept a jarring archipelago of colored stars across my screen and Wolf Blitzer appeared like a wizened, earnest hedgehog to formally announce the result, it didn’t seem possible. But then there he was, in that gaudy studio, announcing that “Barack Obama, forty-seven years old, will become the president-elect of the United States.”
At some signal in Chicago the barriers opened. Uniformed police scuttled in rows like midnight-blue beetles in their heavy jackets and they unhinged the aluminum gates and swung them aside and the crowd burst through. Hundreds of people, thousands, tens of thousands—CNN pulled its shot wider so the torrent wouldn’t overflow the frame. The wave rushed down the lawn’s dark slope past the statue of Lincoln toward the portable dais erected with its back to Lake Michigan. They chanted “O-ba-ma!” and “Yes! We! Can!” while I watched from home with my girlfriend at the time, quiet on the couch, struggling to process the enormity of the image. It was an avalanche, an epoch-making event, a secular blessing on behalf of our whole society. A movement that had grown from seed and arrived but gone unrecognized finally found itself written into history. It was in many ways a coronation.
Barely two years earlier I’d sat on a different couch in front of a different television, watching another crowning moment. Gaming forums had buzzed for weeks and now the moment had finally arrived: South Park made an episode about World of Warcraft.
Video game references were nothing new, neither for television nor for South Park. At that point in its tenth season, the enormously popular animated sitcom had won an Emmy Award just the season before for an episode (“Best Friends Forever”) prominently featuring Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) console. Yet while the PSP was an element in the plot, the episode garnered attention primarily for its allegorical depiction of the Terri Schiavo controversy over end-of-life care.
Brutally funny or unflinchingly critical when they chose to be, show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had grabbed hold of the entertainment industry as part of a pop culture ascent that continues unabated to this writing. South Park was then and remains now (for those of my generation) the definitive record of our culture. If any element of popular culture should ever find its way into an episode even in passing, it can be said to have truly mattered—at least for a few weeks—in American history. So thus, as the tomes say, it came to pass that most people with even a passing interest in WoW tuned in that night through their TVs and web browsers to see how it played. Following the standard Primus-backed title sequence, “Make Love, Not Warcraft” presented twenty-two minutes of catnip euphoria to MMORPG fans.
It begins with an establishing shot set to lilting woodwinds, showing us not the accustomed snow-capped mountains of the show’s fictionalized Colorado but rather the unmistakable (to any WoW fan) backdrop of the Goldshire Inn! Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny are immersed in the game, and in the first few minutes it’s clear large portions of the episode will be just like this. It’s not just in-group references, like the complaint over resurrecting at the nearest graveyard. The episode is approached with the loving detail South Park brings to all its send-ups, made particularly acute in this case by Parker and Stone’s heavy use of machinima. Machinima is a style of filming using video game footage, like a play staged inside a game. It can be used to tell serious stories furthering the game’s lore, harmless comic romps rehashing popular online memes, or anything in between.
In direct collaboration with Blizzard Entertainment, South Park rendered much of the episode’s twenty-two minutes in WoW’s 3-D engine (as opposed to the “2.5-D” paper-cutout animation the show typically uses), bringing entirely new strata of detail to light. The show’s beloved characters are represented by their in-game avatars, reflecting not just their appearances and traits but, in classic online fashion, what those characters choose to project to the world. Cartman’s speeches before battle echo the detached know-it-all tone endemic to raid leaders. Clyde, at the moment he’s most needed, has stopped paying attention and left his keyboard. From the real in-game user interface to the Elwynn Forest General chat querying, “WHERE IS OLD BLANCHY?” Parker and Stone work hard to establish authenticity in presentation, despite not playing WoW themselves.
The plot departs from reality; after all, it’s a cartoon on Comedy Central. South Park’s four young protagonists attempt to level their characters in WoW, only to be ganked over and over by an impossibly powerful player. Rather than quit the game, they commence an epically miserable grind, killing trivial enemies in a starting zone to level high enough to defeat the ganker—whose nefarious player-killing ways have begun to threaten all of WoW. Blizzard Entertainment makes available the Sword of a Thousand Truths,1 and with this legendary weapon the boys are able to defeat their nemesis and restore order to WoW . . . which, in the end, only means they can get back to playing more WoW. It’s a laugh line for mainstream audiences that also rings true for players. “You can just hang out in the sun all day tossing a ball around,” Cartman sneers at the others by way of challenge, “or you can sit at your computer and do something that matters.” It’s a joke, but like all good jokes it inverts a commonly held belief—that real-life hobbies hold more inherent value than their online counterparts.
The same tension runs throughout the episode. When Randy advises Stan to go outside and socialize, the son exasperatedly snaps at his father, “I am socializing, r-tard! I’m logged on to an MMORPG with people from all over the world and getting XP with my party using TeamSpeak.” Anyone who ever explained WoW (or frankly any video game) to his nagging parents felt this way, even if he deployed more diplomatic language. We always knew why we played! We could always articulate arguments for our preferred hobby, but our parents and teachers didn’t seem to listen. For many of us, just getting consistent access to our favorite hobby was a constant struggle fraught with deception and the negotiation of strict screen-time limits. Online games represented yet a higher threshold, with broadband Internet not available in many locales prior to the early 2000s and many of our parents gravely concerned about online predators. I don’t mean to dub these precautions unreasonable—if I had children I would attempt to limit their screen time and monitor their online activity—but they’re doomed to fail. Children will always skirt around parental controls, particularly when it comes to technology. Try as they might, the older generations find themselves playing catch-up, hobbling along in a losing race like Stan’s clueless dad trying to play alongside his son.
These ideas are not, as a matter of course, expressed on national television. To see them stated aloud in this forum of all forums was a revelation. The use of machinima, setting the episode’s primary action in WoW while relegating the standard animation to expository scenes, inverts our expectations of sitcom structure just as it does the characters’ priorities. Gamers are cynical by nature, inclined to police the borders of their culture (see, for example, the “Gamergate” campaign and its appalling suspicion of women in gaming). South Park attempted something that could succeed only with an earnest rendering both of video games and gaming culture, and few TV shows could have committed powerfully enough to pull it off. Watching this brilliant little tale unfold that Wednesday night, I felt truly special. Hearing the acknowledged voice of my culture speaking directly to me, and in the intensely private language of my chosen community, was the kind of “secular blessing” I mentioned early in this chapter.
Of course, the official coronation would come in the spring of the following year, when South Park executive producer Anne Garefino mounted a bedazzled stage in Los Angeles to accept the Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program. Not a coup, given South Park’s excellent track record in this category (2007 was its fourth win in as many years), but programs are nominated for individual episodes rather than body of work, and “Make Love, Not Warcraft”—twenty-two minutes of gleeful lunacy anchored by an authentically loving tribute to a video game played by less than 5 percent of the Television Academy voters2—was hardly critic-friendly fare. It won not because voters got every one of the jokes but because this episode made a definitive cultural statement, sanctifying video games as central to our culture. And World of Warcraft was no Mario Bros., no PAC-MAN, no DOOM, no Donkey Kong. The other five games that accompanied WoW into the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s inaugural class were accessible plug-and-play affairs built around a few brilliant mechanics. They were much older, with decades of history and numerous sequels. WoW was barely two years old, enormous and still adding more features every few months. It wasn’t for everyone. Often it seemed the more you loved it the more it selfishly demanded of you. By rights it should not have driven its pilings near so deep in our culture’s silty bed, and yet it spoke to so many people in such diverse circumstances that even the Hollywood establishment—for so long the epitome of sun-kissed cool, for so long hostile to gaming and fandom and anything else “nerdy” even as effects-driven fantasies accounted for many of its greatest hits—had to sit up straight and fumble for a notebook. South Park’s victory was a vision of (to use Cormac McCarthy’s phrase) the darkening land, the world to come.
South Park was hardly alone in sowing the seeds of Azerothian fandom. WoW had barely been out for six months when comedian Dave Chappelle took the stage at the Punchline in San Francisco to announce, unprompted, “You know what I’ve been playing a lot of? World of Warcraft!”3 Seeing as he’d quit his megahit Chapelle’s Show and absconded to South Africa just the month before, scorning $55 million of Viacom’s money in the process, he had a lot of free time on his hands. “I knew I had some geek brothers and sisters up in here!” he crowed at the audience’s positive response. Not the hardest sell in the Bay Area, but the line wasn’t uttered as a joke or as part of a larger thought. It was earnest, said off the cuff in a space between jokes, and as one of the comedian’s few public missives at a time of great controversy it spread wider than it otherwise might have. It exploded on the Blizzard forums. If absolutely anything was cool in America in 2005, Dave Chappelle was cool, and he’d just declared himself for us!
They kept popping up, one at a time, these WoW-playing celebrities, these banner-bearers for geek culture in professions otherwise consumed by the definition and commodification of in-group status. Again, gaming culture is naturally wary of patronizing shills, but these confessions were so authentic, so deeply uncool to any rational calculus, that they couldn’t help winning us over. Mila Kunis, already treasured by geekdom for her role as the long-suffering Meg on Family Guy, is the sort of sex-symbol actress a cynical sort might imagine breezily declaring her love of comic books or video games for careerist reasons. Yet in October 2008, she appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and tensed up immediately at the mention of her gaming habits.
“Oh, you are gonna bring this up,” she groans, shifting in her seat, gripping and then releasing the armrest, starting an explanation before arresting it, performing the classic gamer’s calculation inside her head: How ignorant is my audience, and how much work will it therefore take to explain what I want to explain? “I don’t know if anyone plays Warcraft,” she says to the studio audience, long-practiced defensive instincts kicking in, assuming she’s part of a cultural minority about which the majority cannot be expected to concern itself. An exchange with the host follows, revealing a great deal about their perspectives.
KIMMEL (slightly patronizing): “They do. People do. Yeah.”
KUNIS: “Have you played it?”
KIMMEL: “I have not, but I’ve watched my son play it . . . he may have killed you a time or two! I don’t know, he’s good!”
KUNIS (straightening her spine, hackles raised): “I’m really good . . . like, I’m a really kickass mage.”
Any notion of performance has now departed. Kunis isn’t angry, but neither will her competitive nature allow a lazy comparison between a serious adult pursuit and the play of children. She’s compelled to assert her kickass magedom even without explaining what a mage is. Kimmel, for his part, has misplayed the interview. Between his personal experience of WoW as a game for children and Hollywood’s unstated assumptions around gaming, it does not occur to Kimmel that his guest might take this game very seriously. He cannot imagine her, Mila Kunis—global sex symbol, self-made millionaire, acclaimed and popular actor since the age of fifteen—taking pride in an online game. These are supposed to be trivial things, after all. They’re supposed to be places where, as Charles Barkley has said of social media, “losers go to feel important.” How on earth could someone like Mila Kunis find value in such things? Kimmel gamely rolls the interview along, intrigued at her reaction.
KIMMEL: “Tell people how it works . . . you have, like, teams, right?”
KUNIS: “Well, no, you’re your own person, and then you can get into a guild.”
KIMMEL (amused): “Oh, a guild!” (laughter)
KUNIS (animated): “Well yeah, you gotta be in a guild! ’Cause you gotta do raids that require thirty or forty people, but now with the expansion pack, they’re going to have raids that only require ten people . . .”
KIMMEL: “Oh, good! Whew.”
KUNIS: “So it’ll make things a lot easier.”
She breaks into nervous laughter at the end of this statement, made suddenly self-conscious by Kimmel’s (gently) sarcastic interjection, yanked from an animated explanation of a game she loves back into the reality of an ABC talk show where loving that game is no longer cool. Following the briefest of digressions into the PvP twinking scene—a discussion in which Kimmel is so lost that Kunis drops the subject completely, groaning “Oh my God”—she backtracks once again to the concept of guilds.
KUNIS: “We have a [chat] channel that’s like my friends, the people that I actually know in real life . . . and then I’m in a guild guild, and in this guild I know nobody. They all think I’m either like a teacher, or I think I was an architect at one point, ’cause I traveled so much and I was on in different time zones and nobody understood what I did. So I was like, ‘I’m an architect and I travel a lot,’ and . . . they kind of just went with it.”
KIMMEL: “It’s because they’re eight, by the way.” (audience laughter) “That’s why. They’re nine years old. You could have said you’re an astronaut and they would have said, ‘Oh, awesome!’”
Though Kunis laughs along with Kimmel and the segment’s tone never turns cruel, I still find it depressing to see anyone chastened for expressing what she loves. That’s really what this becomes, particularly in the end: a young woman describing her favorite hobby, sharing what she likes best about it, and trying to bring more people into that experience while her interlocutor uses her earnestness as a springboard for lazy jokes. Kunis leaves herself vulnerable here. Hollywood actresses do not, as a general rule, delve into the design contrasts between MMORPG expansion packs on national television, and her host would rather wallow in preconception. He’d yelp Freudian jibes to a unicorn, but his guest, in the cosmic view, comes out on top: she gets to keep being Mila Kunis, Hollywood actress and (as of the Warlords of Draenor expansion) an NPC in World of Warcraft.
Oh, how things have changed! Just a few short years later, one could already perceive the altered landscape. Where the mainstream media4 had once been content to define WoW as the territory of misfits and losers, they now found in its fan base a deep well of charm. The fact that normal, functional members of society played online games in a serious way was no longer treated as a troubling indictment (unhinged subversives walking among us!) of those games but rather as a positive attribute. Looking back, I see no obvious inflection point. I could pick one out of a hat, assemble an argument, and present it in glibly Gladwellian fashion as THE MOMENT THAT CHANGED OUR CULTURE, but I’d rather just explore these positive changes and the better, more open world we all get to live in! Let’s stay in the talk show space, since any good WoW player knows to clear out all the quests in a zone.
Jimmy Fallon is not the same person as Jimmy Kimmel. I point this out because they are both dark-suited white men named Jimmy hosting late-night network talk shows, and thus can be hard to distinguish. Several years after Kimmel needled Mila Kunis about her gaming habits, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon demonstrated the intervening cultural shift with a short musical segment titled “We Are the World (of Warcraft).” As a song it does little to recommend itself, but as an unalloyed item of fan service it cannot help but succeed. Fallon opens the segment with a quick declaration of love for the game, and what follows is a music video in montage form, combining footage of Fallon, WoW-playing celebrities Felicia Day (about whom more later) and Chris Hardwick, Blizzard Entertainment employees, and fans around the world singing a send-up of 1985’s “We Are the World” into their PC webcams. What the presentation lacks in polish it more than makes up for with charm—indeed, the low fidelity, poor lip-synching, and clumsy lyrics only add to the video. The song’s conclusion hides no punchline, just a globe-shaped mosaic of hundreds of player portraits all singing along that eventually merges into the game’s classic splash screen. There’s no joke. The sequence exists purely as declarative statement: “We exist, and we celebrate our community.” That this kind of show might run this kind of piece was inconceivable in December 2010. In June 2013, the world was already a different place.
Just ten days following Fallon’s musical number, WoW made another late-night appearance, this time on Conan O’Brien’s TBS show. Among his guests was Chris Kluwe, at the time a punter for the NFL’s Oakland Raiders and a WoW fanatic (his Twitter handle is @ChrisWarcraft). Kluwe appeared to discuss the gay marriage equality debate, into which he’d repeatedly stepped with passionate and often hilarious advocacy. After the first portion of the interview, focusing largely on issues of equality and empathy, O’Brien asks about his guest’s gaming habits. Note how his phrasing approaches the subject differently from Kimmel and how it reveals a different set of underlying assumptions though neither host plays games himself:
O’BRIEN: “I found this really fascinating. You’re quite an avid online gamer; we talked about this a little bit before the show. You’ve ranked third nationally in ‘dungeon progression’—I don’t even know what that is!”
KLUWE: “I’m about to nerd everyone out here, which will be amazing. . . . So I played World of Warcraft for a very long time and I was in a raiding guild. And in raiding the goal of ‘dungeon progression’ is to defeat the bosses—it’s kind of like solving a puzzle, each boss has different mechanics—and I was in a hardcore raiding guild, which means that we took it very seriously. And so at one point we were third in the United States in terms of raiding progression, which meant we stayed up very late at night and kept pounding our heads against these bosses over and over until we beat them.”
O’BRIEN: “That’s incredible . . . it’s amazing because you’re a player in the NFL, but it seems like your true dream—what you’re most proud of—is that you’ve ranked third nationally in dungeon progression!”
This is the exact sandbar on which Kimmel ran aground. O’Brien approaches it from the start not as an embarrassing fact about Kluwe, not something to needle, but as something legitimately interesting. Part of that is the apparent novelty of an RPG-gaming jock, and O’Brien says as much, but when he sees the contrast between popular conception and reality his inclination is to explore rather than mock. Having elicited as fine and concise an explanation of MMORPG raiding as I’ve ever heard on television, O’Brien is able to cut through the dross and detail to the core issue. On some level Kimmel acknowledged Kunis’s pride, but he merely snickered rather than put the pieces together and articulate, as O’Brien does, that his guest’s gaming life runs parallel to his or her highly televised profession. Like most adults who love video games, Kluwe admits he works “to fund my nerdy habits.” One side of his life need not inform the other. Of course there are exceptions; no human being can commit herself to two separate pursuits and hold them truly parallel, never intersecting. Kluwe picks up on the point:
KLUWE: “That is the only time in my life I’ve actually dropped the ‘Hey, I’m an NFL player’ card, was when I applied to the raiding guild.5 I really wanted to get in, so I said, ‘I’m in the NFL, let me in!’ And they said, ‘Oh my God! An NFL player is playing, so let’s let him in!’”
Pushing the parallels together, forcing an intersection, is like fusing hydrogen atoms: it demands a great deal of force and it risks an explosive catastrophe. Celebrity provides the necessary energy, though it’s worth noting Kluwe is unusual in allowing his online and offline personas to be linked. Elsewhere in her interview with Kimmel, Kunis mentions fleeing from a guild after speaking over Ventrilo and having her (distinctive and famous) voice recognized. “I never went back,” she says, and any sensitive human being likely understands why. Anonymity privileges the least powerful person in any relationship, and while famous men may occasionally enjoy their fame online, famous women find themselves deluged with vile and toxic harassment. For women in general, revealing one’s identity online is often taken by men as an invitation to engage in utterly barbaric behavior.
The game’s presentation of gender is one of the first things new players will see. Gender in WoW has always been binary, determined by a single mouse click on the New Character screen (though players can now pay fifteen dollars to change gender, facial features, and other customizable options). As has become standard in video games, male and female avatars have identical statistics and abilities. The choice is meant to be purely cosmetic, but in practice that click has profound implications for the avatar’s place in the social order.
This won’t come as news to any observant citizen of the Internet, but women aren’t treated well online. The same structural biases permeating our society find their way onto the Internet as overt expression, as anonymity encourages performance of one’s toxic attitudes and open association makes it easy to find others who share them. When angry, unhealthy people congregate, they bring out the absolute worst in one another. Barbaric behavior proliferates, decent actors withdraw from the public square, and anyone could predict the end result: many if not most online spaces are actively hostile to women. Though populated with a higher percentage of women than most online games,6 WoW is no exception.
To create a female avatar is to mark oneself indelibly for separate treatment, even though the number of such avatars overstates the number of actual women. Researchers tracking 375 WoW players through a custom scenario found the male players picking opposite-gender avatars at three times the rate of women. The study’s authors dug deeper for some interesting findings: while men playing female avatars tended to emote and communicate more expressively in-game, this didn’t seem to be deliberate. That is to say, these men engaged in traditionally feminine behaviors not out of any impulse to deceive but because they unconsciously conformed to social expectations. This impulse is reasonably well established among social scientists. Those men also tended to prefer traditional heteronormative presentations—human over dwarf, blood elf over orc, fashion-model figures, long hair, and the like—in their chosen avatars. “I don’t want to look at a dude’s butt all day,” goes the familiar refrain. Men who spend hundreds of hours inhabiting this avatar’s skin would prefer the skin be sexually appealing. Women don’t seem to share the same impulse, perhaps because video game art styles tend to be designed by men for male consumption.
Anyone who takes progression seriously in WoW, whether in PvE or PvP, must eventually get on voice chat. A few organized groups will allow members to listen and not speak, but most demand proof of a functioning microphone for admittance. In a pitched battle, you can’t stop to type. Thus women who want to play more than casually must “out” themselves, and even a well-behaved guild can’t totally protect them, because once you’re a woman known as such within your realm community, everything changes. Flirtatious messages arrive in text chat, as does outright harassment, though WoW’s in-game customer service does a better job than most of responding to complaints and banning harassers. They take hate speech quite seriously, so long as it’s explicit in nature—anything short of an outright slur will probably get a pass. As in real life, the vast majority of harassment is committed by people eager to exploit the rules, to stand one inch from the line jeering that it’s not quite the line. Even a shade of subtlety can render something heinous unactionable.
First and most obvious to any observer of Western civilization, there’s the suggestion that women are inferior gamers. Pick any activity seen as traditionally male (poker, chess, anything to do with cars) and you’ll find men convinced women can’t, or don’t want to, compete. Whether anyone holding this belief could articulate a logically sound reason why is another question, but it’s widespread in gaming. One might intuitively think it’s less common in MMORPGs, with their leveling of skill disparities in favor of time invested, but that turns out only to harden the critique around a grain of truth.
Female gamers might be every bit as skilled as their male counterparts, but they tend to be older by roughly six years, and that age difference is quite significant in a population already selected for youth. Those years come with a terrible escalation in responsibilities as free time gives way to commuting, work, a spouse, children. Older gamers simply don’t play as much; what Nick Yee and others call the “achievement motivation” rapidly diminishes alongside the compulsion to invest long hours in the pursuit of virtual rewards. Women also live in a patriarchal society outside of WoW, one that that sits in judgment of their limited leisure time and actively looks to criticize their choices. Many women report feelings of guilt and anxiety while engaging in leisure pursuits, nagged by the feeling they should be doing something “productive.” Under these conditions, it’s perfectly easy to understand why many women invest less time in online gaming than their male counterparts and fall prey to pernicious notions of gender disparity. To the degree that women underachieve in online games relative to men, it’s the inevitable product of sexism—not a warrant for it.
Second, leaving aside all explicit value judgments, female gamers face presumptions about traditional gender roles. Women are thought—so it is written in the Codex of Misogynon—to gravitate naturally to healing and support roles, rather than tanking and DPS. Tanks in particular are always assumed to be male even if their avatars are female, due to the ideas of toughness and leadership bonded to tank roles. To the extent that women play DPS, they’re thought to play ranged classes rather than melee, staying clear of harm. Blood elf hunters and night elf druids are probably the two most stereotypical character selections a woman can make.
Yet again, data-driven studies contradict the popular wisdom. Male and female players choose to heal at roughly the same rate, with the men healing slightly more.7 Sadly, this argument won’t change bigoted minds, both because they’re bigoted and because the persistence of the women-as-healers myth is perpetuated by a phenomenon discussed earlier: that of gender-bending. Men create a lot of female avatars (33 percent of the avatars attached to male accounts were female as opposed to 9 percent male characters on female accounts) and they tend to play those avatars in ways they believe females behave, including a strong preference for healing. Yee explains: “Female characters had a much higher healing ratio compared with male characters. This disparity was a direct consequence of how players behave when they gender-bend. When men . . . play female characters, they spend more time healing. When women . . . play male characters, they spend less time healing. . . . They enact the expected gender roles of their characters. As players conform to gender stereotypes, what was false becomes true.” The community thinks women heal more, so players with female avatars act out expected gender roles and heal more, thus reinforcing the stereotype.
Third, women gamers are said to be selfish, manipulative, and flirty in the pursuit of social or material currency. They are said to be needy and attention-seeking and just about any other negative stereotype attached to the female half of our species since the dawn of civilization. Here data is no sure guide. These are character judgments, after all, open to interpretation, contingent on context, wed to anecdote. If there’s anything the online world teaches us, it’s the power of perception to warp reality. Does anyone seriously believe that women perpetrate more unwanted sexual advances than men?
While I have no doubt that Blizzard, given a mechanism to erase these toxic ideas from their game, would eagerly do it, they’re part of the same sexist society in which we all live. Top-down wouldn’t be effective even were it practical. What is effective—devastatingly so—at stamping out misogyny? Why, the very same social structures that propagate it!
Not every woman who ever logged in to WoW did so in the face of relentless hostility. For all the indignities of a pickup Deadmines group or Barrens General chat, women are resourceful enough to establish comfortable places for themselves. It was all about finding the right guild. Playing with friends, family, or coworkers was one way to limit one’s exposure to negativity, but as discussed in chapter 4, these small guilds tend to limit one’s progression. When it came to larger guilds with more ambition, more than a few guild masters were female, and many guilds nominally run by men featured female leadership. Female voices and perspectives, always valuable because they are attached to human beings, nonetheless supply a necessary counterbalance to the testosterone-addled youth endemic to online games. In my experience, the thoughtful and deliberate approach characterizing the most successful guilds bled over into their social dynamics. The more accomplished the guild, the more likely it is to be inclusive. This might seem counterintuitive to those who associate more investment in gaming with toxic misogyny, but that attitude doesn’t match up with the real world. Everyone’s heard of WoW but not many outside the community truly understand it, so it often finds itself the target of activist scrutiny, but basic misconceptions can seep into that activism and limit its impact.
Angela Washko, a visiting professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, created a series of video performances called “Playing a Girl” in which she engaged live WoW players in discussions about feminism. While loitering around the Valley of Trials in Orgrimmar, Washko asks essentially anonymous players about their attitudes and opinions. Never leading the discussion but rather facilitating and perpetuating it, she records strange and fascinating and surprisingly raw chats with total strangers over gender issues. She appreciates the honesty allowed by anonymity, but I wonder if she isn’t looking in the wrong places. Washko uses Orgrimmar because she figures it takes substantial effort to reach the city from starting zones, but in reality a capital city is just about the worst place in Azeroth to have an intelligent discussion. Without impugning Washko’s knowledge of the game, this seems like an interesting but highly limited approach—a tactic to impress outsiders, putting a community on display without trying to know it. For a better alternative I point to another online video project, one that used an insider’s perspective to engage millions of gamers around the globe: Felicia Day’s legendary webseries The Guild.
Prior to 2007, Felicia Day was an actor best known for a recurring role in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. With interests ranging from classical violin to tabletop gaming, Day had passionately played World of Warcraft for two years (she describes it as an addiction) before quitting and finding she missed her guildmates more than any element of the game itself. Inspired by WoW’s diversity and camaraderie, “I decided to write something to show the world that gamers weren’t just guys in their twenties who lived in their mom’s basement.” The resulting sitcom script went nowhere, dubbed too “niche” for television audiences, so Day recruited improv collaborators Sandeep Parikh and Jeff Lewis to help her produce it as a webseries. The first episode appeared on YouTube July 27, 2007. Six years and six seasons later, it concluded, having amassed over three hundred million cumulative views. Over its run it featured multiple Hollywood cameos, redefined the ceiling for webseries success, and turned every one of its actors into stars on the convention circuit.
The series tells the story of Codex (Day), a healing priest in a nameless WoW-analogue MMORPG, as she and her guildmates negotiate challenges both in and out of “the Game.” A webcam-style perspective flashes between characters at their PCs, communicating over voice chat. Everyone in the Guild lives in the same area, a conceit that allows Day to bring them together in person whenever it serves the story. Social status and gender roles are the show’s primary theme, as the protagonist answers her front door in the first episode to find Zaboo the warlock (Parikh) standing there with a bouquet of spray-painted roses. Having misinterpreted Codex’s cavalier use of semicolons as romantic interest, Zaboo has left his mother’s house to move in with her. We quickly meet the rest of the guild: uptight warrior and leader Vork, bubbly frost mage Clara, Tinkerballa the cynical and vindictive hunter, Bladezzz the vapid yet conniving rogue. The show understands the culture of 2007 with respect to games and so at first its characters seem like trite archetypes. Vork is a middle-aged bachelor living illicitly off his deceased grandfather’s Social Security checks; Zaboo initially presents as a cringe-inducing stereotype of a henpecked sexually impotent South Asian man. But by the first season’s end some forty minutes later (as a webseries, it is short) every member of the guild has been fleshed out in amusing and emotionally rewarding depth.
The best comedies are, at their core, about failure. Day arms her characters with a diverse arsenal of shortcomings, from Zaboo’s total naïveté to Bladezzz’s helplessness at the hands of his kid sister. Codex often finds herself crippled by anxiety and cannot function in any social setting. Each character has a unique relationship to the Game and makes his or her own hyperbolic compromises to play it. For all the persistent suggestion that this is unhealthy, that the characters play to fill deep wells of sadness, it’s all in good fun, and by the series finale everyone (especially Codex) has grown and matured through his or her in-game exploits.
Through it all, The Guild’s first and last impulses are to be funny. It succeeds because of a comic premise gamers deploy all the time among themselves, transposing game values and logic onto real life. Striking out on a date becomes a failed Charisma roll; a guildmate’s fire alarm clamors away on voice chat and you beg him not to leave his keyboard, insisting his character is wearing plenty of fire resistance gear. Hearing the fictional Clara groan “Ugh, husband aggro!” when asked to participate in her own family life rings like hammer on bell. The Guild succeeds because above all else it speaks to MMORPG gamers in their own language—their in-group references, their slang, their thorough understanding of game mechanics—with more specificity than anyone had ever before seen. I hadn’t watched it myself until beginning this book, though of course I was aware of it, and even in a research mind-set I found myself laughing aloud at the cleverest in-jokes. Without spoiling anything, there exists in season 3 an absolutely sublime line about a five-piece armor set bonus. It should be impossible for a piece of popular entertainment to crack a laugh-out-loud joke about something so infinitesimally niche, but this is the world we’ve come to live in. This is the culture WoW seized on and propagated to untold millions.
The Guild changed the online entertainment ecosystem, particularly as seasons 2 through 5 found paid distribution through Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace. Day retained full ownership and eventually walked away from Microsoft to distribute the sixth and final season herself (along with all the other material, which can be found on YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu, among other services). From nothing but passion, free time, and—yes, let’s be fair—Hollywood talent arose a permanent fixture of the gaming culture canon, built and grown and promoted and owned by a woman.
That last part is important, though Day doesn’t emphasize it in interviews or even in the show itself. The Guild isn’t an explicitly feminist show; in fact, it features a good deal of material the 2015 Internet would dub “problematic.” But nearly every one of those instances is consistent with character, with setting, with the dialogue between actual gamers while comfortable in their own communities. It’s real, it’s accessible, and it truly loves each of its wacky characters, even the execrable antagonist Fawkes, played greasily by Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wil Wheaton. It demonstrates, I think, the limitations of Angela Washko’s brand of activism. Gaming culture can absolutely be toxic and misogynistic, but in the end those elements are a small (if vocal) minority generally born of ignorance. An insular culture such as this is best changed from the inside, through authentic engagement, through the building of progressive guilds and hilarious webseries, through creative construction rather than discursion and deconstruction.
Players on every continent sampled World of Warcraft’s pleasures, both sacred and profane, but those in Asia had a much different experience. I note first that WoW has only ever been officially released in two Asian countries: South Korea and China, about which more in a moment. Everyone else on that side of the globe played the American release, buying their games on eBay, using VPNs to connect, and getting redeemable game time cards shipped around the world. Suffering from constant latency issues due to geographic distance, they congregated in their own guilds on West Coast servers to try to minimize the annoyance. WoW was the biggest game in the world, and this was their only way to play it. In Japan, WoW was never more than an afterthought—for all that nation’s love of video games, they prefer their own. American-made titles have never been popular.
Korea and China represented special opportunities for Blizzard and its parent company, Vivendi Universal Games (which merged with Activision in 2008 to become Activision Blizzard). The former is a country of fifty million people, a market typically too small for American game companies to invest much in penetrating, but Korea is a unique exception. Government initiatives have made it the most Internet-connected nation in the world, and its citizens absolutely adore video games. They love Blizzard’s games in particular—1998’s StarCraft took Korea by storm, to the degree that it is often, without a trace of irony, called the national sport. StarCraft II may have been the republic’s most eagerly anticipated entertainment release of all time. Professional e-sports got their start in Korea, where top gamers are legitimate celebrities accosted on the streets. Blizzard properties and characters achieve Disney levels of recognition. Most American MMORPGs never appear in Korea, but WoW was a risk-free proposition.
WoW’s Korean servers opened in January 2005, a month before the European servers would go online but with a much different business model. Blizzard’s practice for their North American, Australian, and European launches, wherein customers went to a store and bought a piece of software to install on their personal machines, simply wouldn’t work for Asian markets. Koreans see gaming as a public and social practice. Massive Internet connectivity and rapidly evolving hardware made the in-home PC—a staple of American gaming life, a critical component to the tired trope of portly losers in basements—an odd contrivance, one most Koreans were happy to eschew. Most gaming in Korea occurs in Internet cafés, stocked by their proprietors with row after row of flashing flatscreens, boasting extensive menus of food and drink. Gamers pay for time on the machines rather than time on their accounts, with Blizzard ultimately drawing its revenue from the proprietors rather than players themselves. Some cafés include sleeping capsules, or premium facilities with superior computer hardware. Koreans flock to these social hubs at all hours of the day and night, occasionally indulging in hair-raising binges. Every so often a truly troubled individual will perish—or worse, fatally neglect a child at home—and as those horror stories are the only press that gaming cafés receive internationally, they’re what Americans think of first.
But people build real and lasting relationships at these places. They meet their spouses at cafés, congregate with school friends, establish interests and identities apart from those expressed at home. Many of my fondest adolescent memories are of all-night LAN parties with friends in someone’s basement, creating the same kind of immersive private space Asian gamers have come to expect. While that same physical proximity has its drawbacks—scuffles over in-game drama, a potential element of danger introduced to women, trans people, and other out-groups (very real in homogeneous and sexually conservative societies)—it’s the established way of life for gamers in much of the world.
The cyber café phenomenon extends to China, a nation much larger than Korea but not nearly so open. The government strictly regulates Chinese access to Western networks and so American developers looking to access the Chinese market must adapt their games appropriately. “Anti-obsession” mechanisms severely weaken any avatar playing more than three hours without logging out for at least five. Characters may not smoke tobacco or drink liquor. Chinese culture holds no particular mores about bones or the undead, but the government discourages explicit references to death. Undead avatars may not show exposed bones, and dead characters who resurrect find their corpse replaced not with a skeleton but with a gravestone.
With the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, censorship loomed as high and dark and unyielding as Icecrown Citadel itself. The new content, premised largely on undead armies, rankled Chinese officials and doomed the game to an uphill battle. Lord Marrowgar, a raid boss built entirely of bone, received such an imaginative artistic reworking that non-Chinese players expressed regret at their own model (grimly overwrought like the logo for a black metal band). The new death knight player class nearly found itself excised from the expansion entirely; in the end it remained, instead called a fade knight. Bureaucratic infighting between the General Administration of Press and Publications and the Ministry of Culture further muddied the waters. Blizzard decided to switch Chinese distributors, and the resulting server migrations took the game offline entirely for three months. Policy disputes between the Chinese and US governments, entirely unrelated to WoW, made regulatory snarls even trickier to resolve.
Wrath of the Lich King would eventually launch, eighteen months late, and players had barely enjoyed the content when, ten months later, the Cataclysm expansion coasted through censors to land on Chinese shores. In 2012 Mists of Pandaria, with its China-themed artwork and lore, faced no obstacles, and Chinese players were tackling new challenges just days after their American and European counterparts. For the first time, they felt they could compete on equal ground for world-first achievements, and Chinese raiding guilds (particularly the legendary Stars) have been fiercely competing for these honors ever since. Warlords of Draenor similarly saw no substantial challenges to overseas release. The People’s Republic of China continues to take a strong interest in video games as a component of culture, and their officials fret openly over gaming addiction, but China has made its peace with WoW, and Blizzard clearly intends to keep the cyber cafés humming for as long as its millions of fans will stay.
China’s affection for WoW loomed large as late as summer 2016, when the big-budget Hollywood film Warcraft appeared in theaters worldwide. Directed by promising young director Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code), the movie was made through a collaboration between Blizzard Entertainment, Legendary Pictures (acquired by Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate, in January of that year), and venerable American studio Universal Pictures. Its plot loosely tracked the 1994 strategy game Warcraft, set a generation before the events of World of Warcraft. Players immediately recognized such series stalwarts as the tragically corrupted wizard Medivh, his youthful apprentice Khadgar, and the insidious orc warlock Gul’dan. Critics, however, held no standing affection for these characters and roundly panned the movie. It was compared, in some publications, to John Travolta’s legendarily atrocious vanity project Battlefield Earth, widely considered among the worst movies of all time. Where fans of the series thrilled to see their favorite fantasy world brought to Hollywood life—I had to restrain myself from shouting in the theater at the appearance of tower steward Moroes, whose ghostly remains are a boss in The Burning Crusade—critics saw mush. More than a few reviews included “game over” jokes. I’m obviously not an objective viewer, and can understand why viewers who weren’t already fans of the source material might not have liked the movie. But judged on the terms of Hollywood blockbusters in 2016, it really wasn’t that bad. For all the critical savagery, Warcraft grossed north of $430 million in theaters, representing about a $15 million loss for its parent studios: neither a success nor a flop. Sequels have been greenlit for less.
Media commentators were surprised by how the revenue fell out. Less than $50 million came from US audiences, whereas Chinese filmgoers coughed up over $200 million. Hollywood has long relied on foreign revenues to bolster action franchises like the Fast & Furious movies (speeding cars translate better across cultures than dialogue), but this volume of Chinese turnout was something new. It suggested Hollywood films could make money even if they bypassed American audiences altogether, so long as they sprang from widely known franchises—and after twelve years at or near the center of online culture, few properties command more recognition than World of Warcraft.
But there is no greater emblem of WoW’s world renown than Leeroy. Leeroy has endured since the dawn, as far back as anyone remembers, so long ago consecrated into legend, such a cultural totem that it seems Leeroy has always existed. I speak, as you know, of Leeroy Jenkins, the single most famous World of Warcraft player in history.
In May 2005 most WoW players were still in the process of leveling. Those at level 60 worked their way slowly and painfully through endgame content frequently beset by glitches and poorly implemented mechanics. “Broken” would be a kind word. The “whelp room” of Upper Blackrock Spire earned itself a high rank amid the game’s frustrations—every single player who ever set foot in the instance wiped in that room at least once—and so when an unknown guild from the Laughing Skull server posted a wipe video on popular site Warcraft Movies (YouTube was not then the worldwide phenomenon it has become) titled “A Rough Go,” everyone thought she knew what to expect. She, whoever she was, would have been wrong. What started as “A Rough Go” quickly became the most popular video on the site by a Kalimdor mile and became immortalized as “the Leeroy Jenkins video.”
I don’t want to describe it in much detail, both because doing so would water down the experience of watching the actual video, and because anyone reading this has almost certainly seen it. If not, take three minutes out of your life to do so. The setup is simple enough: a raid group discusses their strategy for negotiating the swarms of dragon whelps in the rookery, only to have a paladin named Leeroy Jenkins jump the gun and charge in, screaming his own name as a war cry. The entire party suffers fiery deaths. Nothing about the video’s production or action is particularly noteworthy; the payoff moments charm, but they’re hardly hysterical. Still, something in those three minutes captures the imagination. The video is almost certainly staged, an assertion over which Leeroy himself (in reality a lighting technician named Ben Schulz) has always been coy. “I like people to decide for themselves,” he likes to say. “It’s more fun that way.” I don’t find that question interesting; I’m fascinated by the response to the video, by its eternal life in online memehood.
With countless mirrors uploaded over the years it’s impossible to tell how many views Leeroy Jenkins has accrued. Let us conservatively place the sum in the tens of millions. It is entirely possible more people have seen the video than have ever played WoW itself. I vividly remember a moment just weeks after the video’s release when, during a pickup basketball game with college dormmates, a large and unathletic man with the ball at the top of the key suddenly bellowed “LEEEEROOOYYY JEEEENNKINS” and drove to the hoop like a wounded bison affixed to the prow of a locomotive. He missed. I remember laughing at the display, thinking, That’s funny, Dan doesn’t play WoW. I remember noticing I wasn’t the only one laughing—almost everyone on the court was doubled over with laughter. They’d all seen the video. It was an eerie sensation, hearing an in-joke only weeks into its existence, seeing my peers collectively fall about, knowing not one of them played the game Dan was referencing. It may be difficult to appreciate at this late date in human affairs, but there was once a time when references to online memes based on subscriber-only video games did not generally induce laughter in human beings.
Years to come would see Schulz interviewed on NPR and numerous print outlets, make convention appearances, work as a broadcaster for WoW arena tournaments, and appear bellowing his famous name for Jimmy Fallon’s “We Are the World (of Warcraft),” earning the montage’s biggest audience cheer though few could ever have recognized his face. Blizzard at first recognized Leeroy with a special achievement awarding the avatar title “Jenkins” to anyone who slew fifty rookery whelps in fifteen seconds. The Warlords of Draenor expansion updated Upper Blackrock Spire to include Leeroy as an NPC players can choose to assist (again, for the title “Jenkins”). There is just something fun about Leeroy, a boundless enthusiasm indifferent to consequence, a pure silliness: traits that ultimately came to define an entire generation’s tastes. Whether we’re discussing LOLcat pictures, PewDiePie videos on YouTube, or Jimmy Fallon himself playing silly games with Hollywood celebrities, this whimsical approach is the gold standard of online humor. Featuring homemade production values, a staid setup transitioning to explosive mayhem, an approach layering goofiness over apparent naturalism, and (most important!) at least one infinitely repeatable catchphrase, “A Rough Go” is an early but complete primer in viral hit-making.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Schulz and his comrades never made any money off their wildly popular creation. Machinima videos can’t generally be copyrighted, as the art and game worlds depicted therein don’t belong to the filmmakers and thus can’t be traditionally monetized. Today countless video services kick advertising income back to their most popular creators, but ten years ago the idea of viral video sensations was relatively new. Schulz and company may have staged their famous video, but they were clearly not prepared for what became of it—and who, in 2005, could have been? Today anyone with viral success knows to trademark and promote their characters, ideas, and catchphrases. Models exist to follow. Not so for Schulz and his guild, PALS FOR LIFE, who found themselves late to their own party and remained in obscurity.
Proceeding in tandem with players’ real lives regardless of their station or celebrity, WoW offered both emotional refuge and personal growth. WoW opened new perspective, offering an alternate timeline by which to record our lives. Because we expected that separation, it was both jarring and thrilling to see ever-increasing intersections with the familiar offline world around us. Pop culture swallowed Azeroth whole, and all parties were shocked at how easily it went down, how quickly everything changed to recognize us MMOers—we who’d long since grown comfortable being outsiders.
Of course, one cannot separate this story from the Internet at large. WoW grew alongside it, having the good fortune to emerge at the moment broadband was spreading like wildfire across the United States8 and the creative chops to stand as the biggest and best online game in existence. World of Warcraft abounds with puns and referential jokes, keeping an otherwise staid high fantasy world from ever feeling heavy. Whether you’re meeting a big-game-hunting dwarven analogue to Ernest Hemingway or rolling your eyes at the achievement called “Vrykul Story, Bro,” playing WoW always feels like a tour around the Internet’s sunniest climes.
Millions of people learned to use the Internet and WoW simultaneously; still more officially linked their online and offline personas for the very first time. As with all great achievements, whether in culture or science, what was once revolutionary has become established—a feature of the landscape, accepted, assumed, inescapable. So the Internet must seem to have always existed, though its whole lifetime is subsumed by our own, though at every step and stage we watched its development. Our speech, our deeds, and even our thoughts have grown to accommodate these features. They mark our time as surely as presidential election cycles, and so I believe there will be until the day of our species’ extinction at least one soul living who remembers Leeroy Jenkins.