coalpot

Reflections on “The Familiar and the Foreign: Playing (Post) Colonialism in World of Warcraft,” by Jessica Langer. In (Eds.) Digital Culture, Play, and Identity.

In this article Langer (2008) notes that the computer game World of Warcraft presents contesting sides in the binary of good vs. evil, but warns that such a simplistic analysis of the game’s Alliances and Hordes misses important dialectics of its metanarrative. Instead, she advises that it may be more instructive to examine the tensions through the interplay of “familiarity and otherness” (p.4). She writes, “The assumptions of good and evil that derive from these characterizations are not direct, but are rather symptoms of a common Western cultural association of foreignness and insidiousness, an association that itself derives from Western colonial ideologies” (p.87-88).

Langer (2008) employs post-colonial theory to argue that the game primarily delineates the Alliance and Horde teams along racial lines that highlight themes of familiarity and otherness. She also posits that unlike the real world, which constructs race socially, the game develops racial distinctions biologically (p.88).

She joins Nakaruma (2002) and Fernandez (1999) in pointing to constructions of inequality through virtual modalities in cyberspace to show their inherent destructiveness (p.89). She draws a comparative representation of racial representations in the game and racial constructions in contemporary society. She notes, “I contend that in terms of correspondence with the real world, race in World of Warcraft functions thus: trolls correspond directly with black Caribbean folk, particularly but not exclusively Jamaican; tauren represents native North American people (specifically Native American and Canadian First Nation tribes); humans correspond with white British and white American people; and dwarves correlate to the Scottish” (p.89).

  

In her analysis, Langer (2008) analyzes the differing characterizations of these races in the games, highlighting its social tropes, constructions of power, and hierarchies to see how notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ eventually come to bear on players’ judgments. She writes, “The depictions of subaltern cultures to be found in World of Warcraft are not nuanced representations; rather, they are processed, generalized cultural memes, thrown in to give each race its own flavor. The purpose is to reinforce a particular feeling or atmospheric sense about the race in question” (p.91).

Langer (2008) invokes Edward Said’s controversial theory of Orientalism to settle on her subscription to the notion that Western media tend to have a ‘love hate’ relationship with Othered peoples, on one hand idealizing them and on the other dehumanizing them. (p.93). She pinpoints the games attention to the physiology and physiognomy of its characters in establishing stereotypical and inauthentic representations of nativity. She notes, “Furthermore, these bodies deliberately suggest not the actual bodies of people from real-world cultures but rather stereotypical representations of those bodies” (p.104)

_______________________________________________________________


Langer, J. (2008). “The Familiar and the Foreign: Playing (Post) Colonialism in World of Warcraft,” In  G. Corneliussen & J.W. Rettberg (Eds.), Digital Culture, Play, and Identity. (87-108) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press