Article What Makes an Orc? Racial Cosmos and Emergent Narrative in World of Warcraft

This article offers a new method of reading racial narrative in massive multiplayer online games. Rather than looking to the game text or the behaviors of individual players, it focuses on collective emergent behavior and demographics. From this perspective, the various racial group in World of Warcraft (WoW) take on their on unique characteristics that inform the broader WoW narrative. These differences result from the collective playing decisions of millions of gamers, influenced by the text, and also popular culture, game mechanics, and innumerable other factors. Keywords emergence, World of Warcraft, race, narrative, massive multiplayer online games, cosmos, spontaneous order In 2009, hundreds of World of Warcraft (WoW) players virtually gathered their underwear-clad Gnome avatars and held a ‘‘Gnome Tea Party’ ’ to protest their col-lective marginalization and subordination within the game. The protestors argued that the dominant WoW narrative, formalized in the rules and script of the game, automatically disadvantages and subordinates their characters. In response, WoW creator Blizzard Entertainment Inc closed the accounts of any protestor who refuse