Why the humans are white: Fantasy, modernity, and the rhetorics of racism in World of Warcraft

This dissertation analyzes constructions and representations of racial identity in the world's most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, vis-à-vis the ideological and political-economic history of racism in the United States. Chapter 1 uses Ken McAllister's Grammar of Gameworks to map the game's racial design and its ideological influences. Chapter 2 shows how WoW operates upon biologistic definitions of race and then traces those definitions' historical and literary origins from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century. Chapter 3 offers multimodal rhetorical analyses of the game's ten playable races, finding each to be a pastiche of nostalgic, Eurocentric representations. Chapter 4 uses Ian Bogost's theory of procedural rhetoric to interpret the meanings generated in the context of WoW's player-versus-player combat, which splits its players into permanently warring, racially divided factions. It concludes that although WoW offers a simulation of racist war, the game (and its players) have avoided mainstream labeling as racist by re-framing the conflict in terms of nationalism, following the racial discourse of the “War on Terror.” Finally, through a critical reflection on my own continuing participation in the game, I discuss the ways that white privilege and neoliberalism let players ignore or sidestep the many varieties of racism inherent in WoW and other fantasy games. Ultimately, I argue that World of Warcraft is a metaphor for the ambivalence that mainstream U.S. culture feels as it questions modernity's ways of being and communicating, but has yet to shift into the next paradigm.