“At least I’m not Chinese, gay, or female”: Marginalized voices in World of Warcraft

Abstract

World of Warcraft, the world's most popular massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), is a virtual world set in a fantasy-style environment where millions of players from around the world can interact with each other through avatars and in the game's multiple text chat channels. The game has existed since 2004 with multiple game expansions and additions to the story and world, which has created an ongoing gaming experience for the players. Because of its relatively long history and international player base, World of Warcraft provides an interesting site for analysis of player interaction and identity; by acting through an avatar and text chat, players can remain relatively anonymous, which can provide an element of identity leveling and play (Paasonen 2005).However, the setting of World of Warcraft is not immersive due to one particular aspect of player interaction, which is the widespread adoption of voice chat to facilitate communication. Because much of the control of the avatar is done with the keyboard in addition to using the same keyboard for typing in text chat, players have adopted voice chat using various voice-over-IP software programs to facilitate communication while playing the game. This use of communication technology intersects with a widespread stereotype of the identity of the average player of online games. The use of the voice adds additional information to the communication context and removes part of the anonymity of communication in the game, leading to identity-based repercussions for players who do not fit the stereotype of the average player. This chapter investigates how communicative mode -the use of text versus voice chat -interacts with certain stigmatized identities in World of Warcraft and how players develop strategies of communication to mitigate the negative repercussions of revealing their identities. Furthermore, this work explores the implications of silencing the marked voices and identities in the game.To illustrate how communication type and identity interact, I will first provide an example in the form of a narrative of an event from my ethnographic study of World of Warcraft. Following this narrative, I will explain the methodology used to collect such narratives and experiences from players of the game, and then provide some background information about the research on language use in virtual worlds that informed this study. The subsequent analysis section first presents background and observations about two groups of players who do not fit the stereotype of a WoW player: players who are not male and/or not heterosexual, and players who are not American or not American-sounding. To conclude the analysis section, the strategies employed by these two groups when communicating in World of Warcraft are presented. The chapter ends with discussions of implications of these strategies on perceptions of the voice and identity of the player base. Ethnographic introductionYou are an average player of the online game World of Warcraft, and you log in one night to ...