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Oh, WoW!

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World of Warcraft, or WoW, is like the Red Hot Chili Peppers of the massively
multiplayer online roleplaying genre: not only [3]is it still going strong but
it’s also somehow even bigger than you thought. World of Warcraft’s current
numbers aren’t public, but [4]one recent educated guess came in at 7 million
paying subscribers, which, at $15 / month, would make the game a billion-dollar
earner by itself. Its developer, Blizzard, merged with Activision in 2008, and
Microsoft gobbled up both companies in 2022, but World of Warcraft remains a
load-bearing spine of the newly formed corporate turducken. The game that
redefined gold mining for the 21st century is still a 19th-century gold mine
for its landlords. 

It’s also thriving in a subscription ecosystem that it helped to legitimize.
World of Warcraft debuted in 2004, during an era when you still had to buy
games in boxes from stores. The runaway success of Blizzard’s always-on portal
to Azeroth proved that, for the right product, studios could charge a recurring
fee beyond the initial cost of the core game’s (at the time) formidable five
installation CDs. Here, in the enshittified 2020s, we’ve all grown used to
renting our culture by the month, but it was genuinely pathbreaking for World
of Warcraft to have 12 million subscribers at its peak in 2010. It didn’t
invent the monthly model, which had already gained traction in games like
Ultima Online and EverQuest during the dawn of the massively multiplayer online
roleplaying game (MMORPG) genre. But World of Warcraft’s success took that
recurring charge mainstream and helped popularize the unassailable business
logic that having your customers pay you once was worse than having them pay
you until they decided or remembered to stop. 

As World of Warcraft turns 20, its enduring financial success arguably pales in
comparison to its cultural significance. I asked Angela Washko, a new-media
artist who staged several notable performance pieces inside the game world,
what she considered World of Warcraft’s biggest contribution, for better or
worse. “World of Warcraft expanded the notion of what public space was,” she
told me. “I saw the bonds created amongst members of my guilds moving beyond
the game space, as players flew across the country to meet each other.”
Everyone I talked to about World of Warcraft’s legacy seemed to mention someone
or other getting married, either in the game itself or here in reality after
meeting in the game. “I think the degree of immersion and dissolving of the
boundary between ‘real life’ and ‘fantasy’ within World of Warcraft was really
a turning point in computing culture,” Washko said, adding that World of
Warcraft “changed the conversation around video games from being something that
was ‘an escape from everyday life’ to something that was an extension of one’s
social life and happened to take place in a virtual environment.” 

Through her own work, Washko also explored the less savory side of a fantasy
game populated by real people; her [5]Council on Gender Sensitivity and
Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft involved traveling from town to town
to educate passersby about feminism and discuss how the game’s dominant culture
often created a hostile environment for its marginalized players. I recalled my
own playing days, when you could be flying into a town on your hippogryph,
minding your own business, only to be deluged by a wave of sewer-grade hate
speech on a public text channel. We now take it for granted that online spaces
reflect the social dynamics of the people who occupy them, including and
especially the problematic ones, but in many ways, World of Warcraft was the
kobold in this particular coal mine.

I first encountered the Warcraft universe like many ’90s computer kids: as a
series of top-down, real-time strategy games about economic management and
cartoon fantasy violence. The world (lowercase) of Warcraft pitted the
seemingly noble Alliance (humans, elves, dwarves, your Tolkienesque usual
suspects) against the villainized Horde (orcs, trolls, and other stock
monster-humanoids from the trope factory) in a
vicious-with-a-touch-of-slapstick conflict spanning three main titles and
numerous expansions between 1994 and 2003. If no one was using the phone, you
could play against your friends over a modem. The series had a rich and goofy
aesthetic of exaggerated proportions, saturated colors, and sarcastic jokes.
The units that ran your economy were literal simpering peons, which gave
everything a barrel-shaped, vaguely comedic flavor that played well against the
high-gloss cinematic interludes that would become Blizzard’s calling card.

Flush with revenues from its flagship series, Blizzard began exploring how it
might expand Warcraft’s popular lore into other types of games. First, a
point-and-click game called Warcraft Adventures — a late-1990s attempt at
LucasArts-style vintage puzzle-solving in a cel-shaded take on the mythos — was
infamously canceled for not meeting Blizzard’s internal release standards. (It
also leaked, fully playable, not too long ago. Based on what I’ve seen,
Blizzard was right.) Then, starting in 2001, an experimental team of a few
dozen people got busy building a whole new engine that would bring Azeroth into
3D for the first time and let players meet, socialize, and slaughter skeletons
together. It was a primordial example of the modern phenomenon where a
corporation exploits its intellectual property by jumping genres and colonizing
a new medium. It was also how they’d get me.

There are plenty of humbling ways to use Gmail’s internal search function,
especially if you’ve had your account for roughly as long as World of Warcraft 
has existed. For one example, consider my collected personal correspondence
surrounding World of Warcraft, from the peak years of its involvement in my
life. When I queried “Warcraft before:2007/1/1,” it yielded about two dozen
results, and together, they trace a blunt biography of that moment: landing a
big new job; getting hella dumped; and “spending two months as an antisocial
hermit,” as I told a friend in a Gchat in early 2006. (And how about World of
Warcraft outliving Gchat?) 

Reviewing the private record, it’s clear World of Warcraft tore through my life
like an experienced raiding party of max-level grinders through the Deadmines.
Admittedly, it was the kind of nymph-stage young adult life that was
conceptually made of crepe paper and easily shredded by a video game. But
something about the predictable rhythm of ordering junk food delivery after an
exhausting workday, logging onto World of Warcraft, and hopping through some
lush environment searching for herbs to make into sellable virtual potions just
drew me in, one night after another.

This aspect of World of Warcraft — its knack for blurring the line between work
and fun until the casual observer might not quite recognize it as either —
often came up when I spoke to others about their experiences. “One thing WoW
proved on a large scale is that people will turn a game into a job at the
slightest provocation,” said Cory O’Brien, now a narrative and level designer
for games like Redfall and HoloVista. “I remember spending hours and hours and
hours grinding for dust so that I could enchant magic items. I remember
smelting tin and copper to make bronze.” The elaborate crafting system in World
of Warcraft, which often required materials gained through repetitive in-game
labor, represented an explosion in the popularity of the now-ubiquitous
mechanic where you, as a player, find some stuff and turn it into something
else. “I still play all these more recent games like Minecraft, Project
Zomboid, and Valheim that are literally just that crafting part,” O’Brien told
me. “I spend so much time doing monotonous, repetitive tasks, for free, because
somehow we have discovered that that’s fun.” Here, in 2024, it’s hard not to
feel a vaguely sinister undertone to all of this as the rising tides of
capitalistic overreach gamify the gig economy and hijack the natural human
affinity for rewards for their own extractive purposes. But to Washko’s point
about an expanded social life, one reason this all worked is that you were
often helping out real people, with “legitimate needs” in the scope of the
game. You were rarely just doing these things for yourself.

It wasn’t always exactly a waste, either. Andrew Simone, now a project manager
in tech, attributes a large swath of his professional tool kit to skills he
gained as a guild leader in World of Warcraft. “I actually stopped playing WoW
largely because I felt like I was managing my guild more than my actual
professional jobs,” he told me, proceeding to outline a frightening slate of
workplace-flavored tasks that included interviewing prospective guild
candidates, analyzing performance metrics from the game’s multiuser boss
fights, dealing with in-guild sexual harassment, managing schedules across the
world to hold meetings about all these things, writing guides for new members,
and even “cultivating a kind of guild culture so people enjoyed being there,”
which is an incredible thing to say about something that is already ostensibly
a game. I know there are countless former guild leaders reading this and
nodding along because their current workday docket has nothing on mediating a
10-way raiding party dispute over who should get the legendary enchanted
pauldrons that just dropped. 

On the other hand: plenty of it was a giant waste. I can’t tell you, back in
the day, how many hours I was technically playing World of Warcraft but 
ignoring the game itself while I sifted through, rearranged, and tested various
custom add-ons for its labyrinthine, fintech-ass user interface. World of
Warcraft is a persistent software ecosystem with clients and servers and all
kinds of data flying between them at all times — it’s just not necessarily
exposed to every player in full. An entire cottage industry of user-created UI
mods sprung up to assign repeatable actions to shortcut keys, or process
advanced analytics from game logs like Simone would do for his guild, or
implement an “[6]automatic goblin therapist” who answers any incoming whispers
to your character with an in-game implementation of the classic ELIZA protocol.
Letting players scratch their own itches for how the game felt to play was also
a clever way to limit complaints about the parts of it that weren’t as
polished. I never got much into the game’s advanced content myself, but for
those who did, pretty much the only way to follow the expected meta of guild
raids was to use externally designed UI add-ons. World of Warcraft had the
audacity to make players create their own custom cockpits for the game and
ended up creating a kind of recursive procrastination where you could even
distract yourself from your intended leisure activity. Anyone who’s ever
rearranged the app icons on their phone knows just how ubiquitous this kind of
time-consuming “metawork” has become.

Recently, I engaged in a more contemporary form of networked social
entertainment — sitting around a big TV with friends, watching four strangers
play a game together on Twitch. Just as things were picking up, the stream cut
out, and an algorithmically inserted video ad began to play: it was for World
of Warcraft. This was a group of mostly game designers, and before I had a
chance to say anything, someone else piped in to mention World of Warcraft was
20 years old now — and formally impactful enough that working game makers still
know its birthday.

Seeing that ad, writing this piece, none of it was enough to get me to
reinstall World of Warcraft. (It’s a good thing the game never stooped to
making you feed your in-game pets.) I didn’t really feel I had to replay the
game to measure its influence because its influence is everywhere. Every
monthly subscription, in-game economy, or digital “third place” where lives
bleed into online connections owes it some spiritual recognition as prior art;
those things have all become inescapable. Twenty years later, we are all living
in the World of Warcraft.

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References:

[1] https://www.theverge.com/e/24011096
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[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hot_Chili_Peppers_2022%E2%80%932024_Global_Stadium_Tour
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHDFgZAuJHU
[5] https://angelawashko.com/section/300206-The%20Council%20on%20Gender%20Sensitivity%20and%20Behavioral%20Awareness%20in%20World%20of%20Warcraft.html
[6] https://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info23151-AGT-AutomaticGoblinTherapist.html
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