On a slightly more serious lighter note...

Annals of the Homestarmy

Wednesday, May 17. 2006

Posted by Ancient of Days in Gathering Darkness

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On a slightly more serious lighter note...

There's a discussion going on over at Terra Nova where one blogger insists that the Horde is evil, and that anyone who plays Horde is inherently evil as well.

After having played through Warcraft III, and played WoW on both sides of the conflict, I have to say that I couldn't possibly disagree more. The Alliance, to me, is the far more evil of the two groups. It was through the greed and rapine of the world by the humans and the night elves that most of the tragedy was brought about. The Horde is like the American Indian (Tauren themes, anyone?): portrayed as evil by a bunch of greedy, destructive, selfish humans.

Based on his essay, I can only believe that he'd conclude that I hate my own race. I'd say that's probably true, to some extent. As a general rule, I'm not particularly proud to be a member of the race responsible for so much of the suffering in our past, especially given that I'm not very many generations removed from German anscestry of which I'm particularly displeased.

I look at the behaviour of the Alliance on Maelstrom and I see echos of our own past: abuse, greed, selfishness, and disrespect are rampant amount the Alliance on every server I've played on thus far, while the Horde generally tends to be more open, sharing, and although perhaps a bit more anarchic, the natural result of that appears to be a higher level of general respect for the anonymous individual. These are simply *my* experiences.

The one other point he made that I'd like to respond to is regarding his child. I'm not sure if it's he or I that has done something "wrong", but both my 5 year old and my 1 year old are fascinated by the Undercity. I've never actually played an Undead, but I party with them on a fairly regular basis, and neither of my children has shown any fear of the character models.

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Mad Giggler on :

It's funny, because this gets brought up quite often on the General forums hosted by Blizzard. It's quite clear that the Orcs and Trolls are the most noble of the races. The Forsaken clearly have their own agenda (all those quests to develop a new plague). The trolls seem to have backed off their cannibalistic heritage to partner with the Orcs and Tauren.

The Humans won't even protect their own (I haven't played through the human lands much, but I understand that there are zones that have been begging Stormwind for help and their pleas have been ignored.) They are even being led by Onyxia, a dragon. The Night Elves are xenophobic, and their blundering has exacted a large price in blood from the denizens of Azeroth. The gnomes flooded their home city with radioactive goo, poisoning many of their own. The dwarves seem to be ok.

Fictional world, blah blah blah. I don't think anyone claiming that playing Horde is evil has a leg to stand on.

Wren on :

And, after all, what's wrong with a little anarchy?

I mean...except for the...inherent problems with anarchist society. *cough*

But I couldn't agree more. It's the alliance that unleashed the undead plagues all over, and it's the alliance that broke the peace agreements, as far as I remember.

Plus, I don't find anything wrong with the Undead of WoW. They're skinny. And hunch-y. But they run in a straight line despite their obvious physical problems with structural objective.

Mad Giggler on :

I also loved this rebuttal to the essay:

Well, on a purely factual level, there are some problems here. Orcs have children and charitable works: there's an orphanage in Orgrimmar. The Orcish leadership is not aware, within the game's fiction, of the Forsaken's darker plans, which puts them a step above the United States at various times in our own history. And it's pretty obvious from their actions (rather than their rhetoric) that the Alliance races value war just as much as the Horde races: it was the Alliance which started the current war by colonizing Horde territory.

Also, obviously, whatever the scripting of the NPC's says, the behavior of Alliance player characters is essentially indistinguishable from that of Horde player characters.

Lastly, it's ridiculous to argue that the gut reactions of 3-year-olds are a good way of measuring good and evil. I imagine most 3-year-olds find tarantulas pretty frightening; does that make them evil? Maybe one of the appealing things about Horde is that it belies the identification of "pretty" and "good".

Mad Giggler on :

Oooh! And this one:

Imagine a game in which you have the choice of playing as a German WW2-era concentration camp administrator and your goal is to gather and kill as many Jews as possible. I would never make that choice. WW2-era Germany was the site of much evil, evil that took place in the real world. I would not want to associate myself with that particular evil in a game. I don't have the same feelings about taking the German side in a game like Squad Leader or Battlefield 1942, but the faint echo of those feelings is still there, even in games like those.

Orcs, on the other hand, are an allegorical construction, they have never existed in the real world, nor committed any acts of evil there. As such, I'd argue that they carry considerably less moral weight than you're trying to put on them. The fact is that the "market" (i.e., the players of World of Warcraft) does not place the same value on Orcs that you do. Evil in the WoW market has been so completely discounted as to be almost meaningless. I would even go so far as to say that the fantasy evil that Orcs represent does not have much value in the broader market. Orcs simply aren't shocking or scary or even very evil anymore to almost anyone over the age of 12. The world -- apart from those few who have bothered to open their OEDs -- does not understand the word Orc in its Old English sense. At this point, the world probably doesn't even understand Orc as an artifact of Tolkien but rather as one of Peter Jackson.

Besides which, there is vast cultural near-sightedness here: do you think Indians or Arabs or Chinese share this centuries-old notion of Orcs, or do the easterners who play WoW, of which there are many, have an understanding of the word that is of much more recent vintage? By that reckoning, the market most decidedly does not share the Old English understanding of the word. We Anglophones simply don't have the apples to make it so.

In any case, the world understands "Orc" as a fantasy construct, one that does not, has never and will never threaten anything real and/or living. Playing an Undead character does not constitute "an open and public acceptance [of] a patently evil society." There is no such society to accept or reject. I'm sure there is some kind of undereducated logical fallacy I'm committing here, but I still maintain that the choice of Orc or Undead vs. Human or Night Elf carries far less moral weight than the choice of concentration camp administrator vs. American leatherneck.

I'm not denying that avatars have deep connections to real people, by the way. I think that's something that's forgotten too often. But I think perhaps the thing that bothers me most about your analysis is that it completely denies the person behind the avatar any opportunity to be a moral actor in the world. In my view, *how* you choose to inhabit the fiction of a game world is far more important than which branch of that fiction you choose to inhabit. What if you did take the role of the German concentration camp administrator in the imaginary game posed above, but instead of putting people to death you managed to gather many thousands of Jews and then ship them off to safety. Can that player still said to be welcoming or condoning evil only by virtue of the fact that he or she is inhabiting a symbol of evil in the game world? Where is the player's moral agency here? Does it really end at the choice of faction? There are indeed faint echoes of the unconscious, the mystical, the religious and the spiritual to be found in these worlds. But what's so wonderful about that is that they are echoes of the things we are doing there *now*, they are the sounds of a new kind of mysticism being created by the power that *players* are given. To me, that power far outweighs the faint echo of Old English that does not even reach most people's ears.

Mad Giggler on :

One more:

I rather see that Blizzard is playing against the grain of the usual alignment of races in its fictions. Blizzard was quite conscious of the (modern) history of orcs as a stock "evil" race when they transformed Warcraft III into a tale of the redemption of the race from the historical, rather than racial, characteristics that aligned it with the demonic.

That is where I think the Warcraft millieu is the most interesting - in its implicit critique of the racist ontology of modern Western family, by which race is moral destiny (the Catholic Tolkein himself struggled with the problem of orc redemption - if orcs were irredeemable, then they lack free will; if they lack free will, then they cannot be damned. Yet he disallows the possibility of orc redemption. In an sense, he could be described as having been caught between two different metaphysics, one of which derived from the British Imperial experience of other cultures, the other derived from Christian moral theology.)

Blizzard went the interesting route of challenging the fantasy-race-as-moral-destiny principle while still leaving in the network of signs by which 'evil' is recognized by humans (or, by the modern West, at least.) If they had simply reversed the formula, and made orcs into poor misunderstood innocents, I think it would have been less interesting. Instead, there are networks - and not monopoles - of ideology within both the horde and the alliance that are compelling.

Remember that both sides are capable of producing warlocks, that magic in the Warcraft fiction has a natural tendency towards the demonic, and that the less destructive alternative - shamanism - is a practice of the Horde. It is not unusual for people I know to identify the Orcs or Taurens as morally prefereable to the industrializing, rationalizing humans and dwarves, to see the latter as suspect, all the while retaining the signs that usually mark the 'good' and the 'evil' (glowing white auras, knighly imagery and white castles for the humans - bone-and-tusk architecture, green skin, and tribalism for the Orcs) in traditional fantasy.

Mad Giggler on :

I wish there were an easier way to edit these than by manually changing the entry in the database. I meant that orcs and taurens are the most noble - as Anne so correctly pointed out to me. I covered trolls later in the same paragraph.

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