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March 12, 2007
Me and my big dwarf nose: A Wired News column on race in online games
Finally I'm getting back to blogging after a ferocious two weeks of work! I have a big backlog of gaming columns I've written for Wired News that I need to post, so here's the first one: The column that ran today, musing about the issue of race inside online multiplayer worlds.
I'm slightly "eh" about this column, not because I dislike it but because it's kind of ... insufficient. The whole deal about race inside fantasy worlds has been eloquently debated by tons of brilliant people for a couple of decades now, and indeed, there's been plenty of great online discussion about what the heck is going on with the races in games like World of Warcraft (some of which I link to below) -- so this column feels like I'm barely scraping the surface. Then again, "barely scraping the surface" is pretty much the dictionary definition of most journalism, so whaddya gonna do.
Forthwith:
Playing the master race
Why is racism considered bad in the real world -- but part of the fun in online games?
By Clive Thompson
When I log into the beta of the new Lord of the Rings game, the first thing I do is pick my race. I decide I'm going to be a dwarf: stolid, not so great with magic, but a superb brawler. The idea of being a slightly hotheaded man of the earth appeals to me. And pretty soon I'm engrossed in the task of trying out various big, honking noses.
That's when it suddenly hits me that this is a really weird, yet central part of online gaming: obsessing about your racial identity and appearance.
I don't mean "weird" in that it's unusual. Indeed, every online game begins with you carefully poring over a bouquet of races and picking your favorite. It's completely normal. No, what's weird is that this is crazily, dementedly out of step with how I act in my everyday world. In the real world, defining someone by his or her race is considered a classically illiberal act. But in games, racism -- making snap judgments about someone based solely on their skin and ethnic identity -- is absolutely central to gameplay.
I admit this might seem like a "whoa, dude" stoner epiphany. But the reason it came to mind is because I'm playing a Lord of the Rings game, and J.R.R. Tolkien basically invented the idea of fantasy race-based worlds. The people in Middle Earth were rigidly defined by their race. Hobbits were sensible, if unvisionary; elves were austere and aloof; orcs were unreservedly evil. It ain't where you're at -- it's where you're from. Mostly.
Indeed, Tolkien's obsessive devotion to race has provoked decades of blistering debates about whether his archetypes were thinly veiled allusions to real-life nationalities -- complete with rankings of which ones rocked and which ones sucked. The hobbits seemed like the stolid, sensible Victorian English folk that Tolkien adored; the goblins, with their evil technological genius, could be any scary European enemy army, like the second World War Germans. And the orcs, with their Indo-Asian features? Ahem. "I'm not going there," said Jeffrey Steefel, the executive producer of the Lord of the Rings online game, with a laugh when I called him to talk race.
Of course, you could argue that game designers adopted racial classifications for entirely different and more benign reasons. It wasn't, as with Tolkien, a way to meditate on human nature. It was just a great way to ensure diverse gameplay. Having different races in a game allows for a range of characters with different abilities: Dwarves have endurance, elves have magic, orcs have brute force. From a game-design perspective, dividing the world into races is much like dividing chess into six differently powered pieces. So on this level, you could ask, is the weirdly blatant nature of race in games a big deal?
Maybe not. Except that races inside games often seem to reflect, in a creepy way, some of our most regrettable biases about race in real life. For example, when World of Warcraft first came out, players were amused, stunned or both to discover that the evil trolls spoke in ... Jamaican accents. Aaron Delwiche, a game academic at Trinity University, asked his student Beth Cox to analyze all the "emotes" in World of Warcraft -- the spoken greetings or hand gestures Blizzard pre-programmed into each race. She found that Trolls were "disproportionately more likely to make violent or sexual statements," Delwiche notes. (Some of their sentences were even scripted in Ebonics: "You going to axe me out?" says the female Troll when you hit the "flirt" command.) In the same way, the "good" alliance characters tended to employ Western, Christian-like symbols, while the evil horde had totems and shamanistic magic. "Clearly, there's something interesting happening there, and it's not just coincidence," Delwiche adds.
There's evidence, too, that players bring their own racial biases into the game. When Nick Yee, a game academic at Stanford University, polled World of Warcraft players in 2005, he found that while there were nine possible races to choose from, a significant majority -- more than half of women and almost half of men -- chose to play as the two most "white-looking" and "pretty" races in the game: Humans and elves.
These racial preferences are so powerful that they've actually warped and bent the gameplay in curious ways. Yee discovered that the people as humans and elves tended to be newbies, whereas the "evil" characters -- like Orcs -- were played by younger, more hard-core gamers. The two things were related: It turns out that the whole reason experienced gamers picked "evil" characters is because they were sick of dealing with noobs, and wanted to get away from them. They picked a race that seemed intimidating and scary precisely because they wanted to be intimidating and scary, pretty much the way the death-metal kids at my high school crafted fashion and music to drive the preppies far away.
It throws to an even deeper and stranger question: Does the race that you play as affect your behavior in the game? Yee suspects it can, in possibly subconscious ways. In a new experiment he recently conducted, people who played with "pretty" avatars in an online game were more likely to confide in other players than those who chose intimidatingly mean-looking ones. (He controlled to ensure this wasn't just a matter of self-selection -- i.e., inherently reserved people voluntarily picking uglier avatars.)
The virtual skin you wear, it seems, can affect how you treat other people. "So you start to think, what does it mean to be in that avatar for 20 hours a week?" he asks. (If you want to read a truly spectacular debate on this subject, check out the sprawling thread "The Horde Is Evil" over at Terra Nova.)
Now, this obviously isn't a simple issue. The identities we pick online are not simple reflections of our real-life personas. On the contrary, most pundits have assumed that online worlds are more like identity sandboxes -- places we can screw around with different ways to be. I've run into "good" elves that were total jerks, undead villains who behaved in wonderfully altruistic ways and plenty of mincing hottie blood elves who turned out to be balding, middle-aged, married Ohio businessmen. Online games are our refuge from the linear politics of the real world, right?
I'd still like to think so. Though as I sit here tweaking my dwarf's nose, I admit I'm starting to wonder. Am I playing this character, or is it playing me?
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Having played WoW for a while, it's been obvious to me that a different player profile (as it were) selects the ugly Horde races than plays the pretty Alliance races.
I've played on a couple of different servers, and the Horde consistently kicks the Alliance's ass in the player-vs.-player battlegrounds (where groups square off against each other). It's become clear that, all other factors aside, the average Horde player is a more experienced, more engaged gamer than the average Alliance player.
Posted by: dbarefoot at March 12, 2007 5:22 PM
Yeah, that pretty much matches up with Yee's research, for sure!
Posted by: Clive at March 12, 2007 10:36 PM
Wow, this opened up a gazillion lines of thought for me.
First of all, I need to point out that the Narnia books make the Tolkien books look positively politically correct (I seem to recall lots of the evil characters being described as 'swarthy'). I have a friend who finds himself removing the racial descriptors on the fly when he reads CS Lewis books to his kids. Fortunately, there's a lot of good fantasy for kids that isn't all about the white man's burden.
Secondly, I'd be interested in the RL racial makeup of the people that Nick Yee polled; is there a relationship between one's real-world race and the race that one choosing to play?
Finally, as someone who's neither 'white-looking' nor 'pretty,' I mentally substituted 'one's whole life,' into the question, "...what does it mean to be in that avatar for 20 hours a week?" Which raises another question - how feasible would it be to use the controlled world of WoW as a petri dish to study how race schemas affect social interaction?
Posted by: debcha at March 13, 2007 11:11 AM
Yes, I've already begun to wonder what the hell I'm going to do if my son wants me to read him the Narnia books. The specific stuff you're talking about is Lewis' many references to the Calormenes -- the nation of swarthy, bearded, pointy-shoe wearing, scimitar-wielding, and, ultimately, Satan-worshipping guys to the south of Narnia. Their country is really big and sandy; it is an essentially undisguised reworking of the middle east from Lewis' time. Interestingly, the apocalypse that ends the world and ushers in paradise (as well as shrieking hellfire doom for unbelievers) at the end of the Lewis' final book, The Last Battle is precipitated by the Calormenes' successful invasion of Narnia. It perfectly and creepily mirrors the delight with which the hardcore American Christian apocalyptics regard the conflagrations in today's middle east, since they believe an open war that consumed that region would be the beginning of the much-desired-for end.
As for the RL racial makeup of WoW -- that's a really good question. I don't think Nick has that data, though I wouldn't be surprised if he collects it in the future. He's doing incredibly neat research.
As for your last question -- actually, I think this is precisely what Edward Castronova wants to do with online world games in his new position at Indiana University: To create new ones specifically for the purpose of conducting social and economic experiments! I don't know if he has experiments planned specifically to examine race schemas, but given his interest in this area, I'd bet he or one of his whipsmart grad students does it in the next few years.
Posted by: Clive at March 13, 2007 12:24 PM
Really liked your race/racism story on wired. I\'m sure you\'ll get lots of people emailing you about Star-Trek and subtle racial overtones there.
Another on-line realm where avatars and personas are created to symbolize personality traits is poker. Many people choose names that symbolize strength (like my name of DukeMuscle) while others try the opposite approach and think that they can sucker people into pots with names like "MyLittlePony." Some sites allow users to either upload their own avatars (can be a personal photo), or use existing avatars that are associated with different poker styles (donkeys=dumbasses, cowboy=reckless player, frankenstein=stoic and strong).
The difference between poker avatars and role playing characters, in my opinion, is that the appearance you create for poker is to help you financially, rather than socially.
Again, you wrote a great piece.
Posted by: AllanDuke at March 13, 2007 1:34 PM
Really liked your race/racism story on wired. I\'m sure you\'ll get lots of people emailing you about Star-Trek and subtle racial overtones there.
Another on-line realm where avatars and personas are created to symbolize personality traits is poker. Many people choose names that symbolize strength (like my name of DukeMuscle) while others try the opposite approach and think that they can sucker people into pots with names like \"MyLittlePony.\" Some sites allow users to either upload their own avatars (can be a personal photo), or use existing avatars that are associated with different poker styles (donkeys=dumbasses, cowboy=reckless player, frankenstein=stoic and strong).
The difference between poker avatars and role playing characters, in my opinion, is that the appearance you create for poker is to help you financially, rather than socially.
Again, you wrote a great piece.
Posted by: AllanDuke at March 13, 2007 1:35 PM
I found the article unconvincing, largely because the data presented didn't match well with my own experience, and left out some of the relevant gameplay mechanics that drive race selection.
I played for six months when it started, and I've taken it up again in the last month. In both cases, I've found roughly equal proportions of the (now five) races, and the balance between Horde and Alliance to be fairly even as well. Thus, Professor's Yee's contention that almost half of all players choose to be elf or human sounds false to me, as it would imply a serious imbalance in favor of Alliance races that isn't present, to my knowledge (on my server, Bonechewer, there was a greater number of Alliance than Horde, but this was corrected with a population shift from a Horde-heavy server, Warsong).
As far as mechanics go, one of the strongest determinants of race is the player's desired class, usually decided far in advance of actual character creation, and far more important than race because class determines one's style of gameplay. The races have unique virtues, and those virtues meld very well with particular classes--gnomes are usually mages or warlocks, elves are usually hunters or rogues, dwarves are usually warrior or paladins. The regrettable stereotypes embodied by certain races, like the Troll's Jamaican accent, seem too minor to affect larger influences like desired class.
I think there is interesting analysis to be done on choice of race and player personality, but this Freudian direction seems to privilege an effect that's too marginal to overcome more obvious reasons for choosing one's race. At the same time, it leaves out one very strong indicator of racial selection bias--the ability to directly select the colour of one's skin, and how often that leads to a fantasy world full of pleasantly tanned Californians.
Posted by: Justin at March 15, 2007 6:29 PM
Interesting piece, and crikey yes, Race is a really tough topic to cover in any depth or width.
From the Designer's point of view, I guess we need to be wary of such handy emotional shortcuts. We're always looking to compress and legislate player expectations down to icons or appearances. Easily distinguishable character types are an obvious and alas all-too-intuitive way of doing that, with all the cultural and social baggage that comes along with them. It's no consolation that WoW's alleged crimes are minor compared to the jaw-slackening use of racial stereotype in the last, desperate, three Star Wars movies.
As for "Axe me out" being ebonic, I think that's a stretch. Warcraft has had Troll Axe Thrower units since...er, well Warcraft II definitely had 'em, dunno about Warcraft I. Trolls and Axes go together like Dwarves and Bears, Warcraftily, surely?
Posted by: BonGob at March 19, 2007 11:30 AM
Seth Schiesel had some columns on the recent World of Warcraft expansion and inone he described how the company had designed some new features for characters so that what had been the less popular group would become more attractive. Unfortunately I can't find that specific column online.
Posted by: Arrowyn at March 19, 2007 1:15 PM
Very interesting article.
After reading this, I thought over the games I play/played and realized that many of the characters with the "prettier" avatars and such took on a very controlling attiutude. The ones who were brave enough to decide upon choosing an uglier avatar, one that isn't absolutley perfect in every way, were the more humble ones, the ones who play the game for the (somewhat) care-free fun of it. The ones with the pretty avatars are there just to be the better one, the bossy one.
Sometimes, it is just human nature to want to look flawless and pretty. But I'd rather dare to be different.
Posted by: Alexa at April 5, 2007 9:42 PM
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Having played WoW for a while, it's been obvious to me that a different player profile (as it were) selects the ugly Horde races than plays the pretty Alliance races.
I've played on a couple of different servers, and the Horde consistently kicks the Alliance's ass in the player-vs.-player battlegrounds (where groups square off against each other). It's become clear that, all other factors aside, the average Horde player is a more experienced, more engaged gamer than the average Alliance player.
Posted by: dbarefoot![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 12, 2007 5:22 PM
Yeah, that pretty much matches up with Yee's research, for sure!
Posted by: Clive![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 12, 2007 10:36 PM
Wow, this opened up a gazillion lines of thought for me.
First of all, I need to point out that the Narnia books make the Tolkien books look positively politically correct (I seem to recall lots of the evil characters being described as 'swarthy'). I have a friend who finds himself removing the racial descriptors on the fly when he reads CS Lewis books to his kids. Fortunately, there's a lot of good fantasy for kids that isn't all about the white man's burden.
Secondly, I'd be interested in the RL racial makeup of the people that Nick Yee polled; is there a relationship between one's real-world race and the race that one choosing to play?
Finally, as someone who's neither 'white-looking' nor 'pretty,' I mentally substituted 'one's whole life,' into the question, "...what does it mean to be in that avatar for 20 hours a week?" Which raises another question - how feasible would it be to use the controlled world of WoW as a petri dish to study how race schemas affect social interaction?
Posted by: debcha![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 13, 2007 11:11 AM
Yes, I've already begun to wonder what the hell I'm going to do if my son wants me to read him the Narnia books. The specific stuff you're talking about is Lewis' many references to the Calormenes -- the nation of swarthy, bearded, pointy-shoe wearing, scimitar-wielding, and, ultimately, Satan-worshipping guys to the south of Narnia. Their country is really big and sandy; it is an essentially undisguised reworking of the middle east from Lewis' time. Interestingly, the apocalypse that ends the world and ushers in paradise (as well as shrieking hellfire doom for unbelievers) at the end of the Lewis' final book, The Last Battle is precipitated by the Calormenes' successful invasion of Narnia. It perfectly and creepily mirrors the delight with which the hardcore American Christian apocalyptics regard the conflagrations in today's middle east, since they believe an open war that consumed that region would be the beginning of the much-desired-for end.
As for the RL racial makeup of WoW -- that's a really good question. I don't think Nick has that data, though I wouldn't be surprised if he collects it in the future. He's doing incredibly neat research.
As for your last question -- actually, I think this is precisely what Edward Castronova wants to do with online world games in his new position at Indiana University: To create new ones specifically for the purpose of conducting social and economic experiments! I don't know if he has experiments planned specifically to examine race schemas, but given his interest in this area, I'd bet he or one of his whipsmart grad students does it in the next few years.
Posted by: Clive![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 13, 2007 12:24 PM
Really liked your race/racism story on wired. I\'m sure you\'ll get lots of people emailing you about Star-Trek and subtle racial overtones there.
Another on-line realm where avatars and personas are created to symbolize personality traits is poker. Many people choose names that symbolize strength (like my name of DukeMuscle) while others try the opposite approach and think that they can sucker people into pots with names like "MyLittlePony." Some sites allow users to either upload their own avatars (can be a personal photo), or use existing avatars that are associated with different poker styles (donkeys=dumbasses, cowboy=reckless player, frankenstein=stoic and strong).
The difference between poker avatars and role playing characters, in my opinion, is that the appearance you create for poker is to help you financially, rather than socially.
Again, you wrote a great piece.
Posted by: AllanDuke![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 13, 2007 1:34 PM
Really liked your race/racism story on wired. I\'m sure you\'ll get lots of people emailing you about Star-Trek and subtle racial overtones there.
Another on-line realm where avatars and personas are created to symbolize personality traits is poker. Many people choose names that symbolize strength (like my name of DukeMuscle) while others try the opposite approach and think that they can sucker people into pots with names like \"MyLittlePony.\" Some sites allow users to either upload their own avatars (can be a personal photo), or use existing avatars that are associated with different poker styles (donkeys=dumbasses, cowboy=reckless player, frankenstein=stoic and strong).
The difference between poker avatars and role playing characters, in my opinion, is that the appearance you create for poker is to help you financially, rather than socially.
Again, you wrote a great piece.
Posted by: AllanDuke![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 13, 2007 1:35 PM
I found the article unconvincing, largely because the data presented didn't match well with my own experience, and left out some of the relevant gameplay mechanics that drive race selection.
I played for six months when it started, and I've taken it up again in the last month. In both cases, I've found roughly equal proportions of the (now five) races, and the balance between Horde and Alliance to be fairly even as well. Thus, Professor's Yee's contention that almost half of all players choose to be elf or human sounds false to me, as it would imply a serious imbalance in favor of Alliance races that isn't present, to my knowledge (on my server, Bonechewer, there was a greater number of Alliance than Horde, but this was corrected with a population shift from a Horde-heavy server, Warsong).
As far as mechanics go, one of the strongest determinants of race is the player's desired class, usually decided far in advance of actual character creation, and far more important than race because class determines one's style of gameplay. The races have unique virtues, and those virtues meld very well with particular classes--gnomes are usually mages or warlocks, elves are usually hunters or rogues, dwarves are usually warrior or paladins. The regrettable stereotypes embodied by certain races, like the Troll's Jamaican accent, seem too minor to affect larger influences like desired class.
I think there is interesting analysis to be done on choice of race and player personality, but this Freudian direction seems to privilege an effect that's too marginal to overcome more obvious reasons for choosing one's race. At the same time, it leaves out one very strong indicator of racial selection bias--the ability to directly select the colour of one's skin, and how often that leads to a fantasy world full of pleasantly tanned Californians.
Posted by: Justin![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 15, 2007 6:29 PM
Interesting piece, and crikey yes, Race is a really tough topic to cover in any depth or width.
From the Designer's point of view, I guess we need to be wary of such handy emotional shortcuts. We're always looking to compress and legislate player expectations down to icons or appearances. Easily distinguishable character types are an obvious and alas all-too-intuitive way of doing that, with all the cultural and social baggage that comes along with them. It's no consolation that WoW's alleged crimes are minor compared to the jaw-slackening use of racial stereotype in the last, desperate, three Star Wars movies.
As for "Axe me out" being ebonic, I think that's a stretch. Warcraft has had Troll Axe Thrower units since...er, well Warcraft II definitely had 'em, dunno about Warcraft I. Trolls and Axes go together like Dwarves and Bears, Warcraftily, surely?
Posted by: BonGob![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 19, 2007 11:30 AM
Seth Schiesel had some columns on the recent World of Warcraft expansion and inone he described how the company had designed some new features for characters so that what had been the less popular group would become more attractive. Unfortunately I can't find that specific column online.
Posted by: Arrowyn![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 19, 2007 1:15 PM
Very interesting article.
After reading this, I thought over the games I play/played and realized that many of the characters with the "prettier" avatars and such took on a very controlling attiutude. The ones who were brave enough to decide upon choosing an uglier avatar, one that isn't absolutley perfect in every way, were the more humble ones, the ones who play the game for the (somewhat) care-free fun of it. The ones with the pretty avatars are there just to be the better one, the bossy one.
Sometimes, it is just human nature to want to look flawless and pretty. But I'd rather dare to be different.
Posted by: Alexa![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 5, 2007 9:42 PM