So, over that last three or so weeks I have been playing this little game called World of Warcraft. Despite my person vow never to play aforementioned game I have actually enjoyed my experience. I have leveled quickly, learned new skills, and enjoy the collection of shiny weapons to skewer my pixelated foes with. My defining happy moment was gaining level ten while my entire guild was in world. The praise that I received for this achievement (game world bar-mitzvah?) filled me with a self worth that was unexpected and well received. I am constantly surprised by my want to return to the game.
Just one thing.....
Is it just me or is WOW racist?
I don't mean the millions of people who play every month flinging slurs about Worgen's or Tauren's. I'm talking about that the builders of WOW have set up a magical, wonderful, masterly laid out world, and that world happens to be a racist as the one I live in every day.
Follow me here. The first time you go to play WOW, you are asked a simple question. Are you with the Alliance or the Horde. Let's look at the species that make up the Horde (read "villians"). You have the Orcs, big, brutish, and stupid. You have the Goblins, swindlers, untrustworthy, and greedy. Blood Elf? Addicted to magic, lower forms of the high elves, and hateful. The Tauren are a simple, backwater folk, who if provoked will attack. Troll's (my adopted race) savage, with bones through their noses, and, just to ham fist it, Jamaican accents. Lastly, the Forsaken. They are dead. Now, outside of the Troll accent, I have not connected any WOW race to any stereotype of race that we have in the real world. I'll let the reader do that themselves.
Now the Alliance. Hey! Look! White people! Oh thank God! Yes, just to make sure that everybody was on the same page on who the good guys were, white people for the win. I do realize that you can change the color of skin on the humans, but when is the last time you saw an advertisement for the game that did not, when showing the human race, show whitey.
Just once I would like to play a game that opens on a peaceful four legged, green, and elongated toothed creature wearing a fedora. He has a loving wife and high interest loan on a house. He is going to a job he hates, because he wants to start a family, and while he would love to finish that novel he's been working on, he just can't find the time. All the sudden the sky lights up and his city is attacked. Not just his city, but his world. His wife is dead, everything he knows is destroyed, and there is only one person to blame. Whitey! Why did they do it? No one knows. All you know is you are joining the space army, and for the next foreseeable future you and your avatar are going to be rampaging against these sick bastards. There will be no mission to understand, no talk of peace. Let's be honest, they wouldn't do that for you if the roles were reversed.
Make it happen Blizzard!!
