presented by Ed Chang and Jentery Sayers, 10+31+2007

for research exposed! (general studies 391) at the UW

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Example 1: "World of Warcraft" >> by Ed

Despite the incredible global popularity of Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft (WoW), a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) with a playership now exceeding seven million worldwide, there is still a dearth of scholarship on and cultural critique of the game, particularly looking at race and sexuality.  How might we identify and interrogate the "racial logics" of WoW, beyond a close-reading of “fantasy race” as allusion or allegory for “real world race”, to begin to theorize how race is visualized, articulated, and cued.  In other words, in a game of fantasy race, how and where and why might offline race and racism be deployed, negotiated, disguised, and taken for granted.  How then can we challenge and explore this mediating space between race within the game and race outside the game?  Might these be one and the same?  Furthermore, in the imagining (perhaps intrusion) of real world race into the game in ways that fix it or to borrow Lisa Nakamura's construction cybertype it, how might other categories, such as sexuality, be left unsettled or open?

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