Dissertation
Why the humans are white: Fantasy, modernity, and the rhetorics of racism in World of Warcraft
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
05/2010
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000006160
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes constructions and representations of racial identity in the world's most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, vis- -vis the ideological and political-economic history of racism in the United States. Chapter 1 uses Ken McAllister's Grammar of Gameworks to map the game's racial design and its ideological influences. Chapter 2 shows how WoW operates upon biologistic definitions of race and then traces those definitions' historical and literary origins from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century. Chapter 3 offers multimodal rhetorical analyses of the game's ten playable races, finding each to be a pastiche of nostalgic, Eurocentric representations. Chapter 4 uses Ian Bogost's theory of procedural rhetoric to interpret the meanings generated in the context of WoW's player-versus-player combat, which splits its players into permanently warring, racially divided factions. It concludes that although WoW offers a simulation of racist war, the game (and its players) have avoided mainstream labeling as racist by re-framing the conflict in terms of of nationalism, following the racial discourse of the "War on Terror." Finally, through a critical reflection on my own continuing participation in the game, I discuss the ways that white privilege and neoliberalism let players ignore or sidestep the many varieties of racism inherent in WoW and other fantasy games. Ultimately, I argue that World of Warcraft is a metaphor for the ambivalence that mainstream U.S. culture feels as it questions modernity's ways of being and communicating, but has yet to shift into the next paradigm.
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Details
- Title
- Why the humans are white
- Creators
- Christopher Jonas Ritter
- Contributors
- Victor Villanueva (Chair)Patricia Ericsson (Committee Member) - Washington State University, Department of EnglishJason Farman (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of English
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 157
- Identifiers
- 99901055020401842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation