Saving the World, the World of Warcraft

The Journey is up to you (Introduction)
From the beginning of time, forms of writing and literature have been present in our history. Over time it has evolved from oral to written to print to electronic print. Most of today’s forms of literature are in print form. Walter Ong said, “Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. Writing moves from the sound world to a world of visual space, but print locks words into position in this space.” Print has effected writing in very substantial ways with the ability to have stories on paper which locks in the meaning. With the creation of the Internet, literature has become more easily accessible allowing for authors to connect with their readers and vise versa. Leading to the Internet becoming a form of mediation with the re-creation of older forms of media. Literature is an every changing object as new forms of technology allow the advancement of this genre to grow. Literature isn’t just writings anymore, it has expanded to even more than that.

Video games in today’s world are considered forms of literature for the most part due to their every growing storyline that connects with the user in order to express the story as a form of literature. Douglas Rushkoff said, “Just when it appears that a new medium is going to replace its predecessor, we tend to figure out the true value of the older.” New forms of literature still include variations of older media within itself. World of Warcraft is a prime example of this as it sets a new medium for literature as a whole. WoW overall is a story between the Alliance & Horde and the war that is waged between them. As WoW may seem to be just a video game to some, it is a piece of literature to most. Before WoW was a video game, it was a novel that depicted almost everything that happened in the video game. This a form of mediation as the video game encompasses older versions of text within its main storyline.

For this project I chose to focus on the MMO | World of Warcraft. I want to focus on how the fan communities around WoW impacted the game. This will include discussing the knowledgeable communities likes Wiki’s, the interpretative disputes that are formed through forums and discussion groups, & the different forms of remediation that fan’s have created through inspiration from WoW. Remediation is the main focus of this project in terms that almost everything discussed throughout this Wiki is some form of remediation. Whether it is a fan created video, fan art, or fan created wiki pages like WoWWiki (will be discussed later), it expresses some sort of remediation in terms that it is focused around what happens within the game itself. It is a medium which fans gain inspiration through to create such wonderful art. I will also focus on two of the biggest ongoing debates within WoW and how it is perceived within the surrounding WoW communities. As an avid player and member of the WoW community, this topic has a lot of what I find to be interesting about the game and I would like to express that same interest to you.

The Great Forces Debate (Interpretative Disputes)
Since the beginning of World of Warcraft, two forces: the | Alliance and | Horde were forced to hate and enforce war upon each other. The battle has lasted over 4, soon to be 5 expansions. Before you can begin to save or destroy | Azeroth, you must choose a force to play. By choosing a force, you swear to fight for your allegiance until death.

Horde or Alliance?
Do you choose to fight for the Horde?

"'King Varian...you wish to make war on my people?! You shall have your war, human! You will see the fury of the Horde rage through your cities! You will see your throne split in two! THIS I SWEAR!!' -Thrall, Warchief of the Horde"

Or do you choose to fight for the Alliance?

"'I was away for too long. My absence cost us the lives of some of our greatest heroes. Trash like you and that evil witch were allowed to roam free, unchecked. The time has come to make things right. To disband your treacherous kingdom of murderers and thieves. Putress was the first strike. Many more will come.' -Varian, High King of the Alliance"

One of, if not the biggest debate over WoW, is which side to choose. I personally chose the Alliance force because of the thought of being the ‘good’ guy and saving the World of Warcraft from the Horde. But really, it’s what race you want to play. As of now each force has 6 playable races that range from Humans to Worgans for the Alliance and Orc to Blood Elf for the Horde. The biggest flaw in this debate is that new users do not understand the lore of the story, so they don’t understand which force is suppose to be good or bad. I acknowledge that when I first started playing WoW, I chose the Alliance because I believed they were better, they were good. But are they really the better force? This leads into the next ongoing debate in the WoW community.

Good? Evil? Or both?
For over tens years this debate has taken place until just recently. My reasons for choosing the force that I chose was the good guy aspect that the Alliance had going for it. But can you really consider the Alliance the good guys? Both forces can be good in a way. The debate that has been the center of debate for the last two expansions is whether you can consider one force to be good and the other to be bad or both. For example, user Selenir said:

"“Anyone who thinks of the Alliance as 'good' and the Horde as 'evil' has paid no attention to any of the lore throughout the entire game. Each faction has its own distinct values. The Alliance believes the Horde to be wholly evil and brutally violent, but the Horde shows far more emphasis on honor and courage than does the Alliance.”"

Selenir response is like most that I found. Near the beginning it was thought that the Alliance was good and the Horde was bad. But throughout each expansion, a greater story is discussed and by the 3rd expansion: | The Wrath of the Lich King, the two forces join up to fight a greater evil. This causes a treaty to form, which will be broken in the upcoming expansion. This leads to a mass war that puts Alliance versus Horde again. The lore of the story created by Blizzard, depicts both forces to be good and evil in their own ways. But this debate will continue for the time that this game exists seeing as it will never have a correct answer.

Times up, Let's do this! Leeroy Jenkins! (Remediation)
Word of Warcraft is the most popular MMO game on the market and has been for over ten years. It has accumulated over 10 million subscribers during that time period. WoW has generated a substantial amount of fan fiction ranging from fan made videos to art to stories all created by fans of the game. The video game itself leaves a lot of room for user creation and interpretation. One of the most general forms of remediation is the use or creation of work that is developed through the use of incorporating older media. Fan’s all across the world play WoW and use it to create works of art from what they experience in the game.

Fan Films
Fan created videos are a way for many users to interact with multiple topics. WoW is just one of many examples of entertainment where people create remediation. The example to the right, | Beyond The Real Life, is a fan made movie that follows a story of a user who get’s saved by a women priest and they fall in love. The movie is a parody of WoW that uses the games characters, lore, and mechanics to create a tie between the real world and in-game worlds. This video also includes references to lost and includes music from the | LOTR. This is just one of many feature length movies that are created around WoW that are considered a form of remediation.

In the World of Warcraft, a user creates a character on either the Alliance or Horde and levels it from 1-85. They do this by completing quests, partaking in dungeons and raids, and entering battlegrounds against the opposing force. Many fans like to act this process out in real life and create videos to show their love of the genre. | Herculean Productions is a fan made site from a group of WoW players that decided to create videos reenacting elements from the game. There’s one series that I would like to pay close attention too: |The Chronicles of Leeroy. For some people who have never played WoW before, the name for this video series comes from one of the most popular WoW videos on the Internet called | Leeroy Jenkins. Now let’s get back to the Herculean Productions series called Leeroy. I attached one of my favorite episodes to the left as an example. This is a prime example of remediation. This video includes numerous elements from the game such as abilities, terms, ‘sayings’, reference, etc. It also includes media from the famous Leeroy Jenkins video that was posted earlier. WoW has such a large subscriber total that thousands of players create forms of media that imitate some sort of the game everyday. This one series in particular has 10 episodes that portray a users journey from level 1 to max level 85. But there are others like | Survivor: Stranglethorn Vale and | The Hunt which our online series centered around WoW. Survivor: Stranglethorn Vale is created by a well know company called | Machinima Stranglethorn Vale is a series based off of the famous show | Survivor which puts 16 user created characters against each other in a team based game until there is only one left at the end of the series. Often in forms of remediation, older types of media are present within them. This is another example as it ties WoW together with the theme from Survivor.

Fan Art
Another source of remediation common in today’s world is the use of art created by fans to depict their interpretation of their genre. Since World of Warcraft has millions of user, there is a substantial amount of fan-generated art on the Internet within the WoW community. Art is different from most forms of remediation. A user is recreating what happens within the game in an art form without trying to explain what is happening throughout the story. Art is what the author imagines is happening during that time. There are plenty of sites on the Internet that allow users to get together with other artists and connect using their art. For World of Warcraft, I found the most popular sites to be WoW forums, | Deviant Art, Tumblr, and Fanpop. The general communities that are available allow for this form of expression to reach thousands and show that remediation has influences in art. Below are 3 different pieces of art that I thought expressed very cool aspects of WoW. Considering that I have a passion for the game, I tired to find some pieces of art that also tied into my personal feelings of the game.

Each of these photos represent a medium with the game itself. Each represent a major character in the story line that is a major factor in WoW. The Lich king, Arthas, and my favorite playable character, a rogue, all are centerpieces within the main storyline. These photos are a users form of remediation through art. Each dipict a major factor in WoW through there own eyes, containing elements of past and persent forms of WoW.

Know the Guild (Knowledge Communities)
Forms of knowledgeable communities have been present for most of our lives. Before computers, you could argue that an encyclopedia was a source of this because it was a database that held most of the information needed or wanted for an object. With the creation of the computer and the boom of the Internet, it has become easier for information to be gathered and stored in one general place. Certain sites like Wikipedia and Wikia are a database of information that is collected on a topic and serve as a primary way for most to gather information on a topic. The neat thing about Wiki’s is that almost anyone can help create them. Unlike encyclopedias, where it is created and edited by scholars, any person with an acting knowledge on a topic can help edit a wiki database on a topic. That’s why knowledgeable communities are great; they allow the everyday person, the people that normally would partake in that activity daily participate in gathering knowledge on it.

Collective Database
Wiki’s are a great resource for trying to gain knowledge on a certain topic. Pertaining to WoW, I found two very popular wiki sites that are visited regularly by millions. They're WoWWiki and | WoWPedia. For this example, let’s look at WoWWiki a little more. WoWWiki covers everything that is WoW ranging from the storyline, to dungeons, to item specifics. As of today, there is a total of 95,627 pages on this wiki. There’s so much collective information on these sites that you can find an answer to almost any question that you may have. That could be a question about a quest or something that is specific to a certain race or class. Let’s take a look at my favorite class: Rogue. A rogue can be played on 10 of the 12 available races in WoW. Want to know what weapons and armor are best suited for a rogue? The wiki lists in-depth analysis created by fans like me that will give you the knowledge to run and support a rogue class.

Quests?
In WoW, completing quests are a must in order to reach max level. Questing gives you valuable XP, weapons, and fighting experience towards the development of your character. But many users usually come to ‘dead-ends’ when completing some quests since some instructions have flaws within the game. I admit, this has happened to me a few times. The community around WoW is so extensive, that users have created a detailed log of each quest in order of storyline for each class/race. | WoWHead is a site that lists each quest with detailed information on how to approach and complete each quest.

Questing is just one of many mediums that express World of Warcraft. Each database seems to expand each day with new information and items becoming available. With the new expansion coming out later this year, the questing database will increase within the community with new quests coming with the expansion. The communities behind the game will surly input new pages on the wiki’s to help others out when a quest becomes too difficult.

Links & Resources
| World Of Warcraft Battle.net

| WoW Insider

| MMO-Champion

| ZAM