The Horde is Evil? Part 1

Posted on June 28th, 2007 by Carlos

Edward Castronova is kind of my hero. He’s the brains behind The Arden Project, the first MMORPG ever developed with academic purposes in mind, and he got a quarter-million-dollar grant from The MacArthur Foundation to do it. In short, he’s an accomplished academic who writes with intelligence, clarity and humanity, and who’s forging his career on studying virtual gaming. Like I said: my hero.

So imagine my disappointment when I came across his blog post on TerraNova with the title “The Horde is Evil.” Check it out for yourself here.

I think I might blog about this in several parts and see if I can get to a level of cohesion to merit a conference presentation on this. A question such as this shows just how important it is to think of video games as both an artistic and ludic medium (don’t worry, I’ll define these things), and not, with all due respect to Dr. Castronova, as merely a place where expression of personal psychology and ethics takes place.

I put the link to Dr. Castronova’s post above, but here is a quick and I hope fair summary of his position, using what I consider key quotes from his post:

• “avatar choice is not a neutral thing from the standpoint of personal integrity”
• “the Horde, in World of Warcraft, is evil”
• “There are good reasons for playing evil characters - to give others an opportunity to be good, to help tell a story, to explore the nature of evil. But when the avatar is a considered an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.”
• “the words ‘troll’ and ‘orc’ and ‘undead’ have implied evil creatures for as long as those words have been in use in the English language (since the 9th century in the case of ‘orc’).”
• “all you have to do is look at the values expressed by the cultures, and it should be apparent which sets of values are worthy of praise. The human race is the only one with children, and charitable giving, for example. Orcs, on the other hand, value warfare and power. In terms of public ethics, this is a no-brainer to me, really.”
• “But what made me feel most isolated from this community of scholars was the general indifference to the entire issue. To choose orc, it was said, does not carry with it any particular moral or ethical baggage.”
• “Orcs are ancient representatives of a bad, bad thing, and one cannot undo the power of that association in the course of a single videogame, even one played by millions for a year. Orcs are still evil, even though Blizzard says they are not.”
• “I’m defending a point of view that I’m disappointed is not more widely-held among academics, which is that these worlds are not mere play-spaces, nor mere extensions of the real world. They are a place where we can hear a faint echo of things unconscious, even mystical.”

Certainly a thought-provoking position! In a way, there are so many assumptions of a shared vocabulary in the above quotes (and even more so in the full post) that it seems to me very difficult to even begin the conversation. We all share definitions of “play,” “ethics,” “good” and “evil”? Of course not. But there are even trickier, even more elusive concepts at play here: the role of art in the formation/expression of morality and/or ethics; the ability of an individual artist to use a tradition to her/his own ends; the correlation between the choice of an avatar in a game and the personal ethos of the chooser, and just how difficult it is for an interpreter to glean useful information from that one piece of evidence; the difference (if any!) between a narrative environment and a ludic one.

So over the next few days I will use a blend of analysis and personal experience to explore Dr. Castronova’s arguments. My basic theses RIGHT NOW (they are subject to evolution!) are as follows:

• Avatar choice is not a neutral thing from the standpoint of personal integrity (this agrees with Dr. Castronova’s point on the issue);
• BUT there are so many competing issues when it comes to avatar choice in a virtual environment, and even more so when the virtual environment is a competitive one (as it must be in an MMOPRG with PvP elements), that assuming one can make categorical determinations about a person’s ethics or psychological make up based on that decision is itself morally questionable, and should be considered by professional academics studying virtual environments an unethical practice;
• Artists (in this case, the corporation Blizzard) CAN redefine myth and history in their own work for their own ends, and in fact such redefinition is one of the primary ways artists interact with myth and history;
• The Horde is NOT evil: first, we cannot treat The Horde categorically, as the several factions that make up The Horde vary greatly in their motivations and mythologies; second, The Horde factions , just as the Alliance, are allegorical constructs that are meant to illustrate a specific facet, penchant, and, most importantly, failing of real-life humanity. Taken together, anyone who thoughtfully approaches playing a Horde character might be doing it for the sake of The Good, which, in terms of personal ethics and integrity, for convenience’s sake here I will posit as the opposite of Evil;
• World of Warcraft (WoW) is both a narrative and a ludia (sorry for the neologism: I mean by it a “ludic place, arena, or field”), and one of the important functions of play is to allow us to “try on” behaviors with low or zero consequences — and therefore we should not stigmatize players who “try on” The Horde as being unethical or morally lacking, lest we risk removing this important psycho-sociological function from WoW;
• With all of the above said (and hopefully well-argued in future posts), there is a little bit of truth to Dr. Castronova’s main point: a person’s choice of avatar, depending on their motivations, might represent a personal ethics that might be less than ideal from a societal standpoint. Whether it would be possible for an outsider to know with certainty that this is the case may be impossible; nevertheless, while I refute Dr. Castronova’s blanket categorization of The Horde, I agree with him that some players may be engaging in a mild form of “personal wickedness” when they choose to play Horde.

Like I said: there’s a lot to discuss. And like I also said: it’s going to take me more than a few days to get to all of this! :)