World of Warcraft: Non-Fantasy Gender in a High-Fantasy World 

A large, muscular, hairy, dark brown figure with a large weapon hanging from his shoulder carefully bows down near the little lake. This tauren is picking flowers, and he is unaware of the little gnome lurking behind him. The little gnome sees her chance to attack when he is focused on the flowers. It takes less than a minute before he falls down before her feet, dead and conquered by the little gnome with green upraised braids.

In World of Warcraft, episodes like this are easily imaginable. Developed by Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), an arena for gaming that involves thousands of players who meet, play, fight, and act out the role of their avatars in the same universe.

As a gender researcher I have, for most of my career, studied and analyzed how gender identity is constructed in relation to, in co-construction with, and through technology. The gender identities I have studied have mostly belonged to real people. However, when analyzing a game like World of Warcraft, it is not only individuals’ identities, but also the game designers’ (re)constructions of gender that we study. For decades researchers have claimed that gender is socially constructed. Where else than in a computer game can we so clearly study the social construction itself?

Online, offline identities

The cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker in 1993, showing a dog behind a computer saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” plays with a widespread idea of the 1990s that social distinctions like sex, age, and race were extinguished on the net.

However, it soon became clear that the line between online identity and offline identity was indeed a fine one, as for instance Susan Herring showed in her studies of gendered communication in text-based communication on the Internet in the mid 1990s. The Internet did provide an arena for experimenting with identity, as Sherry Turkle discussed in Life on The Screen (1995), but sustaining a credible presentation of a fake self was not always pulled off as easily as predicted, and with “A Rape in Cyberspace,” Julian Dibbell in 1993 challenged the idea that online experiences were innocent and without “real life” effects.

Fantasizing about man versus woman

Gender is one of the categories we use to navigate the social world. It affects our behavior as well as our expectations of other people. Thus, when entering new social arenas on the Internet, like World of Warcraft, it is not surprising that gender is a part of the game design. Compared to MUDs, text-based online role-playing arenas popular in the 1990s, where players were free to experiment with different ways of constructing gender, in computer games the individual is restricted to the game designers’ constructions of gender. Unlike the majority of computer games, however, World of Warcraft does offer both male and female options for all playable characters. There is no difference in terms of game-play between male and female characters. Tiny female characters possess the same power as male characters of the same level. And yet, despite the game designers’ creative construction of dragons and demons and other creatures of high fantasy, gender is not subject to imagination, but rather remains within the boundaries of what we know as male and female.

There are clear visual differences between male and female characters. The main ingredients of what we might call the “generic gender” are large muscular torsos for male characters, and small waistlines and breasts together with beautified facial expressions for female characters. Although the limited set of generic gender features reinforces notions of gender as the difference between males and females, there are a number of different gender models in World of Warcraft, primarily created through the unique physical features of the various races. Thus, gender models vary from the tall, athletic male night elf and his fashion-model-like night elf sister, to the working class male dwarf and the generously proportioned female dwarf—and from the monstrous and steroidal male tauren and the almost plump female tauren with her big cow-like nose, to the tiny gnomes, which also display clear gender differences.

Females conform to real world standards; males to WoW's construction of race

There are a total of ten different playable races in World of Warcraft, evenly divided between the two factions in conflict, the Alliance and the Horde. There are some interesting differences between Alliance and Horde races, in particular in the version of World of Warcraft before The Burning Crusade (TBC, a game expansion pack released in January 2007). All the original Alliance races have bodies similar to human bodies, while the Horde races are more monstrous, with features from fantasy creatures. Although the game lore tells a more complex story, it is not unusual for players to see the Alliance as the good side and the Horde as representing evil, and designers from Blizzard confirm that Horde races are supposed to be a bit more menacing than the Alliance races. The two new races introduced with TBC distorted this: The new Alliance race, the draenei, is depicted as a demon, while the new Horde race, the blood elves, are descendants of the Alliance night elves, thus sharing their humanlike body. Descriptions of the draenei as more honorable than the blood elves, however, restore the original balance between Alliance and Horde along lines of good and evil.

Despite the general differences between the races of the two factions, the image of gender is not equally clear-cut: Femininity seems to be in conflict with the monstrous features of the Horde races. Thus, the female Horde characters have more visually in common with the humanlike female Alliance races than with their corresponding Horde brothers. They seem to be beautified and feminized in ways that draw their visual appearance away from their race, and toward a more generic femininity. Their body shapes are shrunken and adjusted into nice female proportions and their faces are beautified and toned down from some of the more monstrous features of the Horde races. Thus, it is primarily males who define the “generic races”, while females of the monstrous Horde races are defined more by their sex than their race.  It seems we have encountered a limit of femininity, indicating that femininity has a much stronger resistance than masculinity toward features that are perceived as monstrous and ugly.

Gender is always present in World of Warcraft and it always makes a difference in the characters’ visual appearances. What make the gender constructions in World of Warcraft interesting are the variations. It is not without hyper-sexualization and stereotyping, but it includes a diversity that makes a multitude of visualizations of gender available, some more and others less coherent with gender stereotypes.

Where gender stereotypes are broken

When referring to gender we often mean biological difference between men and women. Gender does not only apply to people—or in this case, orcs, night elves, and tauren—but also “spills over” and gives meaning to activities, professions, occupations, and almost every activity we engage ourselves in. Most activities in computer games have traditionally been actions, deeds, adventures, or storylines associated with men, male spheres, or masculinity. Some of these are also important in World of Warcraft, like fighting and warfare. A fighting female, like the little gnome, thus represents a backlash against traditional gender stereotypes.

While fighting and warfare are activities with clear associations to men, there are also activities in World of Warcraft that, seen through gender stereotypes from real life, can be associated with women or femininity, like cooking, healing, or picking flowers. Even though activities with masculine or less clearly gendered associations dominate, it is interesting to note the existence of a handful of activities with feminine associations—activities that both male and female characters engage in. Thus, World of Warcraft not only presents the invitation to women to “do like men” but also invites men to engage in activities associated with women or femininity. An open question, though, is whether male characters are feminized by having them engage in activities associated with femininity, or whether these activities are de-feminized by having the male characters participate in them.

Diversity, multitude, and ambiguity

Although stereotypes and sexualization have not been left out, some of the most important keywords for describing gender constructions in this game are diversity, multitude, and ambiguity. The game is open to variations in the visual gender construction, ranging from stereotypical images of "fashion model femininity" or "steroidal masculinity" to images that do not conform to Western stereotypes of gender. Females posing in untraditional roles also represent a challenge to gender stereotypes. Gender is present in World of Warcraft in many ways, but it is not necessarily insistent or obvious, and sometimes not even meaningful—or at least, not given meaning through the game design itself.

But we also see limits to how much gender can break away from our offline traditions, even in this fantasy world of orcs, dragons, and elves. The limit of femininity seems to be tied to aesthetical considerations, making females less race-typical and more conformational to the “generic gender” model. The limit of masculinity is rather tied to power in this game world, where female characters, despite their widespread presence, do not equal the number of male characters.

Although a MMORPG universe like World of Warcraft represents an interesting arena for playing with and challenging cultural perceptions of gender, the continuous construction of gender in the dualism of male and female is clearly wasting the fantasy world's potential for experimenting with alternative gender constructions. The final construction of gender in World of Warcraft is, however, left to player’s choices when faced with the diversity and ambiguity within the game.

The little gnome sat down, wondering whether to continue her journey through this hostile landscape, or whether to return to the city, put on her best dress, and perhaps get a glimpse of that nice blood elf she had met at the pub yesterday.

Hilde G. Corneliussen is an associate professor in humanistic informatics at Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen, Norway, where she gives classes in digital culture, gender and ICT, and computer history. Corneliussen’s main research interests are within gender and ICT, computer history, computer education, and computer games. She is the coeditor of Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader, published by MIT Press in May 2008.