Warcraft and Utopia

“Warcraft and Utopia,” an essay on the politics of play by Duke album Alexander Galloway.

World of Warcraft evokes a pre-modern hodgepodge of technologies and narrative scenarios (given time, one might cognitively map the historical fantasy of the game’s narrative — trace when exactly the blunderbuss was invented, or the introduction of certain kinds of armor, for example, all the while knowing that such a pursuit could never be “fixed” or arrived at with any degree of precision), overtly participating in the “utopia for the before,” imagining life before capitalism. However, the functionality of the game is pure software culture, suggesting that perhaps the more one tries to strip utopia of its machinic core, by cloaking it in any manner of pure fantasy or pre-modern worlds (“dungeons and dragons,” “swords and sorcery,” etc.), the more informatic and algorithmic it becomes, reverting to the software equivalent of twenty-sided dice. Indeed dice are repurposed in World of Warcraft: into the various logics of software code; random number generation; action statistics; and particularly in terms of how identity is defined as a set of mathematical variables such as stamina, agility, health, and so on.