A White World (of Warcraft)

A White World of Warcraft

Erica Moutter

So I’m not sure if anyone else has mentioned this franchise on the blog yet but today I’m going to talk about race and cultural appropriation in the Warcraft franchise (Copyright, Blizzard Entertainment). I’m sorry to say that in the embarrassingly long time I’ve played this game series, I actually never noticed that there were no black or Asian characters in the Warcraft franchise until I took this paper.

So let’s get to it; there are many main human characters in the Warcraft franchise and they are all white. As in all of them. Every. Single. One. I even googled it just in case there was one I hadn’t thought of but no. All of them are white. Even worse is that players can’t even represent themselves as black/Asian. In the MMO RPG version of the game players are able to customise their characters completely and if you chose human, this, I’m sorry to say, is the darkest skin tone offered to players (Next to a white character so you can compare):

Now this is problematic for many reasons, but worse is where black and Asian culture has been employed in the games. So if we forget about the human race in the game for a minute and look at the cast of voice actors you will be pleasantly surprised to see a hugely diverse cast. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, everyone. But… None of these non-white voice actors play human characters… or really even good characters.

 So if you are an Asian voice actor you have two options: A Pandarin or a Draenei. The Pandarin are big chubby pandas who are marketed as mysterious, peaceful, consistently eating noodles and super good at martial arts. In fact, I’m just going to let you see for yourself…

Black voice actor? Well you get to choose from Trolls, Orcs (The big green guy from the video), and demons. While all three of these races are on the “bad side” in some way I wanted to aim this discussion instead at the cultural appropriation employed in the case of the Trolls and the Pandarin. The trolls have clearly Jamaican accents (one of the voice prompts that was removed after complaints was “Jamaican me mad mon”), are from “the jungle” and the class known as “priest” in every other race is called “witch doctor” by Trolls. In the character selection the Trolls are also the only race with the hair option of dreadlocks and in the game they are often wearing tatty, minimal clothing, tribal masks and carved wooden weapons. In the case of the Pandarin, as you saw in the video above, not only are they heavily stereotyped (orientalism, anyone?) but are a clear example of the appropriation of Asian cultures in American media. The class (fighting discipline) they bring to the game is called a “monk” who uses “chi” energy and has a martial arts fighting style. The characters often dress in kimonos or gi and have generally Mandarin or Japanese accents while taking the form of a bear native to China. For a game created by white Americans with the predominantly white American player-base this, in both cases, seems to be an example of appropriation. Where, as Suzanne put it in the lecture, the colonizer/dominant group takes over aspects of another group ignorant of meaning or “helps themselves”. Considering kimono and gi are traditionally Japanese and chi and panda are traditionally Chinese, Blizzard clearly hasn’t even bothered to research the cultures they wanted to appropriate. They just took it. Also in the case of the Trolls, Tiki are religious objects in many island nations, made to honour a deified ancestor. Considering this game has a player base of mainly young (influenceable) white people, and a large player base at that (5.5 million in the last quarter of 2015), allowing these young white people to pick and choose aspects of real life minority cultures in America seems problematic. Especially seeing as the online version of the game lets you pick these aspects for yourself. You chose to play as a Jamaican Troll who jokes about voodoo, you chose to play a panda who excels at martial arts and you chose as characters of other races to wear tribal masks or Japanese style kimonos. Does that mean the player is appropriating by extension of Blizzard appropriating culture?

So in summary the Trolls are jungle tribes who only appear in the original games as mercenaries, the Orcs are idiotic brutes who only win battles with sheer numbers, the demons are well… demons, the Draenei are big weird aliens who are only here because the Orcs ruined their home planet, the Pandarin monk class literally has a spell where they drink tea and the humans physically cannot be black. What message are you trying to send to your predominantly white audience, Blizzard?