A story of in-game animosity crossing from World of Warcraft to real life

by Kyle Horner on Oct 28th 2008 5:00PM

World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Culture, News Items

A new feature over at The Escapist takes a look at the phenomenon of World of Warcraft faction hostilities crossing over from the game into real life. Anyone who's played Blizzard's MMO and has more than a couple of friends that do the same has probably experienced it: getting the evil eye for playing on the other side. The story itself is a strange travel through various experiences of social rejection and acceptance that are based primarily on whether or not people roll Alliance or Horde. It's things like this that make massively multiplayer online games so interesting to many fans of the genre. It wasn't until something as successful as World of Warcraft came along that we've been able to see the pop-culture effects of the genre on the general populace.

We're just wondering how long it takes MTV to catch on and make a reality show where five Horde players have to share one house with five other Alliance players. What happens when people stop being nice and start being nerdy?

Source

Tags: activision-blizzard, alliance, blizzard, horde, mtv, the-escapist, warcraft, world-of-warcraft, wow

Reader Comments (4)

Part of me can't believe people would take things that seriously (or even pseudo-seriously), but part of me knows they could.

I also wonder how things like this, as well as all the various studies about class/race/side choice will start to play out after what I've been reading about the options in WAR. As I believe one of your writers put it, the Horde is "misunderstood," Chaos is EVIL.

An MTV show where 5 Horde live with 5 Alliance would be very, very funny.

The alliance would be a bunch of 12-year-olds and the horde a bunch of goths.

Or, the Alliance will be mostly self-respecting, responsible adults, while the horde a bunch of mean, anti-social rejects, because daddy never loved them.