Rendering the Other: Ideologies of the Neo-Oriental in World of Warcraft
Considering video games as sites of semiotic play, I argue that video games are a commodity that inscribes the consumer into various subject positions that often participate in the replication of ideology in simulated spaces. Applying Louis Althusser, Edward Said, and many other pertinent scholars, I consider World of Warcraft, the world’s largest online video game, and what our digital production and consumption of this gamic space says about our identities and place in a larger cultural ideological framework. It is with this understanding that I see ideology in video games as both an illusion that informs our understanding of the world, as well as an allusion to our very real subject positionings within the real world. Focusing first on the capitalist fairytale that is recreated in the virtual economy and gaming ludology, I briefly discuss “gold farming” and how this real world aspect of WoW bridges the Oriental ideology in both real and virtual spaces, as both spaces benefit from this process. Focusing specifically on the recent World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, I argue that by making Pandaria and the Pandaren race so stereotypically Asian, so bluntly Othered, and so vividly exotic merely encapsulates the idea that diversity, difference and especially the East are all now more easily consumed by a world entrenched in such a clash of ideology and clash of cultures, where all facets of identity and play have been transformed into consumable products in the virtual world as potently as they also have in the real world. Ultimately I argue that through digital reinscription, video games render the region, the geographies and the people of the Orient as meaningful only through the subjective Western gaze that comes to understand these geographical, material, and human spaces through a stereotyped and Western-centric cultural lens. Further, I show how video games have the capacity to reinscribe dominant Western ideological trends that through the art of immersion and play become more than abstract paradigms reserved for academia, and instead are inscribed as common consumer understandings of foreign territories, peoples and histories through a new subject-positioning of the player.
American Studies, Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, Computer Science, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, Information Science, Information Systems, Information Technology, Mass Communications, Mass Media, Rhetoric, Social Research, Sociology, Technology, Technical Communication, American Cuilture Studies, Video Games, Ideology, Althusser Said, Asia, Orientalism, World of Warcraft, Play, Thesis, Race, Materialism, Capitalism, Gold Farming, Immersion, Postmodernism
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