ABSTRACT
In 2007, NCsoft released a free medievalist MMORPG (massively multi-player online role-playing game) called Dungeon Runners. The game was often parodic, as some of the names demonstrate: locations such as “Pwnston,” loot such as the “Well Rounded Rusty Great Helm of the Freakish Liger,” and acquirable weapon skills such as “Awesome Cleavage.” It is this last name that I have adopted for the title of my chapter because it is so suggestive of the issues I want to raise about gender and genre in medievalist MMORPGs: it references the medieval violence ubiquitous in these games; it references the way the female body is often depicted within them; and, as parody, it plays on generic expectations, and so implicitly or explicitly acknowledges the audiences that respond to and shape genres. These ideas underpin the discussion that follows concerning genre, gender, and the medium-specific uses of the medieval in Blizzard Entertainment’s medievalist MMORPG World of Warcraft. 1
