ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Blizzard Entertainment's 2012 Mists of Pandaria, an expansion set to the company's famous massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft (WoW). It also examines the implications of deriving ludic pleasure from essentialism and the broader biopolitical regime to which it belongs. The chapter provides an overview of video game theory in relationship to biopower. In drawing attention to the specific Asian racialization within the WoW paradigm, the chapter explores how Mists of Pandaria produces a peculiar epistemic violence even through its apparently benevolent mode of representation. Finally, the chapter concludes with a brief examination of WoW fan culture and how WoW's very participants all work to perpetuate the pleasures of racial fantasy. The ten million-strong gaming community of WoW had developed a virtual racial system and cultural logics and mapped out the original Europeanized territory to a fault, pushing the limits of the European-fantasy imaginary as far as Blizzard's gameworld designers had programmed them.
