ABSTRACT
While discussing the dominant rules and structures that constitute the game in World of Warcraft, I did not shy away from mentioning that which creates its fiction. After all, in order to explain the mechanics of World of Warcraft, it does not matter that its factions are called Horde and Alliance: a more abstract “A” and “B” would have sufficed. For most players, the fact that World of Warcraft is set in a fantasy world cannot be divorced from play – even with the same instrumental rules and structures, another fictional theme would have meant playing another game. World of Warcraft’s fiction is not purely cosmetic either: like the instrumental design discussed above, the fictional design controls and guides the player’s action toward intended uses and, since we are dealing with representation, its intended interpretations. It does so by situating a player’s character in the fiction, by orienting and guiding the player spatially and by limiting the amount of persistent influence players have on the fictional world. Ultimately, the goal of this chapter is to convey that Azeroth, the name of World of Warcraft’s fictional world, is a world in which formal player agency is limited at best.
