ABSTRACT
As should be clear now, MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft are hard to define. I have been calling World of Warcraft a game for practical reasons but, as pointed out before, MMORPGs are in fact not games in the traditional sense of the word. Tracing a modern MMORPG like World of Warcraft back to the genre’s roots, for instance, conveys a history that is grounded both in games and in virtual worlds, the result of which makes it infinitely more than “just” a game. Suggesting that there are differences between games and, say, virtual worlds first demands a deeper understanding of what constitutes a game in the first place.
