Religion and Gender in World of Warcraft
by William Sims Bainbridge
ROUGH DRAFT: Not for direct quotation
Major cultural shifts sometimes happen in unexpected ways that traditional social
indicators fail to measure. This may be the case today for religion in the online environment,
partly because social scientists of religion may have been blinded by the emphasis on faith
(rather than hope or fantasy) in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic tradition. In particular,
it is possible that the "fictional" religions in massively multi-player online games (MMORPGs)
are a harbinger of the future of religion more generally, and especially conducive to socialscientific research (Bainbridge 2007b). This article will employ a range of data, both qualitative
and qualitative, to explore these possibilities, with the proviso that it is far too early in the
development of post-modern religion, and in social-scientific understanding of online
communities, to come to firm conclusions. The empirical focus will be World of Warcraft
(WoW), the most popular MMORPG, and the theoretical basis is the information-exchange
theory of religion developed by the author in collaboration with Rodney Stark and others over
the past thirty years (Stark and Bainbridge 1985, 1987).
Poetic Faith versus Religious Faith
One entry point to the theoretical discussion is the concept suspension of disbelief,
proposed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1817), as a form of poetic faith that sustains much art.
How is suspension of disbelief different from belief? Consider a Christian listening to the grand
operas composed by Richard Wagner, especially the Ring tetralogy and Parsifal. The four Ring
operas concern the ancient Pagan gods, notably Wotan (Odin) who strides across the stage and
motivates much of the action, whereas Parsifal concerns Christian redemption among the
Knights of the Holy Grail. In principal, Christian opera-goers should feel quite differently,
because they reject the religious premise of the Ring and accept that of Parsifal, yet the Ring
operas are arguably much better music and have had far greater influence on European culture.
Originally created in the 1590s as a rebirth of semi-sacred ancient Greek music drama, grand
opera demands a considerable degree of suspension of disbelief, if only because human beings in
the "real world" never communicate by singing arias. Wagner's operas in particular, and his
theory that the artwork of the future would consist of total works of art combining many artforms
(Wagner 1849), very much set the stage for World of Warcraft, not only because the goddess
Freya from the Ring features in WoW, but also because Wagner took seriously a set of ancient
religious beliefs that no one "really believed" any more.
Figure 1 shows Freya's avatar, as she appeared to Catullus, my level 80 Blood Elf priest,
on WoW's cold Northrend continent; later he encountered the goddess herself. Avatars are ingame characters that represent the player in role-playing virtual worlds like WoW. It is widely
assumed that the word was first used in this sense in the 1992 novel Snow Crash, by Neal
Stephenson, that depicts a future time when the virtual Metaverse has become a major sector of
human society. However, the word was actually used a few years earlier in the pioneering
virtual world Habitat, and of course the term comes from Hindu religion. More broadly, IndoEuropean religions believe that a deity would take on the disguise of a lesser being when visiting
Earth, as Jupiter did when he raped Europa in the form of a bull, and Wotan did when he became
2
the Wanderer in Wagner's Ring. Had Christianity been invented by Indo-Europeans, people
might commonly have called Jesus the avatar of Jehovah, and all the struggles over the nature of
the trinity would have been unnecessary.
Figure 1: The Avatar of the Goddess Freya in World of Warcraft
The name Freya in Figure 1 is not spelled in the manner used by Wagner, which was
Freia, and his character was a passive victim rather than the bold female warrior of WoW. The
Northrend continent is filled with Nordic allusions, including Vikings, ships with dragon
figureheads, and a village of Valkyries. Remarkably, when Catullus visits this Valkyrion, his
form changes to that of a female, a case of an avatar going through a magical gender
transformation to become another avatar.
WoW draws heavily on a number of European mythologies. For example, except for
their Scottish accents, the Dwarves in WoW could easily have walked out of Wagner's Ring.
The tall WoW Night Elves could have walked straight out of the "other ring," the one by J. R. R.
Tolkien (1965). WoW's designers acknowledge debts to earlier fantasy games, notably
Dungeons and Dragons, which in turn may have drawn some inspiration from the 1922 sciencefiction novel, Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Gygax 1979). WoW even includes
an operatic aria, comparable to the one Brünnhilde sings at the end of Wagner's Ring, when the
Queen of the Undead sings about lost battles and lost loves. The point is that World of Warcraft
3
is one province of a broad fantasy culture that includes obsolete religions, great works of music
and literature, and a well-established subculture of role-playing games.
The theoretical tradition on which this essay is based might be called exchange theory,
social cognition theory, the new paradigm of the sociology of religion, or rational choice theory.
Truth to tell, it has many variants and draws upon a breadth of prior work in other traditions, so
there may not be any one term to describe it. Given the importance of the strategic exchange of
value and information to the theory, it could even have been described as a variant of game
theory that emphasizes impression management through role-playing and reality-defining (Von
Neumann and Morgenstern 1944; Huizinga 1949; Goffman 1956; Berne 1964; Gouldner 1965;
Homans 1974). Aspects of this theory have been simulated using game-like computerized
multiagent systems (Bainbridge 1987, 1995, 2006b).
Central to the theory is the cognitive-emotional concept of compensators: "Religion refers
to systems of general compensators based on supernatural assumptions." "Compensators are
postulations of reward according to explanations that are not readily susceptible to unambiguous
evaluation." "Supernatural refers to forces beyond or outside nature which can suspend, alter, or
ignore physical forces." (Stark and Bainbridge, 1987: 36, 39) One flavor of this theory might be
called the new economics of religion (Iannaccone and Bainbridge, 2009), which stresses the fact
that people often treat compensators as rewards, thus according them value and making them
salient for economic exchange and for any other kinds of human behavior that can be analyzed in
economic terms. More relevant for this essay is a conceptually adjacent perspective that
considers religion to be a genre of fantasy fiction, very important for some individuals at some
times in their lives, but comparable in its fictive quality to literature, drama, art, music, and
games.
An interesting topic that some erudite anthropologist should explore – and much existing
literature bears on – is the extent to which preliterate peoples really believe the myths about the
supernatural they possess. Without written scriptures and enduring formal organizations, one
would think that the myths of preliterate peoples are chaotic and ephemeral, although cultural
consolidations may occur locally for brief periods of time. A number of classic studies suggest
that these cultural mythologies are indeed dynamic and vary over time and space from highly
diffuse notions that have little coherent force to relatively well-defined ideologies that have some
of the flavor of modern religions (Evans-Pritchard 1937; Wallace 1956, 1959; Edgerton 1966;
Silverman 1967; Lewis 1971; Whitehouse and Martin 2004; cf. Luhrmann 1989). We cannot
resolve these fascinating issues here, but it seems safe to say that firm conviction in a welldefined dogma is not the natural state of human religion, but one possible situation that arises
within the context of particular social conditions, such as the emergence of strong states that
demand loyalty from their citizens (Larner 1984). Indeed, the term faithful can mean loyal; a
true patriot is a loyal rather than veridical one, and conviction may arise as much from social
demands as from personal needs for emotional security.
If for present purposes we consider religion to be a form of fiction, what salient qualities
may it have? While this essay compares religion with the arts, another comparison might also be
made, with white-collar crime (Sutherland 1949). The most striking example is the Christian
doctrine that Jesus arose from the dead. Superficially, there seem to be two alternative ways to
describe this resurrection, as actual fact or as fraudulent hoax. One could waffle and suggest that
a rumor grew in the days after the crucifixion, without anybody blatantly lying, but it is hard to
say that the story was just a metaphor of transcendence through the disciples' enduring love of
Jesus. Only if taken literally does it possess great power. Given that the authors of the gospels
4
have long departed this earth, it is impractical to bring them into court to compare their
testimonies, and modern Christians may be perfectly sincere (cf. Acts 35-39). However, clergy
and other religious professionals benefit from promoting doctrines that serve their own interests
(Bainbridge 2002b), and thus may be engaged in running a self-serving confidence game rather
than being objective teachers of the truth.
As I write these words, a court in France is considering a case that seeks to ban
Scientology on the basis that it is a conscious fraud for economic gain. Similar questions have
been raised about other recent religions that claimed to have found golden plates buried in the
ground, used meditation to levitate in the air, or healed diseases through prayer and the laying on
of hands. As a religion becomes well-established, it tends to draw back from the use of
potentially discreditable magic, yet faiths gain much of their appeal, both initially and during
revivals, from such claims. Scientology is a useful example here, because its founder, L. Ron
Hubbard, was a professional writer of fantasy fiction and may not have made much distinction
between his twin careers as tale-spinner and messiah. In a recent reconsideration of Scientology,
I have suggested that participants could be considered adventurers rather than victims, engaged
in a role playing game that gives them exciting experiences and a sense of special status, living
out a science fiction fantasy (Bainbridge 2009). To be sure, individual Scientologists may differ
in their orientations, and few individuals may possess coherent intellectual models that rationally
categorize the important aspects of life. But to assume that Scientology's claims are more false
than those of Christianity, and thus to accuse this religion uniquely of fraud, may completely
mistake how the human mind actually works and ignore the extent to which all culture is largely
the result of human imagination.
Viewing religion as a genre of fiction suggests not only that gods are fictional characters,
but that human souls are fictional as well. Many contemporary cognitive scientists have pointed
out that the human brain is a complex assembly of semi-autonomous neural components whose
unity is highly problematic (Bloom 2004; Minksy 2006). Many of these components are shared
with other mammals and evolved over a very long period of time to serve one function, then
have recently been inefficiently exapted to serve other functions in humans. In computer lingo
we could say, the mind is a modular kludge beset by glitches that cannot often be distinguished
from features. Long ago, Friedrich Nietzsche (1887) decried the doctrine of free will as a tactic
used to blame and thus to control people, and free will implies there is an independent and
unitary self that can exert acts of will. Existentialists influenced by Nietzsche went further,
expressing severe doubts whether a person would possess anything like a coherent self unless
constantly under powerful social control (Camus 1946, 1955; Beckett 1954, 1956; Frankl 1967).
Citizens of cosmopolitan or rapidly-changing societies thus have a choice between suffering
from passive anomie or actively becoming protean (Durkheim 1897; Lifton 1993; cf. Fuller
1970; Winnicott 1971). Today, one expression of a protean self is the avatar in an MMORPG.
A good research-based transition from this point to a consideration of World of Warcraft
is to mention The Process Church of the Final Judgement, which was an offshoot of Scientology
(Bainbridge 1978). The central members of The Process were artists and architects who
considered their creative work to be religious engineering, and I have described the communal
cult they founded as a total work of art in the Wagnerian sense. They saw nothing inappropriate
or insincere about consciously scripting religious rituals, designing clerical garb, writing sacred
texts, publishing surrealist tracts, composing hymns and chants, or re-inventing their own
personalities. Social scientists sometimes debate whether post-Christian or New Age phenomena
are merely superficial cultural products rather than real faiths, yet The Process demanded much
5
of its adherents, who often gave up jobs in the outside world to live entirely within their dramatic
dream. Essentially all inner members were quite aware that they were creating a radical,
aesthetic culture, and playing quasi-theatrical roles within it. Thus, it was with a sense of
recognition, rather than surprise, when I encountered something similar in WoW, if weaker in
the demands it makes on people.
Entering Azeroth
Three of the four continents in the immense virtual world, World of Warcraft, are on the
planet Azeroth, and the fourth is part of the crumbling planet Draenor. This world and its many
cultures are so vast that that research reported here and in my forthcoming books required 2,400
hours of participant observation, through 22 avatars, as well as very substantial reading and
quantitative data collection inside and outside WoW (Bainbridge in press a, in press b). At the
present time, WoW has about 12,000,000 subscribers worldwide, who interact with each other
online through operating an avatar who moves within a computerized graphic environment of
great richness, resembling the real physical world but with an idealized quality. There are
perhaps 500 separate and nearly identical computer servers, called realms, and I operated
characters on six of them. In each realm, there are two factions (Alliance versus Horde), five
races per faction, and ten classes across the factions and races. A given avatar may belong to
only one faction, race, and class, but may practice various professions at different times, and
belong to one or another player-created guild that can organize events, expeditions, and raids in
this vast virtual world.
The most explicitly religious of the classes is priests, who are the pre-eminent healers in
WoW. Age of Conan, a more recent and very religion-oriented MMORPG, also calls them
priests, and in Dungeons and Dragons Online, similar characters are called clerics. To explore
the doctrinal differences, I created a priest in each of the seven WoW races that has them: In the
Alliance: Human, Dwarf, Night Elf, and Draenei; in the Horde: Troll, Undead, and Blood Elf.
The three other races lack priests. In two, the Horde's Tauren and Orcs, shamans serve religious
functions, although Trolls and Draenei have them as well. Druids also have religious functions
among the Tauren and Night Elves. The tenth race, the Gnomes, place their faith in science and
technology, although their Mages and Warlocks wield some magical powers.
Priests of the different races do belong to different religious traditions. Most common is
the religion of the Holy Light, practiced (in descending order of piety) by Humans, Dwarves,
Draenei, Blood Elves and Undead. This is a highly secularized form of religion, possessing
cathedrals and churches but lacking a god, more an ethical system and a way of understanding
existence than a faith in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sense. Troll religion is somewhat secret, but
appears to be related to their traditional Voodoo. Most fully elaborated, and thus best for an
illustrative example, is the traditional religion of the Night Elves, who worship the lunar
goddess, Elune. This is also a good example because it highlights the religious roles that women
play in WoW, and thus connects this essay to a common topic of discussion in the sociology of
conventional religion, the somewhat contradictory gender differences in piety and power.
Figure 2 shows my Night Elf priestess, Lunette, in the Temple of the Moon in Darnassus,
the capital city of Teldrassil, the large island where all Night Elf avatars begin their careers.
Teldrassil, like the Norse world-tree Yggdrasil, is actually an immense tree, and like most Night
Elf architecture the temple includes trees. To the left of center we see a colossal status of Elune,
the Moon goddess, holding up the Moon, from which flow streams of light that bless and heal
6
her worshippers below. In the middle is Lunette. She has reached level 30 out of the 80 levels
of advancement available in WoW, and she is just at this moment receiving priest training from
Jandria. All Night Elf priest trainers are female.
Figure 2: Lunette Receives Priest Training in the Temple of the Moon at Darnassus
This priest trainer, like Freya and her avatar, is a non-player character (NPC). NPCs are
not avatars, because no human being is operating them, but are programmed by very simple
database and artificial intelligence techniques to interact with players in role-appropriate
manners. Many NPCs are trainers, while others are vendors selling things like armor and food,
and many more are enemies who must be killed or avoided. The training does not involve study
or meditation, but is conducted by casting a magic spell. Similarly, Lunette's healing powers do
not require prayer, or even drawing moonbeams down from Elune, but simply expending some
of her supply of mana to accomplish a technical act of healing. This is a key point about religion
in virtual worlds: The priest's powers do not require faith in the supernatural, but are reliable
technical skills in a world where nature functions differently from in our world. Thus, while
WoW religions seem to be pale fantasies compared with real-world religions, their ability to
accomplish miracles is undeniable, while that of real-world religions is open to debate. When
Lunette wants to resurrect a comrade who has been killed on the field of battle, she simply
employs her resurrection skill, and the comrade is ready to fight again.
7
Running seven priest characters through WoW, one of them all the way to level 80 and a
second to 75, was the participant observation research methodology of this study. In addition,
informal interviewing was carried out by talking with and listening to what other people
communicated through the text-based chat incorporated in WoW's computer interface. Notably,
Catullus joined a very successful guild in the Horde faction, Alea Iacta Est (AIE) in the Earthen
Ring realm (Internet server). The name echoes Caesar's words when he crossed the Rubicon, "the
die is cast." This famous quote suggests the long heritage of games in which chance plays a
prominent role, but it also implies that the real world can be conceptualized as a game. The AIE
guild was formed in association with the most popular and long-running online podcast (i.e.
"radio" program), The Instance,1 which has offered a wide-ranging half hour or longer discussion
of World of Warcraft issues nearly every week since January 6, 2006.
Most WoW guilds are small, and a typical successful guild might have fewer than 100
members, but AIE always had more than 10 times that number during the time I studied it.
Quantitative data about AIE were obtained from WoW's Armory online database that offers data
on all characters level 10 or above.2 The first sample consists of extensive quantitative data on
several variables describing 1,096 members level 10 or above, February 17-22, 2008. It was
necessary manually to download a webpage for each character in this case. The second dataset
was easier to collect but is limited in number of variables, recording the class, gender, and
experience level of all 3,132 members level 10 or above on September 30, 2008. Note both that
the guild nearly trebled in size over seven months, and that it was huge by WoW guild standards.
One may well ask how representative AIE is, versus having an atypical membership.
Rarely, a guild is dominated by, or even entirely composed of, characters of one type. For
example, on July 10, 2008, the Ladies of Destiny on the Scarlet Crusade realm had 214
members, 204 of which were female. Ladies of the Night on the Bladefist realm had 135
members, all but one of them female. A Scarlet Crusade guild named The Darkspear consisted
of 100 Trolls. On the Earthen Ring realm, the Blood Elf Brotherhood consists entirely of Blood
Elves, while Gnome Nation is nine-tenths Gnomes, and The Dwarven Alliance consists twothirds of Dwarves, and one third of Gnomes. Most guilds have diverse membership, however,
and this is certainly the case for Alea Iacta Est. Aside from sheer size, the most obvious way it is
unusual is in that its members are part of a vigorous communication system that reflects and
influences WoW culture more generally. AIE has a newsletter, as well as being connected to the
podcast, and it stages many special events such as raids, marches, craft fairs, contests, parties,
formal decision meetings, and celebrations of dates like its anniversary and New Year's Eve.
Members are unusually knowledgeable about WoW culture and the implications of decisions
about shaping their characters. Thus, it is especially valuable as a source of information about
WoW culture and society, but must be balanced by samples of characters obtained in a very
different manner.
Therefore, I did a census of all characters online at any point during Saturday, January
12, 2008, on two contrasting other realms, Emerald Dream and Scarlet Crusade. To do this, I
employed a piece of open-source add-on software called CensusPlus, that works directly through
a character logged into WoW itself. 3 Emerald Dream and Scarlet Crusade were well established
realms, both having been in existence for more than a year, and in the same time zone. All three
realms employed in this study are RP or "role playing" realms, with an officially expressed but
1
http://www.myextralife.com/wow/
http://www.wowarmory.com/
3
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php; retrieved November 14, 2008.
2
8
unenforced preference for taking the mythology seriously, and staying in character at least much
of the time. The difference between Emerald Dream and Scarlet Crusade is that the former is a
player-versus-player (PvP) realm, on which players outside the newbie starter areas attack each
other at will, creating a much more violent climate than in normal realms where players cannot
fight each other unless both agree to do so.
Repeatedly through the 24 hours of the sampling day, I ran the CensusPlus add-on
program, which tallies a census of all characters online at the moment in a given faction. I did so
using two WoW accounts and two computers, plus having two characters in each realm – one
Horde, and the other in the competing Alliance faction – because the program can be run only
while operating a character of the given faction and realm. The number of characters totaled
fully 22,851, of which 12,051 were on Emerald Dream, and 10,800 on Scarlet Crusade, with the
full range of experience levels from 1 through 70 that existed prior to the Lich King expansion in
November 2008 that took the top to 80. Two subsamples were then drawn to permit close
analysis of the themes of this study. Randomly, 1,517 characters were selected with experience
levels 20-39, excluding a few who were involved in the subsidiary arena competitions, which are
common at level 70 but tend to involve only very specialized "twink" characters at early levels.
The range 20-39 was chosen because such players have left the newbie zones and selected their
professions, but still have a long way to go before completing their climb up the latter of
experience. The second subsample consisted of all 1,664 level-70 priests and warriors for whom
later data could be obtained, focusing on warriors as well as priests because this hyper-masculine
class provided the greatest contrast with the somewhat feminine priest class.
Priesthood and Gender
To give the somewhat abstract ideas of this essay a clearer connection to the traditional
social science of religion, we can focus on some of the demographics of WoW characters,
notably gender and its connections to other variables. When a player creates a new character, the
key decisions are selecting class, gender, and race. It is important to note that there are
absolutely no differences in the capabilities of male versus female characters in WoW. Other
things being equal, a warrior woman is just as powerful as a warrior man – although she tends to
appear smaller – and she can wear the same armor, wield the same weapons, and move as
swiftly. We can speculate that other players respond to female characters somewhat differently,
although this remains to be proven. Any differences in the behaviors or accomplishments of
characters of the two genders must, therefore, be the result either of differences in the skill or
personality of the player, or the cultural stereotypes of male and female roles held by players
about their characters (Correll 2004).
Traditionally, MMORPGs distinguish three main combat roles: tank, healer and DPS
(damage per second). A well-armored tank engages the enemy at close range, while the healer
and DPS stand back, healing the tank and firing missiles or harmful spells at the enemy
(Duchenaut et al. 2006). In WoW, the stereotypical tank is the warrior, and the chief healer is
the priest, but other classes can play these roles to a greater or lesser degree. Paladins are
explicitly a mixture of warrior and priest, but perhaps a little better in the tank than healer role.
The general consensus expressed on the chief WoW-oriented wiki is that the DPS role is equally
well played by the mage who can cast spells from a distance and the rogue who hurls knives, but
the mage may have an advantage over multiple enemies, while the rogue can sneak up on a
9
single enemy without being detected.4 Druids are rather balanced characters, able to tank as well
as heal. The other three – hunter, shaman, and warlock – operate with assistants and thus can
function rather like questing groups during solo play without the need to involve another player.
This is most obvious in the cases of hunters and warlocks who have pets (hunting animals) and
minions respectively, secondary avatars that can act like a team mate. Shamans also have
assistants, although immobile ones called totems.
The class of a WoW character has considerable implications for other attributes, notably
the armor the character can wear and the professions that are most valuable. Priests rely upon
spells to protect themselves, and they are limited to wearing feeble cloth armor. In contrast,
warriors can wear plate metal armor, but lack protective spells. While some armor can be bought
from vendor NPCs, or looted from dead enemies, much of it is manufactured by players from
virtual raw materials, using crafting professions. Player's may share these products with guild
mates or sell them to other players through an elaborate online auction system. The tailoring
profession makes cloth armor, and blacksmithing makes plate metal armor. The cloth required
by tailors is readily acquired from defeated enemies, but the metal for a warrior's armor must be
mined from remote lodes using the mining profession.
Because a character can have only two of the main professions, many in all classes
specialize in the crafts required to make their own armor. Thus, in the first Alea Iacta Est
dataset, 54 percent of priests practice tailoring, and the number is almost identical, 53 percent, in
the Two Realms dataset. Among warriors in AIE, 71 percent practice mining, and 37 percent do
blacksmithing. In the Two Realms dataset, the proportions are 73 percent and 53 percent.
Mining provides the raw materials for two other professions, engineering and jewelcrafting, so
the economic value of mining makes it the most popular profession overall. Correlations
between mining and the three crafting professions dependent upon it illustrate their consistent
connections: blacksmithing (0.31 and 0.37), engineering (0.29 and 0.30), and jewelcrafting (0.24
and 0.24).
The second-most popular major profession among priests is enchanting, practiced by 41
percent of them in AIE and 36 percent of them in the Two Realms. Enchanters obtain various
magical substances, either buying them from vendors or generating them by disenchanting
articles looted from enemies, then use them to magically enhance objects such as their own cloth
armor. In addition, enchanters can make magic wands, which are the most effective weapon
priests wield. The correlations between enchanting and tailoring are 0.54 in the AIE dataset, and
0.48 in the Two Realms dataset. The economy of resource gathering and crafting inside World
of Warcraft may seen so fictional as to be trivial. However, WoW took in something like half a
billion dollars from subscribers in 2008, and I roughly estimate that the internal economy of
these virtual goods may have exceeded that value by a factor of two, although because the virtual
gold currency inside WoW is not legally convertible with dollars we cannot be sure.
WoW's creators do their best to fine-tune the system so that no class has a net advantage
over another, so it is worth noting that gender is not strongly or consistently associated with
success in playing the game. By September 30, 2008, 21.8 percent of the male AIE characters
had reached level 70 of experience, compared with 22.1 percent of female characters. The mean
male level was 41.1, compared with 42.6 for female characters. The random subsample of lowerlevel characters allows us to compare the rapidity of progress by the genders, because both
CensusPlus and the Armory record a character's experience level, but the Armory data were
collected between 41 and 56 days later. On average in the Two Realms dataset, each of the 807
4
http://www.wowwiki.com/Class
10
Emerald Dream characters advanced 0.21 experience levels per day, compared with 0.19 levels
for the 710 Scarlet Crusade characters. In both realms, female characters were slightly slower in
climbing up the experience ladder than male characters, 0.20 levels per day compared with 0.22
in Emerald Dream, and 0.18 compared with 0.20 in Scarlet Crusade. So, different data place one
of the genders slightly ahead, but not much.
As Table 1 shows, we see substantial differences, however, in which classes the two
genders choose to play, especially with respect to priests and warriors. Across all three
comparison samples, male characters are more than twice as likely to be warriors as are female
characters, and about half as likely to be priests. Apparently something about the culture of the
AIE guild makes female characters more likely to be warlocks, and less likely to be druids,
whereas in the Scarlet Crusade realm female characters are more likely to be druids. Other
gender ratios are fairly consistent across samples, and the extreme gender differences in the
propensity to be warriors or priests suggests the power of gender stereotypes in the wider society
are at work in WoW.
Table 1: Gender and Class among 4,696 World of Warcraft Characters
Class
Druid
Hunter
Mage
Paladin
Alea Iacta Est Guild
Female Male
M/F
6.1%
10.6%
1.74
17.7%
18.5%
1.04
12.2%
9.7%
0.80
11.7%
8.8%
0.75
Emerald Dream Realm
Female Male
M/F
10.3%
9.3% 0.90
17.2%
16.8% 0.98
13.0%
10.4% 0.80
12.6%
11.2% 0.88
Scarlet Crusade Realm
Female Male
M/F
16.2
9.4%
0.58
17.8
18.2%
1.02
12.6
9.6%
0.76
11.1
12.5%
1.13
Priest
15.0%
8.0%
0.54
11.9%
5.9%
0.49
8.3
5.0%
0.61
Rogue
Shaman
Warlock
8.5%
5.2%
20.8%
10.4%
10.0%
10.8%
1.22
1.92
0.52
11.5%
5.7%
11.5%
15.9%
4.8%
11.5%
1.39
0.83
1.00
9.5
8.7
10.7
10.1%
9.8%
13.6%
1.06
1.13
1.27
Warrior
2.9%
13.2%
4.61
6.1%
14.1%
2.30
5.1
11.8%
2.30
100.0%
905
100.0%
2274
100.0%
261
100.0%
546
100.0%
253
100.0%
457
Total
Cases
We noted that warriors and priests represent the clearest contrast in the social roles the
character plays in combat groups. A warrior is aggressive, getting right up in the face of the
enemy, and courageous in withstanding the enemy's lethal power. A priest is supportive,
nurturing, and frankly vulnerable in battle. Experienced players on a team expect the warrior to
take punishment on their behalf, but they tend to protect priests, who in return can heal them and
even resurrect them from death. In the abstract, warriors and priests exhibit role differentiation
and division of labor in characters well adapted to group cooperation. In my own experience of
running characters of all these kinds, hunters, warlocks, paladins, and druids are more
autonomous, the first two because they and their secondary avatars are already self-contained
teams, and the latter two because their abilities are balanced and multifaceted. This suggests that
characters may vary in terms of how much they are sociable versus individualistic, quite apart
from the aggressive-nurturant dimension.
Existing sociological literature offers a range of perspectives from which to analyze the
huge difference in the propensity of female characters in WoW to be priests rather than warriors.
One dimension of explanation is differences in orientation toward violence and physical risk
11
taking, because males more commonly commit violent crimes or engage in physically aggressive
sports (Washington and Karen 2001; Jackman 2002), and greater female affinity toward religion
may be the result of aversion to risk-taking (Miller and Stark 2002).
Another dimension is implied by the fact that in WoW priests are healers, and women
traditionally are the more nurturant gender (Rossi 1984; Shelton and John 1996). Sociability is a
dimension of variation among people, and women are widely believed to have more need for
interpersonal relationships (Turner 1999). However, it has also been argued that males are more
group oriented, because their hunter-gatherer ancestors hunted in groups and relied for their very
lives upon their fellows (Tiger 1969). In WoW, however, both warriors and priests are highly
specialized, and thus rely upon fellow team members to do the tasks they cannot. Imagine a
warrior and priest questing together; if either fails to play his or her professional role, both die.
Quite apart from personality trait of sociability, the division of labor binds people together into
networks of exchange and mutual reliance. Cooperative behavior, therefore, has both innate and
instrumental causes.
Players choose gender and class on the same screen at the moment of creating the
character, and a momentary mental stereotype may strongly condition the connection between
these near-simultaneous choices. Therefore, we need to seek gender differences that show up
long afterward, on the basis of extended use of the character.
Class Talents
A talent is a class-specific ability that costs one talent point, and a character earns one
talent point for every experience level gained after level 9. There is no good reason other than
laziness or indecision why a player would not immediately update the talent points right after
leveling. However, of 1,522 characters in the level 20-39 dataset, 16.8 percent had been tardy in
updating their talents. Given the largely incorrect stereotype that WoW players are teenagers,
and teenage boys are proverbially irresponsible, it is interesting to see that male characters do not
score worse on this measure than female ones. In fact a slightly larger fraction of female
characters have failed to update their talents, 17.1 percent versus 16.7 percent, but this is an
insignificant difference. Only 10 of 1,663 level 70 priests and warriors do not have the full 61
talents available to them; 4 of these have 59 or 60 and the remaining 6 may represent failed
characters or bad data. Perhaps nobody reaches level 70 without a high degree of
conscientiousness.
For each class, there are three separate talent trees, in which the most powerful talents are
not available until the character already possesses many lower-level ones belonging to the same
branch. Thus, there is some incentive to specialize in one or another, although a player is free to
select low-level talents across any combination of the three. In the cases of priests and warriors,
one talent tree is generally regarded to be best for solo play, one for team play, and the third
combines both. This makes talents a reasonable measure of the social division of labor. As the
WoW wiki explains, "The Discipline Priest is the jack of all trades, but master of none... The
Holy Priest stands proud among the best healing classes in the game."5 Shadow priests have the
most damaging spells, and thus are best suited to solo play. Among warriors, "Protection talents
are generally very useful for Main Tank group work, allowing the Warrior to put up with more
punishment than otherwise possible."6 Arms talents are the most diversified, whereas Fury
5
6
http://www.wowwiki.com/Priest_talents; retrieved November 7, 2008.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Warrior_talents; retrieved November 7, 2008.
12
talents are best for PvP duels against other players. Thus, characters that emphasize Holy priest
or Protection warrior talents are best for their respective roles as healer and tank.
To get a simple measure of specialization, I identified all the cases in which a character
had more than 30 points in a given talent tree. All but two of 740 level-70 priests having 61
talent points were specialized, by this measure, and 46.0 of the priests were Holy healers. All
but one of 914 warriors were specialized, and 40.8 percent of the warriors were Protection tanks.
Among female priests, 49.3 percent played the traditional healer role, compared with 42.7
percent of male characters. Note that this gender difference in performing the priest role is on
top of the already great gender difference in selecting the role in the first place. This finding
reinforces the hypothesis that the traditional female nurturant role expresses itself in female
WoW characters.
The prediction for warriors is more complex. Both Arms and Fury specializations
prepare a warrior for solo play, and nurturance is not featured by either kind. Indeed, playing the
social tank role is most analogous to healing for priests, so one would predict that female
warriors would be more willing to tank, just as female priests are more willing to heal. This is
exactly what we find, because 48.4 percent of female warriors are Protection tanks, compared
with 39.3 percent of male warriors. Even when they have stepped outside the traditional feminine
role, and become warriors, female WoW characters are more willing to play a cooperative social
role than are male characters.
Reputation
A character is forced to develop a positive reputation among the races that belong to the
faction its own race is assigned to, but WoW includes many groups of NPCs with whom one
may voluntarily develop a reputation as well. A nice example is the value of a positive
reputation with the Timbermaw Furbolgs, somewhat grumpy bear-like humanoids who guard the
tunnel that connects the Felwood, Winterspring, and Moonglade regions of Azeroth. Around
level 50, any player will want to travel from Felwood to Winterspring, whereas the Moonglade
region is a special area to which higher-level druids always have easy access and which other
players may have little interest in except during the annual Lunar Festival when they can easily
teleport there from their faction's cities. One way to use the tunnel is to run quickly, killing
Furbolgs along the way, then pick up the flight path in Winterspring allowing one to bypass the
tunnel in all future travel. Another way is to improve one's reputation with the Furbolgs, by
doing some rather time-consuming quests for them, and gain free passage at any time through the
tunnel. Thus, a player has a choice between violence and cooperation to achieve the same
important goal of freedom of travel, and a character's reputation with the Timbermaw Furbolgs is
a near-perfect measure of this.
I experimented with both strategies using my two high-level priests, first Maxrohn
(Alliance), then Catullus (Horde). Maxrohn blasted his way through the tunnel, in a series of
attempts, winding up with a "hostile" reputation with the Timbermaw Furbolgs, -3952 reputation
points to be exact. Catullus undertook missions on their behalf, ending up "friendly" with +3290
reputation points and free passage through their tunnel. Zero reputation points is the bottom of
the "neutral" category. The Furbolgs will let somebody pass they feel only slightly unfriendly
toward, but they reign a wide territory, so many characters develop much higher reputations than
required. Among the 535 female characters in the level-70 sample, 41.5 percent have positive
Timbermaw reputations, and only 11.4 are barred from the tunnel. Among 1,128 male
13
characters, 36.0 percent have positive reputations, and 12.9 percent are barred from passage.
The mean Timbermaw reputation for females is 890.6, rather higher than the 409.7 mean for
males. This difference may reflect a weak association between playing a female role and being
more cooperative, or, conversely, less violent.
Among the large number of other reputation measures are the five associated with the
faction to which a given race of characters belongs, and this in turn may partly reflect the
geographic location of that race's home, as well as any bias toward doing work for members of
one's own group. For example, Catullus is a Blood Elf, and "revered" with their home,
Silvermoon City, while only "honored" with the four other Horde groups: Darkspear Trolls,
Orgrimmar (Orcs), Thunder Bluff (Tauren), and Undercity (Undead). Maxrohn is a Human who
is revered with the human city, Stormwind, because he has completed so many quests in his
home area. He has also spent a good deal of time in the Dwarven city, Ironforge, which is
conveniently connected to Stormwind by a subway train, and he has just barely achieved revered
status with Ironforge as well. He is only honored with the Gnomeregan Exiles (Gnomes),
Darnassus (Night Elves), and Exodar (Draenei) who complete the Alliance faction.
One might imagine that reputation with distant allies would be a measure of the player's
interest in exploration, which Richard Bartle (1996) says is one of the motivations for entering
virtual worlds. To explore this possibility, I calculated a "parochialism" variable by dividing the
character's reputation with its home group by the average of its reputations with the four other
races belonging to its faction. Thus, a number greater than 1.00 says that the player did more
quests for NPCs of its own race than of other races. Table 2 shows the average parochialism
scores for the level-70 priests and warriors. With the exception of the Gnomes, who are refugees
living with the Dwarves and have easy transport to the Human areas, each race tends to have a
significantly positive average parochialism score, but they do not differ significantly by class
(comparing priests with warriors), gender, or realm. Differences between the races may reflect
nothing more than varying densities of good quests across the eight starter areas of WoW. Here
is one of the frequent cases in which science advances through the hypotheses it disconfirms, and
we see no gender or priestly difference in the urge to explore.
Table 2: The Lack of Obvious Role Differences in Parochialism
Type of Character or Realm
Blood Elf
Priest
Draenei
Priest
Warrior
Dwarf
Priest
Warrior
Gnome
Warrior
Human
Priest
Warrior
Night Elf
Priest
Warrior
Orc
Warrior
Tauren
Warrior
Troll
Priest
Warrior
Undead
Priest
Cases
68
46
34
79
71
58
154
249
163
148
133
99
53
37
182
Mean Parochialism
1.34
1.25
1.26
1.28
1.40
0.91
1.75
1.74
1.34
1.28
1.64
1.36
1.37
1.34
1.54
14
Warrior
Female
Male
Emerald Dream (PvP)
Scarlet Crusade (Normal)
89
1.53
535
1128
1.45
1.48
815
848
1.46
1.48
A very different kind of reputation concerns PvP duels. These can take place
consensually in any realm between individuals or groups, or in special battlegrounds and arenas
set aside for multi-person contests. Participants earn "honorable kills" as they vanquish
opponents, and not surprisingly this is more common in PvP realms that emphasize combat
between players. On average, the priests and warriors in the PvP Emerald Dream realm had
earned 14,031 kill points, compared with 10,978 in Scarlet Crusade.
One might expect equal numbers of kills between priests and warriors, because they are
the perfect partners for each other in combat teams. However, combining both realms, priests
achieved only 10,467 kills on average, versus 14,103 for the warriors. This difference may
reflect gender role, recalling the gender difference in selection of these two classes. The female
characters have earned a mean of 8,494 kill points, compared with 14,362 for males, a bigger
difference than between the two classes. Just 20.6 percent of female characters are recorded as
having completed at least one arena contest, compared with 25.7 percent of males.
A New Form of Transcendence
More than one questionnaire survey dataset shows that people who play online games
tend to be less conventionally religious than the average, and online games strongly tend to
depict exotic or cultic religions rather than those in the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition
(Bainbridge and Bainbridge 2007). Extensive communication with players of World of Warcraft
shows no evidence that any of them really have faith in Elune or the Holy Light. However, this
does not mean that the people who spend significant portions of their lives in MMORPGs or
virtual worlds lack the need for compensators.
Little notice has been given to the fact that religion is not the only sphere of life oriented
toward compensators. The same is true for spectator sports, theater, movies, television dramas,
novels, and music. Sports fans rejoice in the victories of their teams almost as if the fan had
won, apparently gaining subjective status comparable to that of religious sect members, feeling
they are better people for their association with the athletic god that they adore. Clearly, people
gain vicarious feelings of satisfaction, exaltation, and enlightenment from experiencing powerful
fictional narratives. Arthur Schopenhauer (1883-1886) went so far as to claim that the world is
embodied music, because song and symphony elicit so well the fundamental human feelings.
Religion may differ in that it often seeks to discipline human feelings, as well as to express them,
yet in this the online games may be more similar to religion than the other artforms, because only
by following the rules can the player advance toward ever greater transcendence of the mundane
world. This raises the radical possibility that the online virtual worlds of the future may offer
very substantial subjective transcendence.
Figure 3 shows Maxrohn, a level 75 Human priest, performing a Mind Vision spell on
Caylee Dak, a level 70 Night Elf huntress, in order to learn how she perceives existence.
15
Maxrohn is a living memorial to my deceased uncle, Max Rohn, who was an Episcopal priest.
My uncle was very devout, and I recall with what great solemnity he conducted the funeral
service for my grandfather. But he was also something of an adventurer, having churches not
only in the United States but also at three locations in the Caribbean, and once teaching me a
wrestling hold that could break a man's arm. He combined a wry sense of humor with something
of a philosophical bent. I recall a joke he told me a half century ago, about the first astronaut to
reach Heaven. When his spaceship returned to Earth, everybody shouted questions about his
meeting with God. He held up his hand for silence, and said, "The first thing you need to
understand is that She's a Negro." This joke not only touches upon the issues of race and gender,
and of the relationship between science and religion, but also reveals that Max was quite
prepared to consider new ideas about the nature of reality and the human spirit. Infused with
some of Max Rohn's spirit, as I represented him, Maxrohn entered Azeroth and first visited the
Cathedral of the Holy Light in Stormwind city on January 25, 2007. He is currently doing
missionary work on the cold Northrend continent, where the undead Scourge and its Lich King
are gradually being defeated in the great war between good and evil.
Figure 3: Maxrohn the Priest Performing Mind Vision on Caylee Dak the Huntress
Like Maxrohn, Caylee Dak is a memorial. The main WoW wiki explains: "Caylee Dak is
a level 70 elite quest ender located in the Aldor Rise in Shattrath City. She was named after a 28
year old player named Dak Krause who died of leukemia on August 22, 2007. He was born
16
March 10, 1979. The NPC model itself is an exact replica of 'Caylee,' Mr. Krause's character,
bearing the same model and gear, as well as the same pet, Dusky, by his side."7 Caylee Dak is
the goal of a quest given Maxrohn in the garden at Stormwind Keep, by a little NPC girl named
Alicia. She wanted him to deliver a poem to Caylee, because she herself was too young to visit
Outland, where the huntress was adventuring. The poem is a slightly edited version of a popular
verse written by Mary Elizabeth Frye, which expresses a pantheist view of death transcendence.8
It begins:
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
across Northrend's bright and shining snow.
Caylee responds to the poem by bowing and giving a blessing. She is operated by a very
simple artificial intelligence program, and of course Maxrohn is operated by me. My most
advanced WoW avatar, Catullus (2008), has actually published a book chapter under his own
name, based on the premise that if he is my avatar, then I must be his deity. It is very common
for actors to assume the identity of deceased historical personages, as when Charlton Heston
made the Red Sea part while pretending to be Moses in The Ten Commandments, but we do not
ordinarily think actors substitute adequately for the real person. Perhaps more challenging for
the sociology of religion was the time in 1997 when I received a personal letter written that year
by Edgar Rice Burroughs who had died in 1950. Members of a religious group called the Family
or the Children of God had channeled that message, so they said, from the departed spirit of
Burroughs (Bainbridge 2002a: 90). Very few religious groups, outside the Spiritualist tradition,
claim to be able to contact the dead (Braude 1989), but advances in computer technology may
change that.
Within computer science, there is a growing movement that believes artificial intelligence
can be spiritual in all the ways humans may be, and that it will soon be possible to upload human
personalities into computer systems to provide a new form of death transcendence (Mori 1981;
Moravec 1988; Kurzweil 1999; Bainbridge 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2006a, 2007a, 2008).
Traditionalists may be horrified by this idea, and one could debate its technical feasibility, but it
may represent either an emerging competitor to religion or a novel form of religion. Caylee and
Maxrohn, therefore, may be harbingers of a new stage in the evolution either of human fantasy,
or of human faith.
Clearly, analyzing religion as a genre of fantasy fiction is not one of the conventional
approaches within social science, although to do so may provide valuable insights and prepare us
to understand the diffuse quasi-religious dimensions of emerging post-Christian culture.
Certainly, some devout believers would resent their faith being compared to a fantasy game, and
religious denominations do not market themselves as such. It would be a mistake, however, to
misinterpret Weberian Verstehen to mean that social scientists must accept the sales rhetoric of
religious firms, or ignore the fact that people have subtle and diverse orientations toward
supernatural possibilities. Durkheim's (1915) notion that god was a metaphor for society is no
less challenging to faith than the postulate that the arts, through their suspension of disbelief, are
equivalent to religion with its confident assertion of belief. An exploratory study like the present
7
8
http://www.wowwiki.com/Caylee_Dak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_not_stand_at_my_grave_and_weep
17
one cannot hope to answer questions so much as to articulate them, yet it suggests that something
very profound may be happening, equivalent to a major cultural shift, through the emergence of
online transcendence in environments like World of Warcraft.
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