Abstract
Over the past four years, programmer Zoe Quinn, Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, video game critic Anita Sarkeesian, and scholar and activist Melissa Click all received death threats and experienced other forms of symbolic violence after coordinated online campaigns against them. Documenting these instances remains a critical project for feminist media studies. But the interactive context of online gaming offers examples of resistance to oppressive practices and harassment from which scholars and activists can learn. This chapter examines one such example: the struggle over online climate and culture on World of Warcraft (WoW) server Proudmoore. Through its focus on the agency people exercise within the constraints of online spaces, this chapter documents how a specific play culture was transformed and how the fantastic effectively transformed the mundane.
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Notes
- 1.
See http://gambit.mit.edu/projects/hatespeech.php/need for vivid examples of these forms of harassment.
- 2.
The analysis that follows is based on nearly two decades’ combined experiences as participant observers in WoW and other online games. Stabile began playing WoW in 2006, about 18 months after the game was launched, specifically for research purposes. She subsequently played Guild Wars, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Knights of the Old Republic. Strait began playing WoW shortly after its launch in 2005, while still in high school, and later played Guild Wars, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Runescape.
- 3.
In 2006, gaymer.org creator Chris Vizzini filed to trademark the term but with help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was denied ownership by gay gamers who had for years been using the language (Kohler 2013).
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Stabile, C.A., Strait, L. (2018). Out on Proudmoore: Climate Issues on an MMO. In: Harper, T., Adams, M., Taylor, N. (eds) Queerness in Play. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90542-6_15
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