World of Warcraft-English - An Investigation of the Language of the English-speaking European Realms and its Differences to other kinds of Computer-Mediated Communication

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, there have appeared several computer games where one plays over the internet as a digital character with and against a large number of other players, interacting in more or less fantastic environments and cooperating to achieve goals in the game. The most successful by far of these MMORPGs (short for Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), in terms of how many people are playing it, is World of Warcraft (WoW), released by Blizzard Entertainment in 2004 (MMOGchart.com 2008). It is set on a fictitious planet, called Azeroth, and the broken remains of another planet, formerly called Draenor but now known as Outland, which are linked by magical gates. The game is the successor of three popular strategy games and the universe has built up quite a mythology and background-story. Most of the inspiration for the game comes from the Fantasy genre but some Science Fiction-elements have been added. Players take control of a character (that is, one character at a time; one can have up to 10 characters on one server, and 50 characters in total on one account) from one of ten different races divided into two warring factions – the Alliance, consisting of Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves and Draenai (approximately non-fallen demons), against the Horde, made up of Orcs, Trolls, Undead, Blood Elves (previously High Elves) and Tauren (cow-people). This character then becomes one of nine (at the time of gathering of material, that is. Now there has been released a tenth) classes: Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, and Warrior; though not all classes are available to all races. When playing against computer-controlled enemies, each class can then take up one of three primary roles: Damage Dealer, Healer or Tank (a heavily armoured character to keep the attention of the current enemy so that the other people, who are often quite frail, do not get killed). Some classes can also act as “Crowd Control” keeping one enemy incapacitated through various means while the others are dealt with. Only one of the primary roles can be performed efficiently at one time. Some classes can only be damage dealers, but apply different strategies to how they deal damage. When the enemy is the competing faction, the Tankrole becomes unnecessary, since other players decide for themselves who to target. Instead it is up to each player to have a strategy for staying alive longer than the current opponent. Most of the time, one handles oneself well enough on one's own, but in order to obtain the best equipment and slay the most dangerous adversaries, be they other players or gigantic demons, one needs to cooperate with other players in numbers from 2 to 25 and in a few special areas even 40. In order to easily get large enough groups together, or just as a social gathering to get to know some new friends, players can create “guilds”. These guilds describe themselves in different ways. Some guilds characterize themselves as targeted against end-game content, meaning the most difficult computer-controlled bosses – officially named “Player-versus-Environment” (PvE) – while other guilds concentrate on “Player-versus-Player” (PVP): battling the players of the opposing faction, as larger groups in the game world at large or in special “Battlegrounds”, or as small fixed groups of two-, three- or five-man Arena Teams for fighting other such teams, for glory and fame, or infamy. Other guilds are mostly social – just a place to have people to chat with while you are playing. Of course, there are combinations of all of these goals for what a certain guild wants to do.