A Very WoW Valentine

I’m back on track with the blog, and it all kicks off (again) with Valentines day … on-line.
World of Warcraft has had some big events on – besides the release of The Burning Crusade – namely Valentines day (and I’m looking forward to the up-and-coming Lunar Festival).

Just a quick run down of the special event: As a player you could buy valentines day items such as “love tokens”, perfume and cologne. When wearing a perfume or cologne, one could interact with NPC’s (Non Playing Characters) – however, the majority of the NPC’s have a gender attached to the “sex” of the character – so what happened was that a player wearing perfume could only get interactions from male NPC’s and likewise: cologne got interactions from female characters. However – as a player you could wear either the cologne or the perfume – regardless of the “sex” of your character.

There were a couple of interesting things that some guild mates took note of:

• The Undercity ghouls (City belonging to the race of the Undead) were non gendered/without a sex.
  Which leads to the question of whether this is a deliberate move by Blizzard to have an androgynous space in the game?
• There was a wandering Alliance male Night Elf who was programmed (or not programmed/a glitch) to interact with cologne instead of the traditional “male + perfume” interaction.
• That the hetero-normativity of the programming was highly visible – but non hetero interactions could take place – i.e. someone playing a female character could wear cologne and interact with female NPC characters

I found all of Blizzards programming decisions extremely interesting – and it made for some alternative role playing – as the odd (but not quite queer – as the male NPC characters I approached (Orcs of course) would not “flirt” with female characters wearing cologne) programming was certainly something to work with.

The major Valentine day Quest (handing in love tokens) was, in itself, pretty horrible – but that quest also opened up for public humiliation (in my case it was a nasty little female orc who kept on breakin’ my characters heart by laughing manically at her love token offerings); this humiliation was very visible and rather demeaning, but it was also followed up by mate-ship (A guild mate (playing a female character) who gave me several “friendship bracelets”, which removed the curse of heartbreak so I could continue on this quest). Interestingly enough, all of the meaningful Valentines day experiences ended up being an affair that was “women only”.

Perhaps the frustration of not having the full choice of who I wanted to interact with made the “loopholes” even more memorable.

I’m looking forward to the next festival – and will be sure to keep my eye out for more loopholes!!

Emma.

Or check out the official WoW fan art Valentines day competition here