Meet Zuraiza the Painbringer: My World of Warcraft Avatar

(This link goes to my character, Zuraiza, for those want a larger picture.)

That's right, my primary avatar in World of Warcraft is female. This is hardly uncommon. There are plenty of men that play female characters, and women that play male characters. The reasons for why players create online personae that cross gender lines vary, from the immature and purile to the boring-yet-sensible ones.

Zuraiza arose from the latter sort of reasons. I created her a few months before the launch of the first World of Warcraft expansion: The Burning Crusade. The game was a very different beast then, several years ago, and the roles that players had to fill when participating in group-based gameplay included options that had since been eliminated by Blizzard's design team. Zuraiza originally filled one of those obsolete roles.

Now she fills a role known as "melee DPS", which means that she stands behind the target and beats the hell of out of with a pair of two-handed weapons. (Yes, she can do that; that's why those weapons look so big.) If she's needed, she can swap to a one-handed weapon and a shield and fill the "tank" role: she gets the target's attention and lets it beat on her while the DPS--Damage Per Second; they're the folks that do the most damage in groups--focus fire on it to bring it down. (I'm not going to explain why it works this way; suffice to say that it's an artifact of how the code of the game works, and it's a known issue.)

Zuraiza is a female Troll Warrior. (For those that speak the lingo: Female Troll Fury Warrior.) While I play on what's called a "role-play" server, that sort of consensual narrative-cum-improvisational acting is actually strongly discouraged by both the structure of the game and the gameplay culture that's come up around it; the "painbringer" epithet comes from a habit I once had of using a macro command to have my avatar execute a voice emote--"We bring da PAIN to dem!"--whenever I charged into melee and engaged in combat. (This gets very annoying when you need to do that a lot within a minute of time, and pisses off your teammates, so I stopped. The name, on the other hand, stuck.)

I do not see Zuraiza as any extension of myself. Very few players do, especially those who--like me--participate extensively in the game's team-based content that goes on when you hit the level cap--raiding--and instead we see our avatars as virtual playing pieces and dress-up dolls. (The motivation is to improve your character by earning gear upgrades; these virtual assets are often where the design team spends a lot of art assets, so they look very distinctive and thus doubly desirable.)

Instead, the creation of online identity revolves around one's guild and choice of faction. This is very easy to see with long-time Horde faction players, as they tend to openly display their faction loyalties via associated merchandise (shirts, hats) and using social media spaces such as Facebook to display that affection. (Alliance players, on the other hand, tend to be quiet about their affiliation of choice.)

As popular as displaying one's faction of choice is displaying guild affiliation; a guild, in practice, is akin to a bowling team and the usual guild activities--raiding, and smaller group stuff like it--are like playing in a bowling league. The success of a guild in raiding and similar activities brings prestige to it, and thus to its members, and with that prestige comes social capital that can be (and often is) used to influence the gameplay culture of that server, especially within the guild's faction (Alliance or Horde). Like professional sports, there's considerable competition for the best talent on a server, and headhunting is both a long-running thing as well as a source for considerable drama between guilds. The comparison with sports as well as with gangs should be quite interesting to see, if done.

There's some justification for the animosity. Most raiders have "main" characters--the one they raid with most of the time--and several alternate characters ("alts") that are used to support the main in some fashion or another. So, when the main in a guild jumps ship to another guild--and it's almost always in the manner that the Yankees headhunt the best talent in the rest of Major League Baseball; the recruiting guild is usually higher up on the prestige--and thus progression--ladder, and they target frustrated members of lesser guilds who believe that they're being held back. When the main goes, so do the alts most of the time, making the former guild much weaker- a series of these in quick succession has broken the targeted guilds. Guild-based identity, therefore, is not to be taken lightly.

On a lighter note...

Since the latest expansion, Mists of Pandaria (a.k.a. "Kung-Fu Panda: World of Warcraft Style"), I rolled a new alternate character that features the new race as well as the new class: a female Pandaren Monk. My peers, behold Balsa of the Spear. (She's inspired by her namesake, the protagonist of Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, who makes a big impression early in the series with this scene.)