Introduction

Imagine being transported to a world where you can interact with different fantastical creatures. You unleash spell after spell to combat the impending doom of the Lich King and join guilds to role play, level up, or interact with other online avatars. The wait is over and you no longer have to imagine! The online world is Azeroth and the game is World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft is the most popular massively multiplayer online role playing game in history and has created a new genre in internet culture. A person has the opportunity to choose from several races of creature and create an avatar. The avatar is used to interact with other avatars in the world of Azeroth and acts as a representative of the gamer. It is not uncommon for a gamer to spend more than twenty- four hours a week playing World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has contributed to a new Internet subculture. People, who play World of Warcraft or "gamers”, as they are called, live and interact in a world that is different from our own and in many ways non-existent. It is evident that we are in an age where physical proximity is no longer needed for people to interact with each other and build relationships. Is it possible to build a relationship with someone you have never met or seen? Is World of Warcraft being used as an escape from the actual world? These are the questions I would like to answer with this project.
            To put it simply, World of Warcraft is a phenomenon. World of Warcraft was created by Blizzard Entertainment in 2004 and is the 4th installment in a long line of Warcraft games. The first Warcraft game was released in 1994 and was a real time strategy game. If the first Warcraft was considered the start of a revolution in computer gaming, than surely World of Warcraft is the magnum opus of this revolution. The World of Warcraft game created an online world that allowed the user to interact with other gamers in an artificial environment that bent the rules of reality. On the first day World of Warcraft was introduced in 2004, it sold over 240,000 copies. As of October 2010, there were 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers worldwide. There is a community of twelve million subscribers with different and fictional identities interacting with one another and building relationships.
            What defines a relationship in this online community? This is an important question because the World of Warcraft community exists outside the realm of our own. Social interactions change when people are to fly or cast spells on one another. When one looks into the World of Warcraft community one can see immediately that many of the social interactions mirror our own, but how is that possible when people are interacting with avatars. These avatars could be totally different from the actual people they are representing. Who do you build the relationship with, the gamer or the avatar? As the Internet becomes more prominent in our everyday lives, it is important to study a community that has embraced the surrealism of the Internet completely. In order to answer some of these questions I will enter the World of Warcraft as Tobias, a blood elf, and interact with different members of the WOW community. This is my story.