What is the Wow Metaphor? 

How Emeralda and the World of Warcraft compare 

Two-thousand four was the year the World of Warcraft, a Massively Multiplayer Role-playing Game (MMRPG), was released and also the year the first Halfwood Presses were made and sold to become the bases and platforms for all new experiences in printmaking.

Preface 

Note that this essay is created in the realm of Perfect Studios, the domain-of-expertise in artists’ asset management and legacy transfer. On this island domain, we consider all the ways that the works and offerings of artists, crafts people and designers may be maintained, cultivated, and incorporated in the EarthSafe 2022 mission.

Perfect Studios is one of the ten domains-of-expertise in the imaginary place called Emeralda, and this imaginary place is devoted to games for the gifts of life. On each of the ten islands, different strategies are practiced, but they are all related to printmaking, a performance, time-based art that developed concurrently with painting and sculpting.

The World of Warcraft evolved in the United States, starting with a company that designed ports for other companies’ games. Then, three recent graduates from UCLA eventually brought about the earliest versions. This was in the early 1990s, as international events impinged on the United States political and economic policies, laying groundwork for an undeclared civil war in this country. Generations of failures in American education policies resulted in dominant ignorance and American vulgarity which had worldwide consequences.

EarthSafe 2022

My casual encounter with the Union of Concerned Scientists—which I had never heard of until one day, on Guemes Island, I happened to find a brochure that this organization published entitled, “Worlds’ Scientists Call for Help from all Humanity,” in which 1,500 renowned scientists signed an agreement that five problems would end Earth’s Human Life Sustainability within ten to thirty years. It was 1992, and counting.

Thirty years would put us at 2022. Our two daughters—Billie Jane and Nellie Adelle, would be 53 and 50, respectively. The scientists were describing five factors in human societies all over the world which needed to be addressed immediately if the Earth was to be able to sustain our daughters’ lives. As an artist, what could I do to help? And, if 1,500 scientists of high reputations could agree on five points, despite their nationality, religious beliefs and other commitments, would there be 1,500 artists of comparable accomplishment in the field of art who also would agree to sign up to help the scientists?

I felt like a person who had been living in a cave, and in that moment I had stopped my clumsy scrawls and my handprints on the walls of the cave, and looked outside. I saw nothing—no one who called themselves an artist who would sign such a call for help as did those scientists. To agree on five points would require, first, reading them. Who did I know that would read the UCS’ brochure, and immediately agree to help?

Despite that I was close to several renowned artists, I felt reluctant because my past experience gave me to think they would dismiss the brochure. I found the brochure in the community center on Guemes Island; I had been invited to talk about new technologies I adapted to serve traditional printmaking education—things like the first PC-based hypermedia tool, ToolBook—which was Paul Allen’s answer to the Apple Macintosh Hyperstack.

In the coming months I made up my mind to do something—but what? I didn’t know; but I made my resolution to put my future in the context of EarthSafe 2022—do things to help the worlds’ scientists as well as my talents would allow. Because if, by the year 2022, I had done nothing, then my daughters—in their middle age by then—would know the shame.

WoW and me

When I visit the websites for topics on the World of Warcraft, it seems to me that the three graduate students who started it (at the same time that I discovered the Union of Concerned Scientists’ brochure) belonged to a college-educated generation who were oblivious to the five issues of which the worlds’ scientists referred. Well-trained (I will not say educated) in computer science, they found easy money was to be made selling violence in the game industry.

I think violence of the kind you see in WoW is the result of ignorance and vulgarity of the kind we think of as having existed in the Medieval ages when people were barely surviving the elements and who were easily influenced by those who had superior intellect and creativity and could conjure spiritual and ineffable answers to basic questions of sustainability.

For example, questions like, “Why did the neighboring tribe attack?’ The leaders’ answer: “Because they worshipped an inferior God.” What should be done? “Fight back, to the death if necessary, for it is written that we are superior because we are the true human beings and they are animals.”

This thinking had nothing to do with the availability of resources and what is needed for sustainability. If the neighboring tribe wore their hair a certain way, or their skins were of a different tone, then these appearances were somehow lumped into the need to scorn them, destroy them and take their homes and kill their leaders.

WoW employees at company headquarters in California create and sell monsters and evil forces easily enough after generations of failed education in the public schools and colleges of the USA. For the past century classroom teachers have had to fight for their students’ attention and respect ever since TV took over American thinking as regards education.

Teachers have also had to fight for public support and, often times, they have had to fight their own school administrators for their pay. Today, getting young students’ attention is even harder because of video games. And there are more dire forecasts. TV shows of the 50s may have presented a skewed view of American values, but they are nothing compared to the impact of WoW and other games such as Grand Theft Auto.

Many United States children are being set up, in my opinion, to rally to almost any call to help reduce Earth’s human life sustainability for the coming generations. In my opinion, those who call themselves artists and who create those monsters and virtual experiences are minions for the industry, not artists at all of the kind we need to help the scientists save Earth’s human life sustainability.