[Presentation] 'Azeroth As It Was': Is World of Warcraft Classic Really Vanilla?

For many queer players, World of Warcraft has served as a digital platform to enact queer gameplay. Game mechanics, social play, and avatar models provide possibilities for playing queer. For example, the masculine female Orcs have allowed many queer women to not only play with female masculinity, but to go unnoticed by straight male players (Sundén 2009).

And yet, Blizzard Entertainment (Blizzard) has attempted to correct its player’s signs of queerness by banning players and guilds with explicit LGBTQ content (Pulos 2013), and through the introduction of game patches and expansions that continue to widen sexual dimorphism between playable races (Brett 2018). Arguably, Blizzard is enacting straightening devices which diminish in-game queerness (Rubenstein 2007, Brett 2018). However, in August 2019, Blizzard re-released World of Warcraft Classic (Classic), “[…] a faithful recreation of the original World of Warcraft. Combat mechanics, original character models, and skill trees all contribute to a truly authentic experience” (Blizzard 2019). In this, Blizzard has shed the design decisions that have policed queer bodies throughout its patch history. Yet, Is this return enough to break past hegemonic notions of gender and “playing straight”, in order to re-establish spaces for queer play? Through micro-ethnographic narratives, this paper explores “queerness beyond representation” (Ruberg 2019) in WoW Classic. I analyze the moments of Classic gameplay which relinquish “straight time” (Muñoz 2009), allowing players to involve themselves in queer possibilities. In this, I discuss the prospects of counter-hegemonic ways of play that may emerge through the technological affordances of Classic.