Alienation and Assimilation in a Warcraft World

Abstract

The highest level of science and technology convergence is globalization, as Internet, transnational corporations, and a uniform scientific culture encircle the Earth. Some social scientists have doubted that unification is possible, and predict that our world will continue to be a dangerous clash of civilizations. That is the scenario embodied by the most influential massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft. Thirteen societies have combined in two opposed factions, the Alliance and the Horde, but each faction contains hostility and disagreement between societies, as well as examples of close cooperation. This concluding chapter explores nationalism and assimilation using three avatars, two based on a pair of sociologists who interacted often throughout their lives, Daniel Bell (1919–2011) and Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006), and an innovative television personality whose work was intelligent psychodrama masquerading as popular comedy, Ernie Kovacs (1919–1962). Lipset’s theories of democracy, and Bell’s theories of post-industrial society, are relevant, but so also are the difficult paths these two men took from growing up in the New York subculture of Jewish immigrants, to becoming members of the same radical Socialist movement, to becoming in Lipset’s case a Neoconservative, and in both cases, anti-Marxists with love of Israel and loyalty to the United States. The motto of Ernie Kovacs, graven on his tombstone, is “nothing in moderation.” Of Hungarian descent, he was a critic of social pretension and an avant-garde artist who was exceedingly inventive in his surrealist use of television as a virtual world. Thus the three avatars explore World of Warcraft in different ways that offer insights about the American nation that created this premier online gameworld. Is America a “melting pot” dominated by convergence, or a “wild frontier” dominated by divergence?