And yet, for some reason, Horde players seem to be far more passionate about their faction. Why is that? Why was the result of this competition decided before it began?
DISCLAIMER: This is a very tricky thing to figure out, and I'm not a sociologist. This is a subjective question to answer.
1. Simple Colors:
People are more passionate about the color red. Yes, we, especially those in the US and Western Europe (where I imagine the largest concentration of WoW players are) tend to associate Blue with "the good guys," (see Lightsabers, or the Cold War) and Red with the "bad guys," there is something about that low-frequency light that gets our hearts pumping. Indeed, the very reasons why we might think of Blue and Red representing Good and Evil respectively could have something to do with the fact that Blue is typically associated with calmness and serenity, and thus peacefulness, while Red is typically associated with passion and fervor, and thus belligerence. And when we talk about faction pride, we're talking about passion.
2. The Fervor of the Converted:
"The Fervor of the Converted" is used typically to refer to religion. Someone who converts to another religion will often become a very devout adherent to that new faith. It makes sense - if you were raised in said faith, it might not seem like something special. It's something you're used to, and while you might still totally believe in it, you might just treat it as a normal aspect of your day-to-day life. Meanwhile, a convert will take to his or her new faith with greater excitement because it is new, and by having made a conscious decision to join that faith, they have invested personally with their willpower, and want to get everything they can out of it.
What does this have to do with the Alliance or Horde? Well, everyone who plays WoW is, physically at least, human (not counting bots.) By choosing the faction that does not have humans, and is in fact opposed to humans, the player is making a kind of investment in a new identity, and thus will feel more passionate in identifying with that choice.
3. Symbolism and Propaganda:
The Horde has better symbolism and a clearer vision for what their faction represents. Take the competing symbols for the Horde and Alliance. The Horde has this cool kind of barbarian Omega - instantly recognizable to the extent that they were able to carve Azshara into it. The Alliance has, in recent years, been symbolized by just a lion face. Do lions really fit as a representation of the Alliance? (Other than, just like in the best Firefly episode, the fact that "Alliance" sounds a bit like "A lion.") The Alliance symbol used to be a stylized "L" for Lordaeron, which you can still see when you get flagged for PvP, and frankly I liked this more abstract symbol better.
But then let's take some other examples. What can a Horde hero cry out as they charge into battle? "For the Horde!" The Alliance has no such catchy slogan. What is the Horde's leader called? "Warchief." Pretty straightforward. The Alliance? Until recently, there was none. Now it's "High King," which... this is just a personal gut feeling, admittedly, but it doesn't have the same ring to it.
4. Cutting Loose versus Restraint
Part of the reason we play video games is that we get to simulate doing things we'd never be able to do in real life. Most of us would never pick up a sword and hack away at another person, even if it was a dangerous bandit out on the road. Any WoW character is going to be a one-person natural disaster. If you look up the statistics on my least-played character, he's probably got a kill-count that would make most serial killers jealous.
The Alliance is largely characterized by acting defensively. In fact, the only times you ever see them invading a place are to respond to an attack or to counter the Horde (and doing so is, itself, responding to attacks that were known as the First and Second Wars.) That makes them pretty clearly heroic, but it also makes them a little passive. Meanwhile, the Horde is entirely self-motivated, and gets to act aggressively. These days, we think of wars of conquest as pretty unconscionable, but in the safe world of video games, we get to live out that fantasy of raiding, looting and pillaging. And the Horde just gets to do that more than the Alliance.
5. Size, Power, and Humorlessness
For some strange reason, Blizzard has a thing about size. Who is the silliest, most-comedic race in the Warcraft setting? Gnomes (or maybe Goblins.) Yet as the size of a playable race goes up, it gets more serious. Dwarves are still fairly silly, being crazy drunks. Yet when we get up to races like Draenei, Orcs, or Tauren, there's very little humor there. These races are generally treated with a great deal of seriousness. It's not a hard and fast rule - there are definitely some silly characters among the larger races, but the smaller ones are almost always jokes. While the BC and Cataclysm races gave the Alliance two big races and the Horde a medium and a small race, the general trend is that Horde has big behemoths and Alliance has more little guys.
Now, humor is a wonderful thing, but it can be kind of the opposite of passion. The sillier you are, the less seriously you take your cause, and thus, the less passionate you are. Indeed, look at how frustrated people were by the fact that the new quests in Westfall and Redridge Mountains were silly genre parodies. The very fact that Pandaren (who admittedly are an exception to that size pattern) were center-stage in this most recent expansion got people furious, despite the fact that, actually, outside of Valley of the Four Winds and bits of Jade Forest (really just Lorewalker Cho and the Hozen,) the expansion took itself very seriously.
The Alliance generally has a sillier time. And while some of us like that change of pace, to others it's a total turn off and an interruption of the fantasy that they had signed up for.
6. The Creators are There With Us
Look, I know a lot of people feel that there's too much complaining about "Horde bias" amongst the people at Blizzard, and I also recognize that those creators are also trying to work on it (Metzen in particular has taken to wearing Alliance clothing and associating himself with the Alliance,) but ultimately, it's still not totally working. Blizzard wanted to leave Siege of Orgrimmar with Alliance on top, but what they wound up doing was having an entire raid tier that was all about the Horde, Orcs, and Warchiefs. And they're going to follow it up with an entire expansion of the original Horde, but now without that pesky original Alliance.
The problem is that the Alliance isn't really getting fleshed out. Yes, the scales have started to tip back in favor of Alliance power after the de-throning of Garrosh, but Alliance society independent of the Horde has basically been in stasis. Supposedly Varian has become High King, but there's no real indication of what that means that is different from how it was during the war in Northrend.
I can't blame Blizzard for being prouder of what they've done with the Horde, because they're probably more passionate about it for the exact same reasons players are. But unlike players, it is the responsibility of the game's creators to treat both factions with the same amount of care and passion, because if they don't, it reinforces the gap.
Feeling Blue:
Granted, most of us expect that Alliance players will also wind up getting their new chopper mount as well, because of achievements and all that mount-collecting and keeping the game balanced. Still, I wonder if the game's makers and its players will ever find a way to deal with these issues and balance out the faction pride.
No comments:
Post a Comment