Yes, video games can advance political science. We explain how World of Warcraft contradicts serious theories of international security, and how this game might even suggest a better world.
Two years ago I was writing nerd articles about Numerama and its sister site Frandroid. I have since moved to Copenhagen, bought myself a bicycle, and started a doctorate in political science to study the cyberworld under the guidance of a great professor of international security. My first research paper, soon to be published in the respectable European Journal of International Security, is about geopolitics. In the game World of Warcraft.
Securitization: the easy geopolitical basis for a fictional scenario
No, I did not strain myself for my research subject, especially since wow been part of my life since 2013. Researchers using their jobs as an excuse to play video games, there’s a whole field of research, and even my colleagues in international politics have found “serious” ways to write about Sid Meyer’s Civilization, Mass Effectand a good number of first person shooters.
So I decided to analyze how international security works in wow. One of the main theories in the field – which I explained on Numerama, backed up with dragons and magic formulas, in an interview with my future thesis director – is called “security”, also known as the “Copenhagen school”. When we say that something is an existential threat to something that we want to protect, and we say that we must take exceptional measures against this threat, we are “securing”, that is to say that ‘we turn something into a security problem.
For example, when we say that terrorism is a terrible threat to citizens and that, to avoid attacks, we must therefore have the right to bypass encryption to monitor people’s private conversations… that’s securitization. All wars in the modern world have taken place after leaders used this kind of language. We quickly realize that there is securitization everywhere in fantasy, science fiction, superhero comics, and action films. A supervillain who wants to destroy the world, and heroic efforts to thwart it, no matter how much destruction they cause: it’s a very mundane scenario but built around making it secure.
From the Lich King to the Jailer
Scenarios like these in World of Warcraft, there are plenty of them. The Burning Legion, the Lich King, the Old Gods, and the shenanigans of Garrosh Hellscream and Sylvanas Windrunner have been featured in the massively multiplayer game’s eight expansions since 2004. wow boasts one of the largest universes in fantasy, and thousands of pages of text to analyze – enough to feed a security researcher for a while.
And that led me to a completely unexpected discovery, especially for someone who has been playing this game for a long time and therefore should know how it works. international security in wow works perfectly in the opposite direction, if we compare it to the real world.
To be honest, it was even unexpected that the theory of securitization could work in wow. To create this theory, the Copenhagen researchers were inspired by the way “national security” works in rather democratic Western states. This has led some competing researchers to say that securitization theory works poorly in non-democratic countries, or even in non-Western countries; I think this argument is based on a misunderstanding, but let’s skip these technical discussions.
In the lambda (and very simplistic) diagram of a democracy, normal politics is supposed to be rather conciliatory and cooperative, with many checks and balances that prevent emergency decisions. When securitization invokes, for example, the need for large-scale online surveillance to counter future attacks, it seeks to shut down debate, bypass privacy protections, and frame the world through a George W. Bush: “ you are either with us or with the terrorists “. Indeed, “the survival of our fellow citizens is at stake”, nothing less! In the stereotype learned by any student of geopolitics, normal politics is peaceful and security politics is violent.
On the contrary, in wowas in many other video games of this style, normal politics involves killing people at random. From the Zen-like Pandaren to the snarky Skull-Laughing Orcs, just about every race in the game will ask you to beat up intelligent creatures with often no more argument than “they’re giving us trouble.” From one, the security argument that “people’s survival is at stake” does not work, because the people of Azeroth often don’t care about killing, and sometimes even dying. Secondly, if the purpose of security is to override the constraints of the usual policy in the service of security, what is the point in wowwhere the usual policy already allows everything to be done?
In WoW, securitization is a vector of pacifism
Well, in wownormal politics is violent, and security policy makes it possible to overcome divisions between factions enemies to unite against a common threat. The same kind of political language that brings hostility and antagonism to our real world, brings international cooperation to Azeroth. I will illustrate this to you through three domains or “sectors” of security in wow, which I compare with our world. The examples in my scientific paper are based on World of Warcraft: Legion (2016), which many consider the best expansion of the current game, and I will try to reproduce these examples with minimal spoilers.
Many players venturing into Azeroth, encounter a people they do not know and who tell them “help us, the fate of our people is at stake”. This is called societal security. In the real world, societal securitization often takes on xenophobic overtones on the preservation of a national “culture” against an alleged immigrant threat. In wow, it is on the contrary to save a tribe or an entire people from extermination. An international anti-genocide regulation, in fact. When a group of blue dragons from the world of Azeroth are vampirized by bands of drug elves, they can call on the first adventurer to save their community from slaughter.
There is something rotten in the bucolic kingdom of Val’sharah.
Nature’s creatures can also talk about their own safety. Environmental securitization works poorly in the real world – not least because the climate and protected species cannot directly tell us that they are under existential threat, and because the effects of environmental destruction are usually indirect and take time to develop. appear clearly. In wowan entire region like Val’sharah is populated by druids, talking trees and other nature spirits, who claim their safety just as if they were a political community. – because that is what they are. When a problem occurs, it also shows very quickly: everything turns red.
Finally, the icing on the cake: supranational securitization, which hardly happens very effectively in the real world because states and their national security always end up coming first. Each extension of wow is based on a supervillain who threatens the whole world, even the universe, and we would be bored without such threats. The security policy in the game then fulfills the role of international organizations like the United Nations.
In Legion, it’s about preventing the demons of the Burning Legion from getting their hands on invaluable sources of magic that would allow them to conquer the cosmos. There followed an international coalition combining pell-mell the Horde, the Alliance, the demon hunters of Illidan rehabilitated since The Burning Crusade (2007), and other factions that would never work together if there were no existential threat to the universe. To drive the point home and show what will happen to Azeroth if the Legion is not countered, the devastated planet of Argus, homeworld of the Draenei and demonic capital, floats in the sky like a bad omen.
Can we take inspiration from World of Warcraft to solve our problems?
So, if planet Earth followed Azeroth’s lead, would we be able to prevent genocide, solve global warming, and bring peace to the world? Not so fast.
Foreground: Argus before the Legion. Background: Argus after.
In World of Warcraftsecuritization is widely seen in a positive light, but there are still two exceptions which are far from negligible. A little dive into the lore imposes itself. The Burning Legion, one of the game’s most iconic foes, was founded in the cosmic conflict between the Creator Titans and their sworn enemies, the Void Lords (of which the Old Gods, inspired by Lovecraftian horror literature, are the primary officers).
Seeing a planet almost completely corrupted by the Void, and about to turn into a devastating weapon, the titan Sargeras had decided that it was better to exterminate all life and start afresh rather than risk such a horror. produce. It is by this extreme reassuring gesture that the Legion was formed. During his first attack on Azeroth, the young elf Illidan Stormrage was so upset by the demonic abuses that he became ready to do anything to stop the Legion, even if it meant turning into a demon himself. Thus, the game still signals that security has its excesses.
And then, for Azerothian securing to work in the real world, it would probably take normal levels of violence on our world to be as high as on Azeroth. It is something that, of course, is out of the question to want. But this theory could work in areas where conflicts are already present, real or latent – and as the Martinican thinker Franz Fanon explained, this concerns many regions that have undergone colonization.
The fact remains that, casually, whatever the practical result of this research, World of Warcraft has advanced (a little) political science.