In 2005, the video game World of Warcraft struck the cultural
landscape with tidal force. One hundred million people have played WoW
in the twelve years since.
But those people did more than play. They worked, they fought, they
triumphed, they held entire game servers hostage, they even married each
other in real life. They developed new identities, swapping their
workaday selves for warriors, mages, assassins, and healers. They built
communities and rose to lead them. WoW was the world's first mass
virtualization: before Facebook or Twitter, millions of people
established online identities and had to reckon with the consequences in
their real lives.
Blood Plagues and Endless Raids explores this wild, incredibly complex
culture partly through the author's engaging personal story, from
absolute neophyte to leader of North America's top Spanish-speaking
guild, but also through the stories of other players and the game's
developers. It is the definitive account of one of the world's biggest
pop culture phenomena.
World of Warcraft is more than ones and zeroes, more than lines of
code, and so its history must be more than pushing buttons or slaying
dragons. It's the tale of a huge and passionate community of people: the
connections they made, the experiences they shared, and the love they
held for one another.
