20 Years of Orcs, Guilds and Memes in World of Warcraft

Even if you have never been consumed by the battle over Azeroth between the Alliance and the Horde, you probably know about World of Warcraft.The colorful online role-playing game where the likes of orcs, blood elves, night elves and dwarves band together to complete quests and vanquish villains transcended the realm of video games to become a pop culture phenomenon.After World of Warcraft was released by Blizzard Entertainment in November 2004, millions of people paid monthly subscriptions to join guilds with their real-life friends or in hopes of making new ones.

Soon it was being featured on “South Park” and in political campaigns.Then came the requisite Hollywood adaptation.

The game has also spilled into unexpected spaces like cryptocurrency and epidemiology.Although no longer at the height of its influence, World of Warcraft — known by its fans as WoW — it is still going strong: Its latest expansion, The War Within, was released in August.In honor of World of Warcraft’s 20th anniversary this month, here are 20 ways that it shook things up.WoW was a social network before social media.Because World of Warcraft’s popularity eclipsed its genre predecessors, it was where many people got a taste of the future of online social networks.

In the game’s first year, Facebook was burgeoning but restricted to universities; broadband internet was just being widely adopted in many homes.Gamers were used to connecting to online servers or setting up in-person LANs to play first-person shooters or real-time strategy games with a handful of friends.But entering the bustling capitals of World of Warcraft, where hundreds of players would congregate, was another experience altogether.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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