Trying to discover a little bit more about ethics and the nature of malevolence in MMORPGs, I rolled a new Horde character: Badflower. I’ve made it to level 8, and this much is clear: In Warcraft, there are the Good, the “bad,” and the silly.

WoW’s two factions are the Alliance and the Horde: Your standard Human / Elf / Dwarf power trio pitted against the Orcs, the Trolls, and the Walking Dead. But whereas Tolkien and others in the literary tradition clearly see this as a contest between good and evil (and even Good and Evil), WoW equivocates. Good, yes: Alliance characters (human, anyway) make frequent reference to light and righteousness. But Evil, not so much: Horde characters include the Undead and spells make frequent use of demons and imps. But these are not malevolent. Sometimes they are “bad,” and frequently merely “different.”

Indeed, the idea of the Horde as some overwhelming, ubiquitous evil is frequently skewered. On one recent outing, for example, a horrifying giant ogre asked me to help him fetch “gloom weeds” for an zombie apothecary who had built him with leftovers from the graveyard. After a considerable effort, I brought the gloom weed to the frightening skeletal pharmacist, who complained, loudly, that he wanted “doom weed, not gloom weed.”

There is no evil here. The Horde is just like the Alliance, except the Horde’s narratives are infused with irony and humor.