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Digital Elves as a Racial Other in Video Games: Acknowledgment and Avoidance

Digital Elves as a Racial Other in Video Games: Acknowledgment and Avoidance

Games and Culture
Volume 7, Number 5 (September 2012)
pages 375-396
DOI: 10.1177/1555412012454224

Nathaniel Poor
Brooklyn, New York, USA

Elves are a long-standing cultural trope in the West, where they have often represented the other and fears associated with otherness. Elves continue to do the same cultural work today and are a fixture of fantasy settings. Fantasy-based video games portray elves in a variety of ways across a few types of elves (high elves, half-elves, and dark elves), but there are consistencies to their portrayal across such spaces. Given the dearth of work on elves in modern narratives, the cultural work of elves as the other in video games is analyzed here. World of Warcraft (WoW), EverQuest II, The Elder Scrolls series, and the Dragon Age series were studied, with Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) as background. Although WoW is somewhat exceptional in its portrayal of elves, digital elves are mostly portrayed similarly to a historically idealized real-world Western minority.

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