I notice that you’re fairly harsh on the game’s use of English dialect and accents associated with other cultures. You certainly have done a great job proving that this connection is present; I think Blizzard would not dispute you on that point. But is it actually “bad,” in the sense that you wish that Blizzard had not based its races on a mixture of real-world cultures?

Most every fictional group or people draws from real world cultures to some degree or other. In many cases, I think interesting combinations of real-world aspects can result in a fascinating and engaging fictional civilization. For example, Warhammer 40K’s space-age Imperium of Man incorporates elements drawn from the Holy Roman Empire, Fascism, Inquisition-era Christianity (particularly in Spain), and Soviet Russia. I don’t know if Romans, fascists, inquisitors, or Soviets would feel insulted by Warhammer 40K. I do think that the Warhammer 40K game world would be impoverished if the Imperium of Man did not include these real-world cultural references.

Some other examples of fictional groups I can think of which feature traits drawn from real-world groups include: X-Men (African Americans and the civil rights movement in America), Sauron and the forces of Mordor (Nazi Germany in WWII), the Vinci from Rise of Legends (civic society in Renaissance Italy), the city and prince in Howl’s Moving Castle (peasant and mercantile society in high medieval Europe), and the Fremen from Dune (nomadic Arab desert-dwellers before WWII). I don’t normally think of these works’ borrowing of real world cultural traits as objectionable.

I guess I’m not entirely convinced of the wrongness of what Blizzard has done.

If you decide to expand the paper as a thesis or for publication, this might be the area I would select in which further explanation could most greatly benefit the work as a whole.

“You’ll do, let’s go”

“You look like a lady…”

etc…
would you mind if I posted the link on a World of Warcraft community
( http://community.livejournal.com/worldofwarcraft/ ) or if you want to do it… I don’t know if they might kill your bandwidth

It also made me consider the actual meaning of the word “Horde,” i.e., a large crowd or mass, with vulgar/violent implications. I certainly doubt this was Blizzard’s original intention, but it is a rather unfortunate label to assign to a group of traditionally stigmatized ethnic minorities. (Plus walking skeletons, who also have feelings.)

I agree that gender would be a huge area for further study. Games, even more than other media, tend to portray a bizarre world in which all women are outright sex objects, “beautiful and deadly” (God, what a cliche that is) heroines/villains, or harmless/crazy old crones who run potion shops.

(Consider all the female FPS characters who go into gunfire with four-inch heels, breast implants and skintight clothes. Personally, if survival were at stake, I’d rather have a steroid-slamming juicer wearing steel-toed boots and head-to-toe kevlar on my side — male or female!)