I’ve played my share of Warcraft. I’ve done my time in the Deadmines, re-specced to take on Prince Malchezaar, and watched Dalaran slow to a crawl thanks to my somewhat-antiquated video card.

I’ve spent hours in an achievement haze, doing busywork for ephemeral awards. I’ve reported more gold-farmer spam than I care to recall. But I’m not joining in on the latest content blast. Why? Because of all the many ways that Warcraft has scarred my mind and soul, the most profound is this: I now hate elves.

You’ve got to understand here — elves have been a part of my life as long as I can remember. Tolkien elves and Gygaxian elves and Pini elves and Santa’s elves: If it had pointy ears and lived someplace far from any drive-through espresso stand, it was part of my cultural landscape.

And then came Warcraft. I mostly played Horde, so at first elves were my rivals and occasional enemies. But then they bought in a different set of elves as Horde characters, because for some reason elves are like potato chips — they’re always inventing new flavors. Now you can’t throw a Deadly Saronite Dirk without hitting an elf, usually on purpose.

Even so, it took time for my sylvan bigotry to make itself clear to me. I was never able to get very far into Dragon Age: Origins, and I only got as far as I did because I pretended my character was Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager.

The Dungeons and Dragons campaign I wanted to start never got off the ground. Keebler fudge grahams started to taste like ash and bile in my mouth.

Then, recently, I started to look into RPGs for the iPhone, and I felt my eyes glazing faster than a Krispy Kreme machine hooked up to a steam turbine, every time I saw some dewy-eyed sorceress with ears like one of those creepy hairless cats. And let me tell you, game designers love to put sexy she-elves front and center. I finally realized I would rather sit through a parade of ’90s-era platformer critters “with attitude” than play another elf-based game.

It’s not fantasy in general that repels me. I’d love to play a game based on the Temeraire series, where British and French dragon corps battle in the Napoleonic Wars. Give me an RPG based on Princess Mononoke, and I’m all over it. But for some reason, while game designers love to make up their own aliens, nearly every fantasy game trots out the same elf-dwarf-human triumvirate that was hoary back when Leonard Nimoy was singing “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.”

For God’s sake, game folk, it’s called “fantasy” for a reason. Fantasize me something new before I start to hate operating systems that use the Executable and Linkable Format.

In the meantime, I’m avoiding elvenkind and subsisting on a steady gaming diet of space marines, surprisingly athletic Italian plumbers and angry birds.

I’m hoping to get over my imaginary racism in time to enjoy the Hobbit movie, and I’m starting to see some progress. For instance, last night I got two-thirds of the way through “The Elves and the Shoemaker” before breaking out in sweats and shivers.

Maybe, given time, I’ll pick up Cataclysm and give the new content a try.

But I’ll be playing a troll.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a gnome, a gnoll and a gnathostomulid.

See Also:

• Alt Text: An Open Letter to Hobbit Director Peter Jackson
• Alt Text: World of Warcraft Masters In-Game Bribery
• Alt Text: Sam Raimi’s Warcraft Movie Production Diary

Authors: Lore Sjöberg

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