Server Stories

A realm was small enough to have a reputation. People married out of it and held ceremonies inside it; when players died, Blizzard quietly added them to the world as NPCs, unmarked, so that most people walk past a memorial without knowing. In 2006 a guild held a funeral in-game for a member who had died and a rival guild attacked it, and the argument about what the game was for has never resolved. This facet is the population, not the software.

Part of World of Warcraft

19 moments in this segment.

1. 2006 - The funeral raid. A guild held an in-game funeral for a member who had died in life. A rival guild attacked it. Both the grief and the attack were real, and the argument about which of them the game was for has never resolved.
2. 2008 - Serenity Now crash a wake in Winterspring. Sixty seconds of the guild Serenity Now ambushing an in-game memorial gathering held for a player who had died in real life. It is the founding artefact of a whole argument about what a shared server owes the grieving, and it is here alongside the archive's other funeral footage as the griefers' own record of what they did.
3. 2009-12-01 - The Burning Addiction. A short amateur documentary about a friend named Sam and his relationship with the game, made harder by his death during production. It is not a broadcast moral-panic segment but something closer to a home movie, and it shows how the addiction question was lived rather than televised. Dated to its release; the filming period is not documented.
4. 2012 - Ahab Wheathoof. A quest giver in Mulgore, added by Blizzard as a memorial to a player who died. His quest asks you to find his lost dog. Requests like this are handled quietly and there are dozens of them scattered through the world.
5. 2014 - Looking for Group. Blizzard's own tenth-anniversary documentary about its players. It is a corporate film, and it is also the only professionally shot record of several of these communities.
6. 2014 - The couple. Two people who met in the game, in Blizzard's tenth-anniversary series. Marriages out of WoW are common enough to be unremarkable, which is itself the point.
7. 2017-06-04 - Elloric, and the player he was named for. A tribute film about Michael, a player who died, and Elloric, the NPC Blizzard put in the world to carry his name, built with footage from the in-game memorial his guildmates held. Blizzard's practice of writing dead players into Azeroth as permanent NPCs is one of the clearest things WoW did that other games did not. Distinct from the archive's survey scene 'The memorials, collected': this is one death, told by the people who were there.
8. 2017 - The memorials, collected. A survey of in-game memorials to players who died. They are unmarked: nothing tells you which NPCs are real people, and most players walk past all of them.
9. 2017 - Synipus. Another memorial NPC, documented by a player who set out to record them before patches moved or removed them.
10. 2017 - For the Horde, in Budapest. An esports pub in Budapest decorated for one faction. Faction identity travelled well outside the game: it is a shorthand that works in a bar.
11. 2017 - For the Alliance. The other half of the same Budapest pub. The faction split has structured how players talk about themselves for twenty years, including people who play both.
12. 2018 - A wedding, held in Azeroth. A guild wedding staged in-game. For players separated by continents this was often the only ceremony everyone could attend.
13. 2019 - Serenity Now kill Ragnaros. Footage of the guild Serenity Now downing Ragnaros in Molten Core. Serenity Now is remembered for one thing above all, the raid on a rival guild's in-game funeral, and this is the guild doing the ordinary thing it also did, raiding. Kept as guild-side material rather than as a world first.
14. 2019 - Mankrik's wife. A quest whose objective was badly marked, in a zone with no map detail, which produced years of players asking the same question in the same chat channel. "Barrens chat" became shorthand for a whole style of public conversation.
15. 2021-03-13 - Retired servers. Decommissioned server hardware that once ran the game. Each of these machines held a realm, a population with its own economy, its own guilds and its own reputation, none of which survived the hardware.
16. 2021 - Pandora's Box. An essay-documentary on what convenience features did to the game's social fabric, the argument that making grouping easy made guilds unnecessary, and that the game lost something real in the trade.
17. 2022 - Chinese players arrive on other servers. When the Chinese servers were closing, players moved onto neighbouring regions to keep their characters, and turned up in numbers on servers that had never had them.
18. 2023 - A year to plan a griefing. A player spent over a year positioning himself inside a Hardcore guild in order to kill all of them at once, permanently. Hardcore has no resurrection, so the loss was total.
19. 2024 - The famous and the infamous. A survey of the players who became known server-wide, in an era when a server was small enough to have a reputation.