Building A Critical Rationale for Avoiding WoW

I've been struggling recently with the idea that I should be playing an MMO - and I should, if I plan to write about it. Who can write about something they're not reading? (answer: me, but it's sort of dishonest, come to find out)

At the same time, though, I've struggled with the idea that I should not only be playing an MMO, but that it should be World of Warcraft. Millions play it, it's clearly dominating the platform and clearly influential, so it becomes the obvious choice for criticism, right? And yet, I don't really like World of Warcraft. (There; I said it. I know I've blasphemed against gaming culture, but I don't care.) And besides, my internal argument that I ought to be playing WoW because it's so popular rings pretty hollow compared to the pursuits of my academic peers. No one's building a scholarly CV on the writings of Virginia Woolf because Woolf is just so damn unavoidably popular. Quite the contrary; people make a name for themselves these days for reading obscurity more than popularity. There may be problems with that approach when dealing with popular culture - and thus gaming culture - but I can deal with those as they arise.

So if I ought to be playing an MMO to talk about MMOs, but I don't want to play World of Warcraft, it becomes incumbent upon me to generate a rationale for playing something else (and for that something else being contributive to a critical knowledge of the MMO and gaming culture).

* Firstly, WoW is waaaaay overdetermined. The discursive gravity of WoW is so great that any discussion of MMOs in general is drawn towards WoW. Blizzard sucks the oxygen out of the room, leaving everything else at the periphery even though WoW is not the only game in town.
* Secondly, it's difficult to discuss why WoW is successful or popular because Blizzard's hegemony renders those questions invisible. WoW's just popular. A way to find those questions, though, may lie in examining subordinated titles and finding out why they get less market penetration and what kinds of subcultures they are appealing to. Why EverQuest, for example, isn't WoW is probably a more insightful question than why WoW is WoW.
* Thirdly, conspicuously avoiding WoW allows me to indulge in the currently fashionable academic disdain for canonicity. If there is a game canon, Blizzard might as well be William Shakespeare. Apart from engaging in academic tribalism, though, discussing other more obscure titles would build a framework for visualizing games as being more than WoW the way we try to envision books as being more than Dickens and plays being more than Shakespeare.
* Finally, engaging games at the periphery may allow some critical distance to discuss commodification. WoW makes no resistance to commodity, and it might be illuminating to discuss how other games maintain without prostituting themselves to the Blizzard model.

That rationale having been created, I'm right now installing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. At 300,000 subscribers it's somewhere at the periphery definitely, though not as much as EverQuest at 150,000. I think Warhammer is helpful for other intertextual and cross-media reasons as well. The title exists not just as an MMO, but also as an RTS game, a tabletop game, a literary universe, and a range of other contexts. Reading Warhammer across contexts as a popular culture device could be enlightening.