We've written about the implications for race in online worlds in the past, and for those interested in more of the topic I must point you to two discussions on virtual worlds blog Terra Nova and a superb reference list generated on Gameology.
From the first Terra Nova post, The Horde is Evil:
When a real person chooses an evil avatar, he or she should be conscious of the evil inherent in the role. There are good reasons for playing evil characters - to give others an opportunity to be good, to help tell a story, to explore the nature of evil. But when the avatar is a considered an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.
Then when we look at WoW, it seems to me obvious that the Horde races are on the whole evil. One element of this is the fact that the words 'troll' and 'orc' and 'undead' have implied evil creatures for as long as those words have been in use in the English language (since the 9th century in the case of 'orc'). No one, not even mighty Blizzard, can un-do the meaning of a word in a matter of a few years. But more importantly, all you have to do is look at the values expressed by the cultures, and it should be apparent which sets of values are worthy of praise. The human race is the only one with children, and charitable giving, for example. Orcs, on the other hand, value warfare and power. In terms of public ethics, this is a no-brainer to me, really.
The second TN post, Cultural borrowing in WoW, I find more distressing, as I believe that the choices of the developers to personify "evil" characters as representatives from a particular culture contributes to a perpetuation of stereotypes in the real world. Greg Lastowka doesn't rest on this element as much as I would hope, but he does approach the idea from the perspective of how the represented cultures and objectives may go critically unquestioned by users. From the post:
I guess what I'm curious about is how people feel about cultural borrowing in WoW, and more broadly, about the appropriate limits (if any) of this kind of thing. Is there a point where crypto-cultural references become offensive? Can they be offensive if they are not perceived by the players? Jar-Jar Binks seemed to create a little bit of controversy a while back, so much that Lucas himself reportedly commented that the way Binks talked was "definitely not Jamaican and if you were to say those lines in Jamaican they wouldn't be anything like the way Jar Jar Binks says them."
Finally, if this still piques your interest, this reference list is pretty hefty and should satiate any race-related queries you may have.
