Playing Another Game: Twinking in World of Warcraft

René Glas's study examines "twinking" in World of Warcraft, the practice of giving a character unearned advantages through borrowed gear, money, or assistance from high-level players, which produces unbalanced competition in the early stages of the game. Rather than judging the practice, the paper treats twinking as a form of play and analyzes it through four lenses: luxury, dominance, transformative, and standardized play. Drawing on participatory ethnography, in which the author created and played a twink for several months, alongside analysis of guides and forums, the work documents how twinking contributes to hyperinflation of in-game currency, a phenomenon intertwined with real-money trading and goldfarming.

A central focus is battleground twinking, in which max-level characters are outfitted to dominate lower-level brackets in player-versus-player combat. Drawing on Bartle's player types and the game theories of Juul and Salen and Zimmerman, the author frames this as an individualized form of dominance play. Twinks tend to be socially isolated and often viewed negatively by other players, and they frequently regress within Bartle's model of player development. The paper concludes that battleground twinking transforms the late-mid game into a more structured, sports-like experience with predefined goals. However, it argues this practice does not represent MMORPG design as a whole, since the game world remains open-ended.

The final argument holds that twinking standardizes gear and character builds within each class, converting the game's typically varied, progression-based play into a narrow contest decided by skill. Battleground twinks are rarely a player's primary character and represent a niche, luxury-like pursuit that departs from the social and exploratory design the game intends. A case study of one fully twinked character, Brikk, shows that one-on-one duels against other twinks became prolonged tests of skill and endurance. The author contends these encounters are among the few moments in the game where outcomes depend purely on player ability.