The Words of Warcraft: Relational Text Analysis of Quests in an MMORPG

This study applies relational text analysis to the full World of Warcraft quest corpus, roughly 6,765 texts divided into Horde-only, Alliance-only, and shared sets, arguing that examining the complete body of quests captures game culture more faithfully than focusing on a handful of representative examples. The authors situate their work within research on MMORPG narrative design, noting that quest writing is typically a late-stage, templated, and deadline-driven task that players often only partly read. Their analysis draws on the Allakhazam quest database, whose logging artifacts and retained removed quests they acknowledge as limitations.

The central finding is that the faction-specific corpora are strikingly similar. The five most frequent terms appear in identical rank order across all three sets, and more than half of faction-available content is shared verbatim between Horde and Alliance. Violence-related vocabulary appears slightly more often in Horde and shared quests than in Alliance quests. Local differences do exist: Horde texts use more aggressive language and reference their own factions more frequently, while references to the Scarlet Crusade cluster in shared quests.

These local distinctions, however, largely disappear when only relationships appearing in at least five percent of texts are considered. The dominant shared core across all quests is a small set of actions, chiefly players confronting enemy mobs at the request of quest givers, which the authors find outweighs narrative content in structuring the text. The conclusion is that quest texts convey only the most general messages. The authors suggest that designers vary quest styles and rely on other game features, rather than quest text alone, to communicate plot and faction identity.