Having decided to take action regarding the Swastika Symbol, Bowtox broadcasts a _call to action_ to other interested WoW characters through the general, trade and looking-for-group chat channels. He also talks to the surrounding player characters, who begin to modify the base symbol shape.
Lilsmoky is the first to perform the “/sleep” action, which allows them to lie down along one symbol _arm_. Other players adopt the action and a user-generated box pattern forms to replace the Swastika:
![Group Dialogue begins regarding action[s]. The lilac text indicates chatting privately, the white is general, and the orange indicates in-game gesturing.](http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/4.jpg "Group Dialogue Begins")
As the symbol intervention continues, additional players perform other reappropriation actions, such as:
- Riding mounts so as to close spaces and join gaps within the symbol:
- _Beautifying_ the area with displays derived from inherent game functions [eg multiple spell casting(s)]:
- Morphing of player characters into disco-dancing pirates. These pirates proceed to play a game of catch with a leather ball whilst dancing in the swastika-turned-box:
This Synthetic Presencing example ends when Blizzard begins to remove the symbol corpses [due to player complaints]. After thanking his fellow actioneers, Bowtox proceeds to the mailbox and resumes playing WoW via convention game dynamics.
Hey again,
It is great to see some performative interventions on the swastika rather than just banning it. A pure ban would just make that ideology more attractive to others for all the wrong reasons.
This artistic intervention is the best way to engage it.
I wonder if they were charging this swastika as a magickal symbol? As we know, Himmler had an obsession with the Occult and the SS actually had its letters derived from Runic symbols.
Definitely Fascism and occult role-playing have a well documented historical link and so seeing this kind of activity should not be a surprise to any avatar in WoW.
This morning, I was leveling up in The Barrens and I was monitoring the General Chat Channels and there suddenly appeared a whole bunch of Anti-Semitic remarks about “Jews hording all the gold” or something like that.
So, maybe that Corpse-Swastika configuration is part of a much darker mutant form of CyberNeoNazi outreach?
I’m not sure about this at all. Anybody claiming to purge negativity through their actions steers a little close to a different and more sinister form of fascism. The apperance of a swastika could be many things; only when the outraged turn up and complain is it formally politicised.
Howdy Jer, Christian…
Jer: I don’t think Barrens Chat is directed specifically in a race_hate angle. It’s basically a free-form outlet that feeds off its own self-referentiality [more 2 come on that in a future entry].
Christian: Just seeking some clarification; are you not sure about the Presencing event itself or the corresponding theorising of it? I’m not totally sure that the Presencing action intended to strip away all negativity involved, but more to possibly counteract it?
Yeah, I was concerned about the reaction to the symbol rather than whoever laid it in the first place. So, an angry punk living in say, Barcelona, has a very different swastika on her backpack than the neo-nazi living in sydney drawing it on the side of a polish-owned bakery. So like, I get it – WoW players see a ‘negative’ and counter-act it with buff and spells and special action. But perhaps that dialectic is borne not from a social forma seeing a swastika, but from the ambient autism of WoW game design. We can’t commune, so we commune through these gestures and the limit conditions and cases of our little bodies.
Another thing I think of is the interaction of neo-nazi and anti-nazi punks in London in the 1980s, and then reverberating through other punk milieux. Symbolism of nazi paraphenalia is contingent on local knowledge and local circumstances. Obviously if the symbol is laid with specifically racist character names, making it a quite complex activity to perform. Thats not in question; its not a frivolous graffiti act. But in the old school Stuart Hall sense, “what does this direct action do?”.