This WowWiki entry explains well the utter silliness of most discussions in the main public channel in the beginner’s area for the Horde faction in World of Warcraft. What is really interesting is that a confluence of factors in the game (for instance geography, player level) lead to very similar chat patterns across servers, from country to country, month after month (I’ve been witness to Barrens chat myself a couple years ago with Horde lowbie rerolls). See, WoW is not a single universe, it’s actually hundreds of servers functioning as silo’ed replicas of the same universe. Characters from one server don’t interact with those from other servers except in instanced PVP zones and arenas, or when they migrate from one server to the other (usually because of over or under server population). Yet the same behaviors happen again and again.
WoW shows how mechanistic human groups can behave. Guild drama for instance is highly replicable from guild to guild. Once you’ve been through it a couple times, you may feel like you belong to a species quite close to ants or bees.
