This week, I played Wizard101 by KingsIsle Entertainment. It’s available on a variety of PCs and downloadable on many web browsers. As some who played this as a child, I would say this is for the “tween”agers, if you would like to call them that. Or you could also say its target audience is anyone who is a fan of a free, casual MMO game
Wizard101 is a free MMO game that was first released in 2008. Despite its cartoony art style (however I love it) and kid-friendly tone, the game creates a world players genuinely grow attached to through its effortless world building. From its narrative choices to its mechanics, Wizard101 actively invites the player to care about the Spiral, its interconnected universe of magic-themed realms.
You begin Wizard101 as a young, newly enrolled wizard at Ravenwood School of Magical Arts. Your first act? Saving Wizard City from a villain named Malistaire. The stakes are made clear and immediate to the player: your school, your classmates, and your city are in danger. This hits the emotional “affiliation + peril” sweet spot that Baxter described in this article read before this, you’re immediately grounded in a home and immediately called to defend it.
As you progress, you travel to other worlds in the Spiral, each with its own culture, conflict, and aesthetic. Krokotopia channels ancient Egyptian themes, Marleybone is a Victorian dog-ruled world dealing with civil unrest, and Mooshu draws from East Asian mythologies with a spiritual narrative arc. These zones are highly stylized, distinct, and packed with side characters who have their own motivations, not just exposition. That makes even the goofier worlds feel “lived in” so to speak, all finer details contributing to the overall feelings of the world the user now inhabits. It’s very reminiscent of environmental storytelling, and I would say it does this well.
The game’s mechanics work hard as well to really immerse the user. At character creation, you are placed into one of seven schools of magic via a quiz (pictured): Fire, Ice, Storm, Life, Death, Myth, or Balance. This shapes the spells you can cast, your role in combat, and your strategic options throughout the game. Storm is high damage, low accuracy, Life is healing-focused and resilient, Death blends offense and sustainability, and so on to give each school/ability a different place in combat. This system shows quite clearly its MDA framework. Mechanics such as spells and decks contribute to the Dynamics of team-based combat paired with solo questing, and all of this contributes to the overall Aesthetics of a power fantasy game that allows you to experience a typical Hero’s Journey.
As for ethics, I did want to talk about how Wizard101 depicts the body and other users within the world. Unlike what we saw when we discussed D&D last week, the game avoids racial essentialism. Avatars are customizable and disconnected from ability, although it is victim to the usual early 2000s there’s like 3 hair textures, no body type diversity, and incredibly Eurocentric features issue. But as I was playing I noticed a way for a different kind of essentialism to appear, magical determinism. Your school placement locks in your strengths and weaknesses. A Life wizard will never deal Storm-level damage. A Death wizard will always lean on life-stealing mechanics. It’s a fixed trait, framed as innate, rather than learned. Without any flexibility, even if the game doesn’t have any sort of explicit racialization, it does still exhibit a very similar caging effect. You are stuck as one thing and never allowed to grow, which tends to be a problem with many games like this.
I also noticed oddly enough that certain schools are subtly gendered. Life and Balance are often seen as supportive or feminine-coded; Storm and Death are associated with aggression and masculinity, and in general as I noticed this it made me uncomfortable. These associations whether we would like to acknowledge it or not are incredibly harmful, and the lack of flexibility in school identity limits the player’s ability to grow beyond these frames.
Another thing I would like to note that is less related to player identity but in general did make me uncomfortable is that, they visibly depicted any “bad guy” as looking very different from what players looked like. The players once again all had very Eurocentric features by design. However the villains generally did not. Sometimes they would be monsters, so they’re so different that you feel it’s ok to battle and kill them. But sometimes they were more human-like, more vaguely deformed or even just looked like a different race. The way the first villain, Malistaire (pictured) looked is very deliberately not European. I could see his character taking inspiration from many cultures, however because I am Egyptian what is most prominent to me are the aspects of his look that remind me of a “Jafar” type villain. His face is longer, sunken in and his clothes look very inspired by things you would find in the Middle East, especially the staff. This made me incredibly uncomfortable and I’m certain I’m not the first person to notice this, but I did want to point this out. By using racialized features on villains without depicting those same features on the user, they are making it seem like people who do not have those Eurocentric features are “evil” or “villainous” and they must be taken down or subjugated in some way. That is exceptionally harmful, whether it was intentional or not.
If I were to change anything about this game, I’d prioritize making school identity less rigid. Players could learn, grow, and adapt throughout the game in a variety of ways. You could maybe earn spells from other schools through quests, choose to change your field of study, or even be able to create hybrid fields as the game develops to suit what you most identify with as a player. These changes would reflect a constructivist model of identity, one that shows traits are shaped by experience, not just predestined fate in the form of a 10 question survey. I would also allow for more diversity in the user avatar creation process, and when it comes to villains, I would make sure their features are not incredibly phenotypically different from what the user would have. Or I would make them look so out of this world, like everything else is in this game, and ensure that they would never have racial implications back onto the existing world with real people in it. You could go one of two ways I suppose
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