By Wagner James Au

If you're from the Axis of Evil, you're not supposed to be in the legions of the Horde— even if your country got bombed out of the Axis more than three years ago. Kalimdor's a no-fly zone, as are the Eastern Kingdoms. This is because World of Warcraft's Terms of Use bars players living in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, "or any other country to which the U.S. has embargoed goods." (Citizens from Junior Axis members Syria and Cuba are similarly shit out of luck.) And though the US dropped its Iraqi embargo right after President Bush's remarkably ill-timed "Mission Accomplished" announcement in 2003, Blizzard's rules still say gamers in Baghdad shouldn't be caught leveling in Azeroth.

Which is a roundabout way to introduce "Hamletau", my 8th level Warrior currently noobing it up somewhere South of Goldshire. And though he's got a short sword and a crappy shield, Hamletau's real profession is reporter. After three years as "embedded journalist" in the kinda-sorta MMO of Second Life, where my avatar is known as "Hamlet Au" , my editors at Kotaku challenged me to try out the same kind of reporting in the biggest MMO of them all. It's one thing to report within a user-created world where players can literally make the news up, but could I create a news desk in an old school, hierarchical, level-oriented MMO? Who has time to talk about virtual anti-Bush protests or avatar racism, when there's dungeons to raid?

And though I've argued that every MMO should hire a team of embedded journalists , I was a bit anxious to try it myself. There's news going on in WoW all the time, whether it's a plague resembling a terrorist bio-warfare strike , or a temporary ban on guilds defined by sexual orientation or an attack (staged or real) on the memorial service for a guild member who apparently died in real life. But how can any one person report from a place with 6 million-plus members scattered on 1000+ servers?

Fortunately, the first WoW story angle popped up even before I'd finished the registration process. On paper, at least, despite all the troubles Iraq has been through, and is still going through— not to mention the Coalition soldiers covered in dust and IED shrapnel flakes just looking for a damn hour of R&R at their base's Internet caf — World of Warcraft is still supposed to be off limits to the entire country.

But how strongly enforced were these regulations? As it happens, I know an Iraqi gamer in Baghdad, so I asked him.

"[Y]es," Zeyad e-mailed me back, "I have played [WoW] in the past. It's not very popular here as, say, Red Alert or Empire Earth, for example, but the game has its fans." Zeyad is the secular Sunni author of the enormously popular Healing Iraq blog, and when he's not reporting first-hand on firefights in Adhamiya or lynchings in Husseiniya, he's often gaming. (Notice the Paypal link on his site; assisted by 1337 blogger Jeff Jarvis, Zeyad is trying to raise enough money to get out of Iraq to study journalism in New York. Help a fellow gamer out, for god's sake, the dude's trapped in a Counterstrike match that never ends.)

"I have noticed plenty of games and software with the ban on Iraq warning," Zeyad's e-mail continued, "but you know that we get most of our games, software, and DVDs though piracy anyway." This was also the case during Saddam's regime, Zeyad told me, when bootlegs games were freely available in Baghdad's Bab Al-Sharj markets—after the secret police had first play-tested them to make sure they didn't contain anti-Saddam material, that is.

Zeyad isn't impressed with Blizzard's ban on Iraqis. "As long as we have piracy here," he told me, "I wouldn't care less if they still have a ban on Iraq. No one here really buys originals when they can get the game or DVD at a one dollar price." Which, when you think about it, is probably one of the best markers for real progress in Iraq. Forget about voting or troop withdrawal, we'll know the country is actually a stable member of the world economy when Blizzard's corporate parent Universal-Vivendi sends a team of lawyers into the Bab Al-Sharj to make sure the electronic stores don't have any contraband Warcraft on their shelves.

I checked with Blizzard to see if the ban against World of Warcraft in Iraq was still being enforced.

"After with consulting with the legal team that wrote up the Terms of Use," Blizzard PR assistant George Wang e-mailed back, "they informed me that Iraq and Iran had previously been on a government list of embargoed goods when the ToU was first drafted. Because of this, we did not condone shipping World of Warcraft to Iraq..." Wang told me the Terms of Use will soon be updated to reflect the updated embargo list, though more than a month after contacting him, it still has Iraq listed on the Axis of No Play.

Then again, there's little reason to think the ban was enforced much at all. Veteran WoW players tell me they often raid with folks who say they are Coalition troops in Iraq who've cleverly hacked around military firewalls to log in. And while it's doubtful that anyone but Kim Jung-Il and his geek cronies could log into World of Warcraft from North Korea, there's still an embargo on Iran. I checked with some contacts an Orkut, the semi-defunct quasi-Myspace that's still popular with Iranians, to see if they could WoW from Tehran.

An Iranian IT consultant eventually e-mailed me from somewhere inside the theocratic regime:

"hi dear ... yes , i and my friends play WOW in iran... this game is buying in shopping in iran."

So despite round-the-clock "morality" enforcers on the street and an Iranian President who keeps threatening to launch nuclear conflagration, WoW finds a way in, and continues its spread around the globe.

There's actually a serious side to all this. Despite the early promise of an Internet that could truly connect the entire world, vast firewalls block the Web traffic to and from countries like Iran and China. Web traffic, that is, because up to now, authoritarian regimes have not blocked the chat in MMOs— this despite the nearly two million Chinese alone who play World of Warcraft. But sheer numbers make it inevitable that some of them will soon test the limits of political expression in WoW. Picture a Chinese guild conducting Falun Gong meditations in Booty Bay, or a memorial to Tiananmen Square's dead held in Stormwind, and you get an idea of the possibilities of free expression, even when you look like an orc.

So I asked Blizzard's George Wang about the inevitable: "If governments in Iran or China asked Blizzard to help them regulate 'subversive' chat in World of Warcraft," I e-mailed him, "how would the company respond?"

Unfortunately, I didn't get any reply to the two times I sent that question. And so the dagger hangs over the head of WoW's Chinese and Iranian players, who must wonder if (or rather, when) Vivendi-Universal will go the way of Yahoo! and Google, and bring the hammer down.

It looks like there's a need for virtual reporters in World of Warcraft, after all.

In between WoW bouts, Wagner James Au still covers the emerging world of Second Life. Send Warcraft news tips to "Hamletau" on the Eitrigg server, or e-mail him— au at kotaku dot com.