In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, you can be one of the Worgen, a race of feral wolf-beasts

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
Available now

Released this December is a major expansion to the six-year-old videogame, World of Warcraft. Entitled “Cataclysm,” it promises a substantial remaking of one of the world’s most famous virtual realms: a place that over 12m people visit each year. World of Warcraft is neither the most ambitious nor the most beautiful game of its type. Yet this expansion, which comes heralded by the kind of publicity and trailers usually associated with Hollywood blockbusters, is a huge event in the gaming world and beyond.

Virtual worlds are fundamentally unlike other kinds of games, in that they’re not so much products to be consumed as services: persistent destinations that players visit again and again, over months and years, in order to socialise, explore, achieve, progress or simply to be.