Robert Nideffer: 12 Years in Azeroth – The Journey Begins

2025

Blue terminal window showing a text-adventure welcome screen titled "Welcome to 12 Years in Azeroth", with another window behind that shows a map of New England, and another window to the side with an adventurer and his pug, and behind that a computer desktop.

Robert Nideffer’s 12 Years in Azeroth - The Journey Begins fuses autobiography, fiction, and game design to explore a twelve-year immersion into the online game World of Warcraft. Commissioned for artport, The Journey Begins is the first section of the work and provides an entry to four more parts launched by the artist over the course of 2026. Anchored by a browser-based electronic manuscript tied to the artist-created game world, the complete narrative unfolds from 2006 to 2018 across three avatars, three historical periods, and three interlaced worlds represented by maps. Players can switch between Earth; Azeroth, the world in which the majority of the Warcraft series is set; and Middle-earth, the fictional continent that serves as the setting for much of J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous fantasy works. Players interact with a desktop where they can access important files. Behind the retro façade of a minimalist interface runs a 3D simulation that is dynamically shaped by the player’s actions. Players converse with AI-driven characters whose personalities and memories evolve during the reading process, uncover manuscript fragments, and solve narrative puzzles to progress. 12 Years in Azeroth explores how identity, memory, and history intertwine with digital experience by blurring the lines between a person and an avatar, historical facts and their fictional account, the actual and a game world.

Please consult “readme.html” on the desktop once you enter the game.

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Robert Nideffer (b. 1964) is a Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he served as Head of the Department of Arts until 2018. From 1998–2013 he was a Professor of Art at the University of California, Irvine, where he founded the Game Culture and Technology Lab (1999) and was Co-Director (2005–2007) and Director (2007–2009) of the Art Computation Engineering (ACE) graduate program. His work has been exhibited at a variety of national and international venues including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte in Spain; the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He has lectured extensively both inside and outside the academy, and his projects have been discussed in major media outlets including books, journal articles, television, the internet, film, and radio.

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