Stories are stories. Whether they explore the world we all live in, or a world made up from wholecloth, the purposes is the same: to tell us about ourselves and discuss what makes us who we are as individuals, as families, as clans, as peoples. The nice thing about fantasy -- like The Lord of the Rings -- is that we're given the opportunity to lay bare concepts like 'good' and 'evil' without it feeling silly or being heavy handed. In a "real world" story, for it to be believable, these concepts are shrouded in nuance.

Warcraft actually pulls the high-fantasy genre back toward the real world by making everything nuanced. We get illegal logging and world-polluting multinationals.*

I'm sure THE GRAPES OF WRATH is a fine book, if you happen to like it. It is, however, less valuable -- to me -- and less important -- again, to me -- than THE LORD OF THE RINGS, A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, THE WHEEL OF TIME, or even the sublime HYPERION CANTOS.






* I'm sure there's an example of Alliance forces invading Horde lands, but I wouldn't know them. My Horde alts never made it much past level 20.