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Posted on May 15th in 2005, the short clip has since reached 26,995,204 views. This is a video of a group of World of Warcraft players discussing their strategies for a monster encounter. What seems to be a normal discussion quickly turns to complete panic when a guild mate named Leeroy decides to skip the strategy and jump into the fight early. The video was created by Ben Schulz and was completely scripted and staged with the help of his guild mates.
History
Date discovered: May 15, 2005.
Peak popularity:
Difficult to say. Since its release, the video has been gaining more and more views consistently. With World of Warcraft's audience growing by leaps and bounds each year, the interest of this video remains consistent.
Original Site: www.youtube.com
Remixes / Parodies / Responses:
One of the most obvious responses to this video is from Blizzard. This is the company that makes World of Warcraft and it has always been a company that takes the customer community seriously. With the rise of Leeroy Jenkins, Blizzards responded with a new achievement players could unlock in the World of Warcraft realms. The player could go to the same instance, kill all of the same monsters on a timer, and they would earn the achievement called “LEEEEEEEROY” and earn the title of “Jenkins.” It was only a matter of time until the World of Warcraft population was sporting the title of <Character Name> Jenkins.
In addition, Blizzard released a World of Warcraft trading card featuring Leeroy Jenkins.
In the youtube world there have been numerous remixes, mostly along the lines of videos like this:
There have also been parodies of the video. These parodies mostly involve splicing Leeroy into movies like in the following example of using the Leeroy audio in a scene from Lord of the Rings:
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Other community responses include the use of 'Leeroy” in gamer speak. In World of Warcraft, “Leeroy” has been transformed into a verb that generally means the person is about to jump the gun and ruin things for their allies. “Dude, you Leeroyed us. Not cool.”
Outside of gaming culture, larger audiences have taken notice of the Leeroy Jenkins video. In 2005, the popular game show, Jeopardy! Featured a question about World of Warcraft with mention of Leeroy Jenkins.
The TV show South Park took notice of Leeroy's popularity in their episode Make Love, Not Warcraft. In the episode, the boys' antagonist is named Jenkins and Cartman at one point says a line very similar to the guild's discussion in the video about strategy.
Leeroy Jenkins has also had general internet stardom in the sense that Leeroy has become a meme featured occasionally on websites such as memebase.com.
Appeal and Audience
When studying the appeal of the Leeroy Jenkins video, all the different social structures must be examined. As Jussi Parikka states in Digital Contagions, “an inspection of a technological or computer body means analyzing a whole congregation of bodies...that are attached together under this specific force”(Parikka125). This can also be applied when studying the infrastructures that form a viral object's popularity.
This video's obvious audience is the gamer community. When this group views the video, much of the humor comes from it's relatable content. This video was released in the early days of World of Warcraft where many fights were still unknown and strategies were meticulously planned. Most gamer's had been in a similar situation and to see it go so horribly wrong so quickly was all too familiar. This means it is relatable but with a strong stress on absurdity humor in relation to Professor Knight's matrix for video analysis.
When the focus is expanded out, the general internet audience comes into focus. While the relatable aspect will be lost (most people watching wouldn’t know what “intimidating shout” was or anything along those lines), the humor remains. The absurd humor is still there, but a new one is added. Most people, when watching this video, would laugh at the set up of the actual “Leeroy” moment. It stems from a superiority humor over “nerds.” From personal experience, I was emailed the Leeroy Jenkins video from my friend, years after I had originally viewed it with the caption “Lol! It's the game you play! Lol, you nerds with your number crunching.”
Social Vectors
A large, continuing source of popularity for this video is World of Warcraft's growing player base. When the game was released in 2004, the copies flew off shelves and many people were on back order for weeks. Blizzard had no idea of the game's popularity. In 2010, the game hit 12 million subscribers, and although subscriptions have been declining lately, the game continues to have international success.
Resources / Further Information
Parikka, Jussi. Digital Contagions: a Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Print.
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