I can still hear it: the wall of sound in my headphones, the cacophony of competing sound effects, some like the double pam-pam of exploding bombs, some the more occult whizzes and crackles of spell-casting. The press of bodies on my screen has become an indistinguishable mass clustered around a blank flag inside a castle. Everyone is waiting for the flag to turn either blue or red, signaling to the dozens of far-flung players whether their side has won this battle or lost it. I wait too, chewing on the cord of my headphones.

“Stay down if you’re dead,” comes the voice of the raid leader. “Wait for someone to come and rez you. We’ve got ‘em.” His accent inevitably becomes more and more southern as the evening progresses, from either fatigue or beer intake, and occasionally becomes so thick that he has to ask another of the southern regulars to “translate.” He is a brilliant battle commander, at least where orcs and wizards are concerned: patient, decisive, strategic, the sort of person who naturally cultivates loyalty. I am, at this point, among the dead. I wait obediently to be resurrected.

By now, most people in this guild know who I am in real life. In fact, several of them have appeared in fictionalized form in Ms Marvel, during a story arc about a video game villain that achieves self-consciousness and begins to cause real-world problems. There are only a few dozen of us in the guild: a tiny fraction of the quarter-million players who log into this massive multiplayer RPG every day. There are many different ways to play the game: you can do individual quests and follow a storyline, play against the software in dungeons, or just farm materials and sell your wares in the ad hoc digital economy. But in this guild, our preferred mode of entertainment is player versus player, a chaotic real-time open-world battle against other guilds for territory on a vast map dotted by castles and keeps. It is by far the most unpredictable mode of play, relying as much on psychology as on game mechanics. As a PvPer, my skills are no better than average, but I follow directions and I’m difficult to rattle. I came to video games late and have made peace with the fact that I will never have the reflexes of the kids weaned on Call of Duty. I’m here for the poetry. I’m here because I like a lot of different kinds of people, and at present I am thinking about a question: how did all of us, from such vastly different backgrounds, end up as a bunch of orcs?

I’ve been playing this game since beta. As soon as the early character models were released, I knew what I wanted to play: I’ve always loved RPG orcs, a variety of fantasy creature whose historically recent evolution from shuffling monster to intelligent antihero I find deeply fascinating. In fifteen years we have gone from the slimy, deathly pale, largely nameless orcs of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings to beefcake CGI orcs voiced by well-known actors, and I feel there is a lesson in there somewhere. However, when this game was in development and I looked at the breakdown of its three proposed factions (for brevity’s sake we’ll call them Red, Yellow, and Blue), I knew immediately where the bulk of the players would gravitate. The Red and Yellow factions were crammed with sexy elves and cat people. The Blue faction was comprised of orcs, a very generic variety of magician, and the game’s only explicitly Black culture. It was clear months before launch that numbers would not be on our side. In PvP, a style of gameplay in which players face off against each other rather than the game’s AI, this is a real problem.

Yet here we are, watching the flag in the digital castle turn blue, resurrected atop a pile of dead elves. We have three regular raid leaders: two of them are military veterans who served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The third is a math teacher at a New York public school. The skill sets involved in each profession are not as different as one might assume. Many of the other regulars are veterans as well, and a few are soldiers on active duty, stationed at various bases across the country. At this point in our story, both post-9/11 forever wars are still limping onward toward unknown ends, though no one talks about them anymore. Occasionally, someone in the guild gets redeployed. Some of the veterans are angry: they feel they were sent into danger to watch their friends die and to be the face of an illegal occupation on the flimsiest of political pretexts. They came back inside-out so some suit in Washington could get re-elected. They feel—they know—that they were lied to. Others, however, come from generations of military families: war is simply their calling.

With a population only half as large as the other two factions, we are forced to think strategically. We hide in ditches and culverts, at choke points on bridges or between steep hillsides. When a larger enemy guild passes, we hit them in a surprise attack. This distracts their main fighting force, but in such unforgiving terrain, it also allows us to do something crucially important to the success of a very small fighting force: take out their healers, who in the narrow passes we favor have nowhere to run. As strategies go, this one is lethally effective. It would take me months to realize that this asymmetrical warfare, this grim calculus, was familiar to our veteran leaders. These were precisely the tactics used against them by insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was how militias with a quarter of the personnel and a tenth of the resources had kept the American military at bay for fifteen years.

Though we have little in common outside our mutual passion for massive multiplayer games, I adore my guild mates. They are funny, intelligent, and in their own way have a deeply held sense of fairness: anyone who uses racist, sexist, or otherwise demeaning language in chat gets booted immediately, without discussion. This is not because they believe in the precepts of social justice; it is simply because they know that this kind of exclusionary language is bad for troop morale. When one of the youngest regulars, a teen boy, comes out as gay, they treat him with unfeigned kindness. Yet I can’t help but sense the fault lines running beneath the surface: conflicting priorities, divergent life experience, slowly hardening political differences. In early 2016, pro-Trump jpegs begin to appear in several of the guild members’ Facebook feeds. One will stay with me: a DIY political ad showing a lion rampant over an elephant and a donkey. TRUMP, it proclaims, Because this and this (the elephant and the donkey) aren’t working. It hangs on the screen like a little omen. Surely not, I think. Surely this is just frustration, posturing, trolling. No one with any sense actually believes that man is the solution to our problems. Of course, I am wrong.

The morning after Trump wins the election, I log in to see who is online. Somehow the betrayal is made worse by the fact that I saw it coming. Yet I want to hear their voices, see their familiar heavily armored character models onscreen, maybe to convince myself that we still live in the same reality, or rather the same fantasy. It suddenly feels as though the forever wars have followed us here into this fictional one; the wars they fought, the wars I fought against. It is as if we have been drinking poison for fifteen years but only now begun to die. That is what war does; war is the primary mechanism through which ordinary people become acculturated to evil. Through war we learn that the pain of the enemy doesn’t count. We override our most basic human instincts to drown out the voices we don’t want to hear.

It is tempting to think that the rehabilitation of the orc in modern MMOs and RPGs is the result of changing attitudes toward world history and pushback against the black-and-white thinking of the past; a new willingness to examine the reasons why some peoples are labeled savage or barbaric while others remain civilized despite the copious amounts of blood on their hands. It’s tempting to think we have simply expanded this more nuanced way of thinking to fiction, and the result is Thrall from World of Warcraft. But the worsening social conflicts in our society, the backsliding into some of the most pernicious forms of racism, suggest this may be too easy an answer. I sometimes wonder whether the real reason is something both simpler and subtler. An orc is an outcast, a product of conflict and estrangement, and we are living in an age of outcasts. The center, if it ever really existed, is gone, replaced by competing forms of extremism. “For orcs, there is no other life but war,” says a dour CGI Durotan in the fumble that was the 2016 World of Warcraft film. What other life do we know now? There are the wars abroad. There are the wars at home. And here on this fictional battlefield, drawn to the same thing, the same green-skinned be-tusked antiheroes, another war has been declared, though for now, at least, we pretend we are on the same side.

In the coming months, I drift away from the game. Running with a competitive PvP guild requires an enormous outlay of time, often several hours a day if you’re grinding for the best gear, and now, with two kids and a demanding publication schedule, I no longer have anything close to that kind of time. But I miss the guild. As angry as I am, I miss them.

Years later, a story about orcs would start to take shape in my mind and eventually become The Hunger and The Dusk. It’s full of characters we want to root for, but this is a world without government or laws, in which nearly everyone has committed acts of violence, and enemies face each other across seemingly unbridgeable divides, separated by problems with no obvious solution. For a high fantasy, it feels a lot like real life. I sometimes struggle to articulate where my ideas come from, that perennial Q&A question, because I can’t always tell. In this case, however, the lineage is clear. I can still hear the noise, the disembodied whoops of triumph, and I can see them, green in tusk and claw.