Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: the Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft [Conference Notes]

by Latoya Peterson

These are the notes for “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft.” The notes are for the keynote presentation given by Dr. Nakamura at the Texas A & M University Race and Ethnic Studies Institute’s Symposium exploring Race, Ethnicity and (New) Media.

The full paper is available on Lisa Nakamura’s research site. The abstract is as follows:

This article examines the racialization of informational labor in machinima about Chinese player workers in the massively multiplayer online role playing game World of Warcraft. Such fanproduced video content extends the representational space of the game and produces overtly racist narrative space to attach to a narrative that, while carefully avoiding explicit references to racism or racial conflict in our world, is premised upon a racial war in an imaginary world—the World of Azeroth.

This profiling activity is part of a larger biometric turn initiated by digital culture’s informationalization of the body and illustrates the problematics of informationalized capitalism. If late capitalism is characterized by the requirement for subjects to be possessive individuals, to make claims to citizenship based on ownership of property, then player workers are unnatural subjects in that they are unable to obtain avatarial self-possession. The painful paradox of this dynamic lies in the ways that it mirrors the dispossession of information workers in the Fourth Worlds engendered by ongoing processes of globalization. As long as Asian “farmers” are figured as unwanted guest workers within the culture of MMOs, user-produced extensions of MMO-space like machinima will most likely continue to depict Asian culture as threatening to the beauty and desirability of shared virtual space in the World of Warcraft.

Notes

People don’t hold video games accountable for racism; however they do hold them responsible for violence. Gaming has to constantly defend its portrayals of violence, but almost never discusses how it reinforces racism.

More people play Warcraft now than were on the internet in 1995. There are a significant number of players in China and S. Korea. Digital games are one of the only platforms we had that were transnational from the inception. People who would never think of trying out Japanese media has actually been engaging for a long time without being aware of it through the gaming world.

Nakamura starts her presentation off with a clip from South Park from the episode Make Love, Not Warcraft. In the segment she plays, the following conversation happens:

With that, Nakamura starts the discussion on how Cartman’s off-handed comment reveals how many think of Asian players – specifically Korean and Chinese – as “not real” players in this online world and begins to explore how racial bigotry is manifesting itself in the World of Warcraft.

Machinima are fan made vids using graphics and scenarios from Warcraft. Some machinima are very critical of Chinese players; likening them to service workers like maids.

Nakamura then talks about the weird line between spoof on the internet and actual racism, and how occassionally, one can lead to the other. She brings up Alex Rivera’s Cybraceros Project and Damali Ayo’s Rent-A-Negro project. For those unfamiliar with these projects, here are the descriptions:

Cybraceros

THE Cybracero MISSION

All the work – without the workers!

Cybracero Systems provides employers with innovative marketing and technology solutions that enable them to grow their business.

Founded in 2006 by a group of visionaries, Cybracero Systems was created with one objective in mind: to get all the work our society needs done, while eliminating the actual workers and all the difficulties that workers imply: health benefits, housing, IRS, INS, union conflicts, cultural and language differences etc.

Through our proprietary and patent pending technology, we combine the latest technology, Internet and state-of-the-art robotics and create “Telepresence”, a model that is about to revolutionize the planet.

Rent-A-Negro

Rent-A-Negro.com serves today’s changing nations by allowing you the chance to promote your connection with a creative, articulate, friendly, attractive, and pleasing African American person. This service comes without the commitment of learning about racism, challenging your own white privilege, or being labeled “radical.” In fact, rent-a-negro.com allows you to use your money and status to your advantage! In addition, your dollars go to support the African American community…

Both of these projects were jabs at society; however, Nakamura notes that both Rivera and Ayo actually received requests to rent a Negro or to purchase Cybraceros.

The next clip Nakamura shows is a BBC report into the practice of Gold Farming in WoW.

Paying someone to do boring labor online really speaks to the dynamics in the real world – how we pay immigrants (legally or illegally) to do “the boring work” no one else wants to do. (Similar undercurrent of contempt.) Nakamura notes that the perspective of the gold farmers is missing – while they were interviewed for the story, they were not permitted to tell their stories about being murdered in game or being targeted because they are Chinese.

In her paper, Nakamura writes:

As Dibbell (2007) notes, WoW isn’t a game for everyone in a literal sense: for worker players it is a virtual sweatshop. Worker players in MMO’s produce informationalized property that they can neither consume themselves nor sell directly to those who can—in this sense, their high-tech labor in low-tech conditions more closely resembles maquiladora factory laborers’ conditions than it does other recreational or professional software-based activities.

Farmers work in shifts, playing WoW in 12 hour sessions and sleeping on pallets—their work exemplifies “flexible accumulation’s strategy of mixing nonmodern and modern forms of production” which as Hong (2006) explains “depends on and reproduces racialized and gendered exploitation” (p. 115). Gold farming is an example in extremis of informationalized capitalism, for the avatar is a form of property that is composed of digital code yet produced by the sweat of a worker’s brow.

Gold farming is seen by Richard Heeks as providing an ICT infrastructure and helping to bridge the digital divide in other nations. Far from being a scourge, practices like gold farming provide income to developing nations and provide jobs for people in a digital space.

Much of the machinima made about the WoW universe is anti gold farmer, with titles like “The China-man gets fired.”
While the market for gold is predicated on having both someone to purchase the gold and excess gold, buying is not as bad as selling – similarities with gold farming and sex work. While people like Ryan, the gamer profiled in the BBC segment, are considered cheaters, most of the administrative action and ire within the game is reserved for the gold farmers. Most anti-gold farmer rhetoric is anti-Asian.

One of the best (and most popular) machinimas to illustrate this is one called “Ni Hao” (lyrics included when you hit play on the video)

Most relevant verse:

“Where did all the doggies and kitty cats go
Since the gold farmers started to show
Don’t want to know what’s in the egg roll
And they keep comin’ back
Cuz you’re giving them dough
Take one down and I felt inspired
Corpse camp until
This China-man gets fired
That’s one farmer they’ll have to replace
Not supposed to be here in the first place.
I don’t know any other way to convey
How much we wish you’d all just go away
Server economy in disarray
Guess I’ll just fear your mobs around all day.”

“Ni Hao (A Gold Farmer’s Story),” Warcraftmovies.com, accessed 10/26/07

Nakamura points out that a lot of what is being said in the video are based in anti-Asian stereotypes. “Player produced videos such as “Ni Hao” mock Chinese food ways, implying that Chinese eat dogs and cats. This is a nonsensical accusation, since there are no dogs or cats in WoW, nor any egg rolls.” However, players still insist that their criticisms of gold farmers are not racist.

Also from the companion paper:

As is also evident in the readers’ comments to Yee’s essay, posters are eager to prove that their hatred of Chinese gold farmers isn’t racist, is not a prejudice against “biological difference,” but is rather a dislike of unsuccessful assimilation to American social norms, what the poster calls the “anticultural” position.

The problem with gold farmers isn’t that they are Chinese; it is that they “act Chinese.” The characterization of American WoW player behavior as self-sufficient, law-abiding, non-commercial, and properly social is belied by their role as gold buyers within WoW’s server economy: the purchasing of virtual property lies within the bounds of “American” gaming behavior while selling it does not. But this is only the case if one is Chinese—IGE is not targeted in racialized terms, if at all. The notion that it is permissible to condemn someone for how they behave, rather than what they are, is a technique for avoiding charges of racism, for “culture” is seen as something that can be changed, hopefully through assimilation to American norms, but race is not. However, as Yoshino (2006) notes, this neoliberal position results in a compulsion to cover one’s identity, to behave in ways that are normatively color-less or sex-less, in order to take one’s unchangeable race, gender, or sexuality out of play.

Most of the machinima is anti-gold farmer, which begs the question: Who gets to produce machinima? Politics of labor and privilege playing out over who gets the right to speak and who gets to control the discussion. “Leisure” players, those who play WoW for recreation have more time to create machinima; “worker” players, those who play WoW as a source of income, are normally unable to devote that kind of time to a side project.

Nakamura also reports on racial profiling in game – the habit of certain players killing other players because they type slowly or strangely, as if English was not their first language. Nakamura explains that she has a friend who is a skilled player, but a horrible typist, who is often targeted because they confuse his slow typing for someone who does not speak English as a native language. Nakamura prefers to use the word “profiling” than “stereotyping” because profiling is more behavior oriented.

Some also argue that there is not a racist link because people are expressing their preferences for certain gaming styles. However, when styles are viewed as symptomatic of a culture and then devalued because of that link, there are serious issues.

You also see similar schisms forming around this subject as you see in intra-racial or intra-ethnic anti-racist discourse. Gold Farming is considered an issue of class in China, rather than race. Internalized ideas of what is right and wrong in game leads to distancing leisure players or “good” Chinese playing for fun from the “bad” Chinese players who trade their play for cash. Some of these divisions are heavily emphasized and enforced by Chinese leisure players.

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Comments

Luis wrote:

Well done. It should also be pointed out that the Gold Farmer song is eerily reminiscent of the songs circulated in songbooks in the late 19th century about Chinese railroad laborers, farm hands, and… gold miners. Lots of dog and cat jokes.

It’s like we’ve gone full circle.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 11:37 am ¶
atlasien wrote:

Fascinating presentation.

Youtube in general is chock full of anti-Asian racist videos. It’s depressingly easy to end up watching one by accident.

Just wanted to mention that there is a Mexican science fiction movie coming soon that sounds like it’s totally based on the concept of “Cybraceros”. It sounds really good:

“Go See Sleep Dealer”.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 11:48 am ¶
steve wrote:

his is an interesting post and I agree with a fair amount of what’s written, but for people who don’t play World of Warcraft, a couple of things that I think are fair to note:

1. Gold farmers are disruptive to the game — less to the inflationary effects of purchased gold than to the fact that in order to generate the gold people just stay in one area killing the same set of monsters over and over. This is a problem for people who need to kill those monsters for other reasons. Normally if you go to an area and someone else is already there killing those monsters you just wait your turn but a gold farmer doesn’t leave since they are not killing for a quest or even to obtain enough gold to buy something — they are going to do that indefinitely.

2. Most servers in world of warcraft do not permit unconsented player killing — they are PvE (player versus environment) servers. Therefore, while people may resent gold farmers it is in fact very hard to murder a gold farmer in game. Also, killing a person’s character, while annoying, is not a significant event — the character loses no gold or items and simply has to return to the body. On certain servers that are PvP (player versus player), unconsented player killing can occur so harassment can be more significant but most gold farmers do not inhabit PvP servers for exactly that reason.

3. Also, even though WoW is multiplayer it is possible and in fact likely that the vast majority of gold farmers work their entire shifts without talking to or interacting with another player. The farming they tend to do involves killing monsters that any single character can kill and since they can not be attacked by other characters (see 2 above), as long as they turn off incoming messages, no one can talk to them so as long as they do not talk to anyone its fine.

4. There is definite antagonism towards gold farming and towards Asian people for it. However, there is also recognition that some of the best players in World of Warcraft are Asian — South Korean in fact. SK Gaming is recognized as one of the best guilds in game and the top arena teams are often South Korean with the top tournament teams being from various South Korean professional gaming groups. That’s not to say that there aren’t gamers who probably respect SK Gaming and curse out Chinese gold farmers at the same time, but the resentment is not solely racial.

5. Despite the points above, I would agree that despite WoW having such an enormous player base that I would have hoped that it would not, WoW’s general chat has a sentiment that often seems to reflect the traditional white, young uneducated male stereotype of a gamer — loves pot, hates gays, non-whites and foreigners. However, WoW also serves as a home to lots of communities of gamers of color or of BGLT gamers. There are BGLT guilds and while I am not familiar with any guilds that are people of all one ethnicity, there are plenty of PoC I know who play the game and get along with lots of people in game.

Finally, as MMORPGs get more and more prominent in terms of gaming, there are very interesting issues that arise. I don’t know if you saw this but recently the operators of Star Wars’ online game tried to suppress a discussion of homosexuality in game by arguing that homosexuality did not exist in the Star Wars universe. There was an outcry and the operators withdrew from that position. It was interesting to note that my sense of it was, despite the general homophobia that I attribute to the gaming community, that gamers generally came out in support of the fact that the game should not be able to dictate what sexual orientations were permitted in game.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 12:51 pm ¶
Chabas wrote:

As a WoW player – be it on the European servers rather than the American ones – I definitely recognize the issues. Gold farmers are definitely a pain in the neck and there is a tendency to consider them all Chinese – which I *know* isn’t nearly true. Plenty of lazy people using bots etc who have nothing to do with Asia. I’ve also definitely seen backlash over that against non-goldfarming players who had some association with Asia.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 2:02 pm ¶
Chabas wrote:

…and more prompted by the above comments:

on the topic of machinima: there is a LOT of WoW machinima out there, some VERY well done, and Blizzard in fact encourages this. In years of playing WoW and watching machinima, I’ve found very little of it to be about goldfarming and related stereotypes.

Also, WoW does seem to have a very vocal young white male public, which leads to an assumption among many players that all players are young white males. Racism is very much not the only issue here. Sexism and homophobia are wellknown issues as well, to the point where they become a running joke among players who don’t even hold to either of those modes of thought IRL. Of course, unless you know them in person, there is no way to tell the difference between the real thing and the joke.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 2:26 pm ¶
Aishtamid wrote:

Fascinating article. I’ve seen spam on the trade chat in WOW for farmed gold, but I never actually knew how much the whole enterprise is based in stereotypes.

Racialization discussions in WOW goes way beyond gold farming; virtually every playable race is based on a real culture, including many positive and negative stereotypes.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 3:21 pm ¶
Nina wrote:

Steve, have you read the text in full? It’s rather interesting.

As I understand the argument, it’s about how racial stereotypes about Asian people and what is considered Asian behaviour (like looking all alike and eating cats and dogs) is instrumentalised in these videos and conversations. Gamers, whether actually Asian or not, is profiled as ‘acting chinese’ and are despised and harassed for it. On youtube you can find numerous videos depicting a player ‘messing with a gold farmer’ or giving tricks in how to identify the ‘china man’.

Thus, the resentment is expressed using racial and ethnic categories so the phenomenon is indeed racialised.

It’s also interesting how the phenomenon illustrates global power dynamics – dislocation of labor, third world-people performing tiresome work under stressful circumstances to provide first world-people with more enjoyable leisure time.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 3:51 pm ¶
Luis wrote:

You also ignore how often good Asian players’ skill is dismissed as being “just because they’re Asian.” When Cartman says half of those players don’t count because they’re Korean, he’s lumping together not only gold farmers but also good Korean players who are seem as illegitimate players. I’ve seen this double standard happen in games like Starcraft as a response to the challenge Asian players have to “regular” players (ie white players).

As for Gold Farmers disrupting the game: they couldn’t disrupt the game if people didn’t buy their products. If “regular” players didn’t regularly decide to cheat, there would be no market for gold farmers and they would close up shop and leave the game. End of story.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 6:32 pm ¶
Kaonashi wrote:

Personally, I don’t buy gold (nor do I know anyone who will admit to doing so) and people who do buy it are looked down upon–at least on my server. In fact, I’m not sure who the hell is buying gold because the practice is despised so much and because a lot of those gold and addon sites actually have ploits on them that log your actual Blizzard password and you wake up one day, log in, and are confronted with naked toons and empty banks.

That’s not to say that there aren’t gamers who probably respect SK Gaming and curse out Chinese gold farmers at the same time, but the resentment is not solely racial.

I agree. Our NA players are good but the ones of the Asian servers tend to be in a whole different league. While there’s issues with racism (and especially homophobia, as I’ve seen the same people who won’t hesitiate to out racist players or guilds in trade chat do a “nudge nudge wink wink” when the conversation turns homophobic ) on the NA servers that Blizzard continues to address, this isn’t one of them because the farmers are hated almost universally–including on the Asian servers.

YouTube and ED fuckery, on the other hand, is an entirely different issue because the people who post such things are more than likely to have racist attitudes in the first place.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 7:22 pm ¶
Keydar wrote:

I think it is also important to point out the color pigmentation options and facial features of customizable characters in games like World of Warcraft.

In World of Warcraft for example, the pigments for characters are predominantly various shades of a “white” skin tone, while the facial features tend to resemble only those of European descent. So that even if one were to choose a darker skin tone, it would mostly resemble a dark-skinned white person.

Because of the fact that skin color is really the only customizable option, you are left with either a multitude of different types of white people, or a single dark-skinned person with ambiguous facial structure.

Even characters of a different folkloric race (such as Night Elves) may have pointy ears and all that, but they too have “white” facial features, regardless of their strange skin pigmentation (blue, purple, etc). Races such as gnomes have no dark pigment options whatsoever. It is almost as if the creators believe humans to be the only case for which race is applicable.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 7:25 pm ¶
maus wrote:

“Steve, have you read the text in full? It’s rather interesting. ”

I have, but it still conflates the completely understandable dislike people have for farmers with more serious racist leanings. There’s also a lot of baseless/specious reasoning.

“while they were interviewed for the story, they were not permitted to tell their stories about being murdered in game or being targeted because they are Chinese. ”

You get “murdered” in game because they’re in PVP zones. Non-Chinese players would meet the same fate.

“Some machinima are very critical of Chinese players; likening them to service workers like maids.”

Generally this is because of real stories of sweatshop-style farm shops, it’s not all teenagers in public cafes, you know.

“Most of the machinima is anti-gold farmer”

“Much of the machinima made about the WoW universe is anti gold farmer, with titles like “The China-man gets fired.”

Specious, baseless. Much may very will be anti-gold farmer, because they are visible and (indirectly) obnoxious, making the game more difficult and boosting the time and money it takes to succeed in-game. That doesn’t mean that because they’re more prevalent in the media that everything is a racist caricature.

I’m definitely interested in the sociology of Gold Farming, but gold farmers have an objectively negative effect on the areas they inhabit. This article, while potentially interesting shows a near-willful lack of understanding of the dominant culture. The lens is tainted.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 7:44 pm ¶
nihilix wrote:

I’m part of a new guild on Steamwheedle (one of the many WoW servers) that’s grown out of the Shakesville community – a feminist, glbtq friendly guild.

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/05/wowshakesville-update.html

I’ve corresponded with the creator of the Ni Hao video about the racism; he claims he isn’t racist, that cats and dogs are eaten in China, that’s just the way it is. Riiiight.

Anyway; the Ni Hao video, while it contains the cat/dog libel, also blames the companies that hire the worker “ten cents an hour’s good money if you’re Chinese” and the gamers who buy the stuff.

The whole fantasy genre has racial issues and has since before Prof Tolkein wrote his not-so-gently-coded superiority fiction.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 9:07 pm ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:

@maus -

The text in full refers to Lisa Nakamura’s 40 page paper, the one the presentation I summarized is based on. I suggest you check that out.

Posted 11 May 2009 at 10:52 pm ¶
Steve wrote:

@Nina

This is Steve (not Maus — though I agree with a fair amount of points Maus says). I did read the whole article.

I don’t disagree with the fact that the phenomenon of gold farming has resulted in anger that has tapped or encouraged racism. The purpose of my post was just to point out that some of the article, if read without knowledge of how the game actually worked, portrayed things in more of an extreme light than how I think they really are.

Two other notes — although one is not on gold farming but of the intersection of sexism and MMORPGs.

1. Maus catching the comment that most Machinima is anti-gold farming as being untrue is spot on. There very well may be lots of anti-asian machinima out there but the majority of machinima has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the game itself. If you want to see what machinima is sort of getting attention I’d suggest visiting popular Wow sites (i like http://Www.wowinsider) and seeing what Machinima they feature. Machinima is a very interesting phenomena and I don’t think its fair to say its merely a tool of racist Wow players, thought it certainly could be used that way.

2. There recently was an article on Wowinsider about Noblegarden — WoW’s in game equivalent of Easter — and an Achievement that involved putting bunny ears on females above level 18. A female WoW player blogged about how she felt it was sexist and there was a lot of discussion on it — much of it super unhelpful that would probably reinforce a lot of thoughts that the player base is juvenile and misogynistic but some thoughtful comments — and at least people are thinking about it.

I am glad that sociologists are thinking about these issues but I’m with Maus in the sense that from reading the notes I get the sense of an outsider who came to the game with an agenda and has overstated the case a little bit. Gold farmers are despised and there is racism — but all the talk of in game murder and the like really made me feel like I was listening to someone who didn’t really understand how the game or its player community works.

Posted 12 May 2009 at 12:24 am ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:

@Steve –

The note taker (me) doesn’t play WoW. If I summarized something wrong, so be it, be here is what I am clear on:

1. Lisa Nakamura plays quite a bit of WoW. She has done research on virtual gaming worlds and the internet for ages (more than a decade) and if you look on her research site, you’ll see she is one of the pioneering thinkers on race and gaming.

2. I do not know how you kill a player in WoW, or what the servers you reference mean. However, Lisa was very clear in her presentation about some way to dispatch a player that caused a lot of annoyance. It was something about targeting. As someone stated above, generally, an in game kill isn’t a big deal – you come back to life with your stuff in tact. However, Lisa described some kind of thing where you can continually target a player over and over, killing them as they return to life. I am afraid I do not recall the term for what she was describing.

She also mentioned that in other interviews of people who were gold farming players they mentioned feeling stressed that they were targeted by other players. They mentioned they were fine with dying in game – that happens. But they hated dying specifically because someone else targeted them while they played.

3. There has been much more movement on the ideas of sexism in gaming than racism in gaming. The general conversation about sexism is a bit (a small bit, but a bit) more advanced than race in gaming.

Posted 12 May 2009 at 12:48 am ¶
maus wrote:

“The text in full refers to Lisa Nakamura’s 40 page paper, the one the presentation I summarized is based on. I suggest you check that out.”

Will do.

Posted 12 May 2009 at 1:19 am ¶
maus wrote:

One more comment “She also mentioned that in other interviews of people who were gold farming players they mentioned feeling stressed that they were targeted by other players. They mentioned they were fine with dying in game – that happens. But they hated dying specifically because someone else targeted them while they played.”

People *do* go out of their way to target Gold Farmers because of the extreme imbalance they enter into the game. Anyone believed to be “cheating” in games other than MMORPGS (counterstrike, quake, team fortress, etc.) receives the same shunning and ire of the populace. Even the people who buy the gold don’t necessarily like them because of the general economic inflation they introduce into the virtual markets.

Sure, people will go out of their way to obstruct them and make the farmers’ livelihood difficult, but it’s not necessarily out of hatred of the “other”, or because they’re being dehumanized.

They’re treated differently from the rest of the human players because they are playing as if they’re bots, not really interacting other than the most insignificant way to not be detected as a false player. In that way, the farmers set themselves aside as “different”, and not a functioning member of the society.

I do sympathize with the crappy job it must be, but I’ve done mindless call center work and gotten yelled at for problems that certainly aren’t mine. Americans have enough problems taking videogames too seriously, I can’t find too much sympathy for non-racial rudeness in WoW.

Again, just commenting on that specific subject, not yet commenting on the paper as a whole.

Posted 12 May 2009 at 1:29 am ¶
cb3n wrote:

@Maus

It seems to me that one of the points here is that what you term as a “completely understandable dislike people have for farmers” is in and of itself problematic and somewhat irrational. Instead of villifying the people who are ultimately causing the problem by offering real world money (you know, the kind people need to eat) for virtual money, the community chooses to focus almost it’s entire rage on the other end, the people who need that real world money and so they try and meet the demands of the wealthier group. Further those people are demonized in deeply and overtly racist ways, and one could make a very convincing argument that the decisions of who gets blamed for the problem is made along racial lines (IE the farmers are blamed because they are already viewed as other by the dominant in game culture).

In addition, the fact that people are using gold farming to actually make a living for themselves tends to lend them a greater moral right to the in game resources doesn’t it? Essentially it’s become a little like a bunch of guys vacationing on their yachts complaining that the poor fishermen have ruined the fishing. I mean I know people pay money to play WoW for fun and I imagine it’s super frustrating when gold farming impedes ones progress through the game, but really at the end of the day our being entertained isn’t quite as high priority as that guy in front of a computer screen in a sweatshop somewhere making some kind of living.

Finally, I’ll admit to never having played WoW. But I did play Ultima Online obsessively back in early years and have dabbled with all kinds of other MMORPGs and I just want to point out that none of them have been perfect. Especially in terms of the virtual economy (anybody else remember duping back in UO and Diablo? Oh or those hideous jet black robes someone hacked in that ended up everywhere?) if it wasn’t gold farming it’d be something else. It really is basic supply and demand stuff; n0 matter how many gold farmers Blizzard catches and throws off their servers, the problem will still exist as long as there is a demand for gold and players are too lazy to get it themselves.

And as a veteran of these social experiments, I’d have to say to any player who is really that upset about this issue that if they don’t want to deal with other people using the virtual environment of their game in ways that are different from how they’d like them to, maybe they’d be happier with a less open ended and more private gaming experience (having just spent all night playing it, I highly recommend Fallout 3). Heck when I was playing UO people couldn’t even step out of town on their own without getting slaughtered by roving gangs of pks and having all their stuff taken… and WoW players think they have it rough.

Posted 12 May 2009 at 6:15 am ¶
Ba66er wrote:

@Latoya
I would have helped if you had played the game for a day or so for research before writing about it. It’s not hard to get access to it and at least you would know what you are talking about instead of just mindlessly repeating other people’s statements. Make a character, see what trade chat is all about, see a gold farmer in action.. I dunno either would have helped you actually make a case.

Mod Note – What part of “Conference Notes” don’t you understand? I’m not traveling to Amsterdam to talk to Dutch Moroccan Kids or creating a profile on the Japanese language social networking site mixi either – that doesn’t mean I can’t present the findings from the conference. – LDP

Posted 12 May 2009 at 6:21 am ¶
SarahNicole wrote:

Lisa Nakamura is as much a legitimate WoW gamer as she is a legitimate academic, and the same can be said for myself (I organized the symposium). I find it interesting that the assumption was immediate in the first few comments that she’s not a real gamer. Not everyone plays the game the same way. The statements above regarding gold farmers being objectively disruptive and negative to “the” game are by definition subjective assessments of affects to particular gaming experiences, not pure statements of self-evident-to-all fact. Additionally, cb3n’s point about why the gold farmers, and not the gold *buyers*, are the primary negative targets in both discourse and in-game (and out-of-game) action is, to me, one of the more interesting responses to this discussion…

In the Q&A afterwards, issues of gender and sexuality, in addition to the main focus of race and class highlighted by Lisa’s talk, were brought out as well. The audience was a mix of gamers and non-gamers, and they were all academics as well…

@atlasien — she also talked about the Sleep Dealer film…

Posted 12 May 2009 at 10:22 am ¶
SarahNicole wrote:

Or. You know. “effects” to the game. *rollseyesatself* Not enough coffee this morning…

Posted 12 May 2009 at 10:25 am ¶
Steve wrote:

@Sarah

Are you implying that we are accusing Lisa of not being a real Wow player because she is a woman? If so I don’t think that is a fair criticism.

Latoya’s comment that the post was her summary so some of the inaccuracies are attributable to her and not to Lisa IS fair. I at least am at fault for attributing things to Lisa that are really the result of a non-Wow player summarizing what was a lengthy talk.

However, other than that, the post contained descriptions of the game that, taken out of context, are in my opinion misleading, which was the point of my original comment if you read the opening sentence … “his[sic] is an interesting post and I agree with a fair amount of what’s written, but for people who don’t play World of Warcraft, a couple of things that I think are fair to note.”

If you read Latoya’s post, you don’t think that some of the comments about players being murdered and most machinima being anti-asian are not, without more context, distortions of the way Wow and its ecosystem works? Whether a man or a woman wrote it, its not an accurate depiction without more context.

@cb3n
Is your analysis premised on the fact that the activity is permitted? Because it is not — its a violation of the terms of service to buy or sell gold or items.

Perhaps you are aware that it is illegal and you still feel that farmers have a greater entitlement due to their need. Then my question is whether someone that is not a farmer but also illegally obtains gold — by botting — should be prosecuted in game but farmers should not. If that were the case, then we would have a system of enforcement where 2 players doing exactly the same thing were subject to different penalties because one person needed to farm gold for a job and the other one just wanted to get excess gold by botting.

The racism that comes with the dislike of gold farmers bothers me, but to me thats totally different from saying they have any moral entitlement to break the rules of the game in order to make money. Whether its a gold farmer or some lazy kid who likes to download bot programs, if they break the Terms of Service they should be banned.

Posted 12 May 2009 at 11:42 am ¶
SarahNicole wrote:

@ Steve: No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m restating the suggestion that she’s not a real WoW player because that’s what was said a few times. It wasn’t an implication because of her gender, there were several more or less direct statements, and the implication seemed to me to be about her status as an academic — i.e., she just dipped into gaming because of a research agenda (I’m referring more to maus’s statements than yours, although you did reference such an “outsider” critique in your more recent post). I don’t think that’s a valid criticism of her work, given her easily discovered status as an acafan/gamer.

From my perspective, being both a WoW gamer and present at the talk, I didn’t think either Lisa’s presentation or Latoya’s summary of it were misleading about the context of the game. Her work (the paper linked to in Latoya’s notes above) is multi-sited, and expands the definition of the what “the context” of the game even is, implicating our offline lives in what happens within the online gameworld and its out-of-game online communications…

Posted 12 May 2009 at 12:10 pm ¶
Bagelsan wrote:

In addition, the fact that people are using gold farming to actually make a living for themselves tends to lend them a greater moral right to the in game resources doesn’t it? Essentially it’s become a little like a bunch of guys vacationing on their yachts complaining that the poor fishermen have ruined the fishing.

I’d compare it more to someone complaining that the poor fishermen are fishing in their swimming pool. It’s not the intended purpose of the space, and it’s misusing private property (that is, it’s the property of Blizzard and the company says not okay to gold farm.) The gold farmers have the same right as everyone else not to be targeted by violence and racism but they don’t have a right to make money off of someone else’s product.

As for who is being targeted, it really does have at least some aspect of pure practicality. Blizzard can identify both gold sellers and gold buyers, and they target both. Players can’t tell if you buy gold but they can often tell if you’re gold farming, so they target the players they see. Clearly the racist language surrounding the whole business is a problem, and makes it pretty clear that race is a factor, but the public targeting of gold farmers in and of itself is not racist, I’d argue.

(And it’s a minor point, but there *are* cats and dogs in WoW. Obviously it’s racist to say that crap about eating them, but they really do exist. Incorrect details like that were distracting from the overall message, I thought, even though I generally agreed with the points she was making.)

Posted 12 May 2009 at 1:32 pm ¶
cb3n wrote:

@Steve

I’m not sure if the comments page of a blog about race and media is really the place to debate the broader ethics of virtual communities and online gaming so I’ll try and keep this brief.

Your response brings up some interesting questions about what/if any rights and responsibilities are actually held by Blizzard. While the company created the virtually environment and one could clearly make a case for them to be responsible for exerting some influence over how it is used in terms of preventing blatantly illegal activity (note that I’m using the term illegal to refer to things that are actually criminally illegal), do they really have the right or need to rule over how people interact with the game environment? Especially when it comes to an activity that may actually help further their own interests; gold farming makes it easier for more casual players to advance in the game and so may provide a way for different demographics than ‘hardcore gamer’ to get into WoW.

It’s important to recognize that violating a terms of service agreement is only illegal in a vague civil sense, that is, Blizzard and other MMORPG companies aren’t governmental organizations and WoW isn’t a sovereign nation by any stretch of the imagination (yet) so any rules they choose to implement in the virtual environment aren’t actually laws. So really, gold farming as we’ve come to define it, while against in game rules doesn’t actually break any real laws. Ultimately also, terms of use agreements are subject to change pretty quickly, especially as these sorts of online environments evolve. The black dye tubs that I referenced in my earlier post were initially a violation of UO terms of use, but became so widespread that eventually Origin started giving them away as special rewards to players.

Now to answer your question about whether I, personally, think there is a difference between gold farming and botting: Yes I think a distinction could easily be drawn based on the fact that botting involves the use of an outside program to influence the game while farming does not. However, I don’t think such a distinction should be drawn. To get more to the point which I think you were trying to get at yourself, it may be difficult to tell the difference between someone who is making use of a bot and someone who is legitimately doing the work of harvesting in game resources so any practical distinction would be difficult to implement, particularly at the player to player level. Of course, there’s also the whole question of defining what a bot is, one could make the case that the earliest bots were people standing their avatars in front of a resource and duct taping their hotkeys so they could run to the store for more cheese doodles or whatever back in UO.

Posted 12 May 2009 at 1:46 pm ¶
Bagelsan wrote:

Especially when it comes to an activity that may actually help further their own interests; gold farming makes it easier for more casual players to advance in the game and so may provide a way for different demographics than ‘hardcore gamer’ to get into WoW.

Just curious where you get this idea from. No one I know has found it necessary to buy gold to play the game, and they all play pretty casually. And people who can’t play well but buy high-level characters or drop a ton of money on gear for their low-level characters are laughed at. Seeing so much cheating and profiting would be more discouraging than encouraging to new players, I’d think.

Posted 12 May 2009 at 2:08 pm ¶
Steve wrote:

@cb3n

I wish my editing had caught that — I did not mean to say illegal. I agree Botting and goldfarming are not illegal but are violations of the ToS.

I think the issue I have with the concept of a gold farmer’s moral right to an in game resource is that by definition the gold farmer is trying to use that resource in violation of the rules. I don’t think someone can have a valid moral claim to something that is, within the context of the game, they are using for improper purposes. Its true the ToS may change in the future but only at that point could, in my mind, a gold farmer have a legitimate moral claim.

Blizzard could significantly harm the gold farming industry today by simply selling gold themselves (one might argue they have already through the introduction of the level 80 dailies — anyone with an hour of time can generate at least 100 gold without blinking an eye). From a moral standpoint, would Blizzard be culpable because they are throwing gold farmers out of work?

Posted 12 May 2009 at 4:27 pm ¶
Kaonashi wrote:

SarahNicole: I think the reason why people are slightly hostile is because even allowing for personal experiences and server differences there’s a disconnect between what she’s saying and what we’ve experienced in the game. It isn’t because she’s a woman.

I can’t believe no one has mentioned this simple fact: Gold Farming is prohibited by Blizzard in the TOS and anyone caught doing it, spamming services for it, etc have their accounts immediately terminated. Blizzard even puts a program on your computer that checks for third party bots and other cheats that farmers regularly use) while you are playing. Unfortunately, as quick as Blizzard bans the farming accounts, they come right back again. I haven’t a clue as to how she got the idea that gold-buying isn’t as hated as selling because as much as gold farming is detested, gold buying is detested even more (next to toon-buying). No one brags about buying gold. That’s a good way to get reported and your account banned.

WOW does mirror a lot of the dynamics of the real world because people from all backgrounds, races, socio-economic groups, beliefs etc all mingle in the world of Warcraft in a big ole stew. So the odds that there’s some racist folks playing along with everyone else is pretty high, and they are that way to begin with…the game didn’t make them that way. People like that can make something racist out of damn near anything; the game is merely other outlet in which to express hatred. What this article FAILS to address that unlike a lot of online games, Blizzard does its best to give you tools to keep bullshit you don’t want to deal with to a minimum, and that’s unfair. Blizzard is not a stupid company. They know that one of the top reasons why people quit playing online games is because of assholes, and they want to keep your asshole experiences to a minimum so you can continue to enjoy playing the game and they can continue taking your money.

I can only speak from my own personal WOW experiences, but I rarely hear people talking about gold farmers in terms of their race; you’re more likely to hear gold farmers referred to as “those fucking farmers” than people saying blatantly racist things (and on the rare occasions I do hear something like that, poof, on the ignore list they go). I feel sorry for the gold farmers for the conditions in which they work, but that’s the extent of my sympathy. When I can’t complete quests because a farmer is farming my mobs and won’t respond to my whispers telling them I need some mobs for a quest and to please leave me some (or even worse, kills me because we’re in a PvP area and I intruded on his work), there’s a problem. When I can’t farm rare materials because a farmer decides to spend his 10 hour shift doing nothing but mining in Scholazar and Icecrown there’s a problem. When I can’t sell crafted items on the AH for a decent amount (and make some gold in the process for myself) because a farmer has flooded the market with rare crafted items for cheeps there’s a problem. If I were on a PvP server, I would not only kill them dead every time I saw one but would have a friend camp the GY too just in case he decided to rez there. And I would do this not because they are Asian, but because they are THAT big of a pain in the ass.

Posted 12 May 2009 at 5:53 pm ¶
SarahNicole wrote:

@Kaonashi: Again, I never said the hostility was because Lisa is a woman — that was Steve’s misinterpretation of what I was saying, which I proceeded to explain.

Also, there’s often a disconnect between what researchers find after doing systematic research and what individuals experience at the micro-level in their particular situations. Clearly, Lisa’s work (as well as that of others she cited in her paper) uncovered arguably racist and racialist interpretations of gold farmers/farming. Given that she uses the concept of profiling to discuss them, saying that because you yourself have never encountered such discursive/narrative interpretations is a bit like denying that the racial profiling of black drivers exists because you’ve never seen it happen firsthand. Additionally, her article does an excellent job of setting contemporary cultural narratives within the history of racial discourse, and demonstrates that the machinima that does make use of racial tropes is treading well-worn territory…

And to add my own anecdote, I’ve been called names, attacked and killed because I apparently seem like a farmer, because I am just mostly a solitary player, and hardly ever respond to anyone’s whispers. My husband can barely get me to join quests with him…

Posted 12 May 2009 at 7:18 pm ¶
BeanPaste wrote:

I just want to clear something up that is bugging me.

I’m not sure why SK Gaming is being used as a reason to dislike asians. The SK does not stand for South Korea, it stands for “Schroet Kommando”. They are in fact Swedish, not asian at all.

http://www.sk-gaming.com/about/

Posted 12 May 2009 at 11:36 pm ¶
Steve wrote:

@Beanpaste

1. the association with SK Gaming and South Korea was made in my original post and you’re right — thats a mistake. i never checked my original information on that so sorry. someone told me it was a south korean based guild but its clearly not.

2. however, i actually noted people respected SK gaming. i’m not sure where you got the impression that SK gaming was causing people not to like Asians because that comment does not appear in any of the comments here — not in mine and not in any subsequent comment as i just searched for the term in all of them.

Posted 13 May 2009 at 1:26 am ¶
BeanPaste wrote:

“i’m not sure where you got the impression that SK gaming was causing people not to like Asians”

I sort of saw it as being implied from people saying that Asians were facing antagonism for being both farmers and good players and citing SK as an example of a guild of the best players.

But now after re-reading I notice I must of been combining different posts from different people into one.
Someone said that Asians that are good at WOW get dismissed because “oh they’re asian”. While at the same time they get stereotyped into being gold farmers as well.

Posted 13 May 2009 at 11:14 am ¶
Titanis walleri wrote:

I could be wrong (since I don’t play WoW), but I imagine Blizzard punishes gold buyers as well as gold sellers. I know Anet does that with Guild Wars, so I can’t imagine Blizzard wouldn’t.

And gold farmers also have other negative effects, like stuff getting nerfed in an attempt to slow them down (and I don’t think *anyone* likes when that happens)…

Posted 13 May 2009 at 1:00 pm ¶
Kaonashi wrote:

SarahNicole: I realize that (which is why I prefaced my comment with “I can only speak from my personal WOW experience”). With over 250 servers available, people’s experiences will vary. Also, I didn’t say that I never hear people referring to Gold Farmers as being Asian; I said that you’re more likely to hear them referred to as “those fucking farmers” and when I DO hear something stupid that person goes straight on my ignore list.

And to add my own anecdote, I’ve been called names, attacked and killed because I apparently seem like a farmer, because I am just mostly a solitary player, and hardly ever respond to anyone’s whispers. My husband can barely get me to join quests with him

That’s unacceptable. If you are being called racist names while being griefed that player needs to be reported, as that’s in violation of the TOS.

Posted 13 May 2009 at 4:51 pm ¶
Luke wrote:

I would expect that Gold buyers are not censured by players because it’s a lot harder for a player to detect a gold buyer than it is to detect a gold seller.

Posted 14 May 2009 at 10:38 am ¶
erica wrote:

The conclusion of her essay woe’s the abscence of pro farmer fan-material… Why should there be? even the author finds it a disgusting practice?

Fair game and gamers (and farmers in a way) are the victims of people who buy in games items with out of game money. It sucks that a racial steryotype has arisen, but as it was said, it is against blizzard TOS and should be reported.

it is simply poor sportsmanship… and cheating… like buying monopoly spots with real money instead of colorful game money. no one would be happy.

online also has the absence of inhibitions that face to face and serious discussions have… so racist fans will make racist fan content.

farming (comparable to what corporations do every day in product factories) and economic and racisim have existed long before wow.

in LARP we have the opposite problem… “should we give out of game money for the expensive item earned in-game?”

-e

also a note from the essay… female dwarves are not unpopular because of farmer associations… because short bearded women are unsexy in our society. when we are talking about body image and fantasy worlds then we can talk about female dwarves…

Posted 14 Jun 2009 at 7:03 am ¶
Kaimaera wrote:

I will give you one thing, I believe the majority of the player base of WoW is under the impression that a majority of gold farmers are Asian and make references of that in game. People think very little of gold farmers and even less of people who buy gold. I can see how people who are not experienced with the game – or people who are looking to find something racist within the topic – could easily take that and run with it for miles, and in my opinion that’s what this article is doing.

Immature individuals will say things in the various chat channels of the game that are intentionally outrageous – racist among many other things – with the desire of starting some big argument. They do so to cure their own boredom, because they like to argue or enjoy watching others do so. Mature people who play the game ignore those juvenile types. Reporting someone to Blizzard for making racist comments or any other offensive behavior is as easy as right clicking on someone’s name and selecting ‘Report for spam’ or contacting a Game Master.

So many things have been blown out of proportion or taken out of context in this article that it makes me believe it had been done intentionally in order to have an article that was more than a paragraph or two long. Some things are even completely incorrect altogether. For example:
“‘Player produced videos such as ‘Ni Hao’ mock Chinese food ways, implying that Chinese eat dogs and cats. This is a nonsensical accusation, since there are no dogs or cats in WoW, nor any egg rolls.’ However, players still insist that their criticisms of gold farmers are not racist.”

The reason they are implying the Chinese or other Asian cultures eat dog meat is because they do and have been doing so for thousands of years. That was not an insult, that was historical fact. It is taboo in most cultures these days, but is in no way nonsensical to make the comment.

It is also a fact that there are dogs and cats in WoW. A specific dog is Kyle, a NPC Tauren’s pet. The dog has the same skin as the wolves in the game, but in doing the quest, Kyle is referred to as a dog in both the quest text and is spoken out loud by the Tauren “Can you help me find my dog?” Otherwise, you were correct in saying there are no Egg Rolls in WoW.. yet.

Another thing I feel is being stretched is in the quote from Ni Hao:
“Corpse camp until
This China-man gets fired
That’s one farmer they’ll have to replace
Not supposed to be here in the first place.”

It’s as if the author is wanting the reader to get the impression that the reason Nyhm is ‘corpse camping’ the guy is because he’s Asian, and isn’t supposed to be playing the game because of his race. That is completely absurd. It’s because he’s a gold farmer and is 1 of tens of thousands of people who are helping to ruin the in-game economy by farming and selling gold.

It’s been reported that Nyhm was concerned with the lyrics of his song being viewed as racist. Eventually he decided to produce the song with Summergale anyway in the hopes that the majority of people who would watch his video would be players of WoW and understand his context, and have a sense of humor. I don’t believe that Nyhm would have wanted an Asian person to be insulted by his video. The video was made because of gold farmers and was intended for the amusement of those people who have ever been subject to dealing with the issues that lurk in a gold farmers wake because we would all understand exactly what he was saying. I see that it was lost on others.

What I’m trying to say is that yes, there is some racism in the game.. there’s going to be racism anywhere society freely gathers, especially in competitive environments. Just like you, I wish that it would all be done away with. The best way to rid the world of racism is to educate people on the topic. The more we understand each other the more we will start to see the similarities instead of the differences. But going out of your way to dig what you’re looking for from things that were not ever intended to come across the way you wish it did is not the way to go about it.

Posted 14 Jun 2009 at 7:42 am ¶
James Davis wrote:

Although making some good points about the racism that goes into the gold farmer discussions, I feel the author overstated the case on a recurring basis.

Statements like concerning how much viewership of Mad Cow’s/Nhym’s “Ni Hao” video has gotten miss a greater fact: this is a popular machinima artist, with 22 or so videos, one of them about gold farming.

Ni Hao, then, becomes the archetype for the discussion, but is it the norm of even anti-gold farmer videos? In South Park, another reference, a single comment is made by Cartman, an unrepentant racist and commonly held as an idiot. The only other reference is, “Chronicles of a Gold Farmer,” which is a lot more racially neutral, even if it is about profiling gold farmers… but based on their gold farming ways.

In any case, I’m not seeing that the websites mentioned are “full of machinima of trophy videos of farmer killing replete with racist imagery.” While that description does stick to “Ni Hao,” it certainly does not describe “Chronicles of a Gold Farmer.”

That is it for the machinima references. One particularly offensive machinima, one that brings home one point (but doesn’t come close to the racism) and a one liner from South Park. Yes, there are more, not cited, but they compose the clear minority of the videos made.

Quotes that bothered me paritcularly:

“WoW allows players to hide race during game play, an enormous amount of player energy goes into ‘outing’ gold famers.”
* The word ‘enormous’ is a difficult word here, it may be accurate only insofar that there are over 10 million players, and if 0.01% of their energy is spent ‘outing’ gold farmers, this would be enormous. Mostly, it’s reads as if average players spend a lot of time on this–they don’t.

“Most Asian players are ‘leisure players,’ not player workers.”
* This is true of the world in general, but not of the servers US players have direct access to. Despite the author’s belief that players may choose to play on any server they wish, Blizzard guides players from certain regions to matching servers a variety of different ways. (How you pay being one, where you bought your WoW product being another.) My wife found it terribly inconvenient to play on the same server as her British friend. The direct result is that most asian leisure players are on their own servers. Leisure players have less reason to jump through hoops to get out of their alloted server choices. And thus, the majority of asian players encountered by US players are gold farmers.

Sometimes, it is as if the author forgets that behind the dislike of gold farming is a legitimate complaint: Gold Farmers monopolize resources, making it substantially more difficult to farm the resources they need for themselves. Long since dismissed in the opener as not terribly relevant is the fact the entire enterprise of gold farming is, most patently, against TOS and cheating (by both the buyer and seller, which I hold both to blame.) These two facts, put together, fuel Nhym’s statement that they, “Shouldn’t be here, anyway.”

I’d like to carry some truths from this paper, of which there were many:
* “Gold farmer,” and “Chinese,” are, unfortunately, used together and/or interchangeably by many US WoW players.
* “Ni Hao,” was a particularly offensive video, the parody was lost.
* Gold farmers incur more wrath than buyers (is this because buyers can remain anonymous?)
* Actually being a gold farmer is a sad way to make a living.

This article posed some questions possibly worthy of taking a look at:
* Does the fact that many gold farming operations use bot programs, with live people only keeping the bots going, even further reinforced the notion that a farmer is little more than a NPC?
* Does the fact that the gold theft industry is fueling the market as well as gold farming (the former is clearly on the rise) give an even more negative connotation to gold farmer?
* How much hate for gold farming would exist if it didn’t carry the racial issue? I’m guessing some, but really can’t say for sure.

And, as an aside, I find Dribbell’s comment that gold farmers have ‘mastered’ the game a bit laughable, at best. Efficiently producing game wealth is only a small subset of the game.

Posted 01 Jul 2009 at 1:38 am ¶
James Davis wrote:

erica:

Quick note about female dwarves: the reference was not actually to WoW female dwarves, there was a quick sidestep to another game, where the currency was adena. (I got confused, it’s clarified in footnote 13.)

Posted 01 Jul 2009 at 1:47 am ¶
Ross Chung wrote:

“…since there are no dogs or cats in WoW…”

That’s not entirely true. There are many different kinds of cats that can be obtained as pets. Dogs don’t appear in the normal fashion as you’d expect, there is a pet called a “worg” which shares appearance of both a common dog and a wolf. While it technically doesn’t look like a dog, many players still refer to it as such.

Posted 01 Jul 2009 at 10:01 am ¶
ryan casey wrote:

most of the time if you want to buy gold they ask for your account information which they use to hack your account then send all your gold to other gold farmers.That is how gold farmers get the gold in the first place

Posted 24 Sep 2009 at 7:14 pm ¶