Though Consalvo (2007) stresses the extremely subjective ways that MMO players define cheating, asserting that “a debate exists around the definition of cheating and whether it actually hurts other players [and] players themselves see little common ground in what constitutes cheating" (Consalvo2007: 150), real-money trading—or buying and sellingin-game propertyfor realmoney—is widely considered the worst, more morally reprehensible form of cheating. The practice of gold farming, or selling in-game currency to players for real money, usually through resellers such as the International Gaming Exchange (IGE) or eBay, is especially disliked. Leisure players have been joined by player-workers from poorer nations such as China and Korea, who are often subject to oppression as both a raciolinguistic mínority and as undesirable underclassed social bodies in the context of game play and game culture.3 These “farmers," as other players dismissively dub them, produce and sell virtual goods such as weapons, garments, animals, and even their own leveled-up avatars or virtual bodies to other players for real-world money. As Consalvo (2007 164) writes, the “gill-buying practice is viscerally despised by some players."
Constance Steinkuehler's (2006)analysis of Lineage II, a KoreanMMO, discovered this to be true as well and, more importantly, uncovered some of the ways in which the condemnation of virtual currency buying is far exceeded by a visceral hatred of gold sellers or farmers. This hatred is strongly articulated to race and ethnicity: many (though by no means all) gold farmers are Chinese, and there is a decidedly anti-Asian flavor to many player protests against Chinese gold farmers. As Steinkuehler notes, hatred of gold farmers has given rise to polls querying players on North American servers: “Is it OK to Hate Chinese Players?" (32% of players responded yes; the majority, 39%, replied, "I don't hate China, just what they stand for in L2"; and 10% checked “I am CN and you should mind yourself, you racist pig"). Though she notes “calling someone ‘Chinese' is à general insult that seems aimed more at one's style of play than one's real-world ethnicity" (Steinkuehler 2006: 200), the construction of Chinese identity in MMOs as abject, undesirable, and socially contaminated racializes the culture of online games, a culture that scholars such as Castronova (2005) have claimed are unique (and valuable) because they are exempt from real-world problems such as racism, classism, “looksism," and other types of social inequality.4 Though, as T. L. Taylor (2006) notes, MMOs are distinguished by their “enormous potential in a fairly divisive world," the “fact that people play with each other across regions and often countries"as often as not results in ethnic and racial chauvinism: “as a tag the conflation of Chinese with gold farmer has seemed to come all too easy and now transcends any particular game" (Taylor 2006: 321). Robert Brookey (2007) expands upon this claim; in his analysis of gaming blogs, he discovered “overt racist attitudes" towardChinesefarmers; most importantly, that “some players, who harbor negative feelings toward Chinese farmers, do not believe that these feelings denote racial discrimination." Thus, although it is the case that players cannot see each others bodies while playing, specific forms of gamic labor, such as gold farming and selling, as well as specific styles of play, have become racialized as Chinese, producing new forms of networked racism that are particularly easy for players to disavow.
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TheViolence of Participation