The social calculus of race, nation, and class are burdens borne by Chinese gold farmers, Chinese leisure players, and, ultimately, the gaming community as a whole Hatred of Chinese gold farmers drives WoWusers to produce visual and textual media that hews closely to earlier anti-Asian discourses, media that they broadcast to other users through forums, general chat in-game, and homemade videos.
World of Warcraft is a virtual world where significant numbers of people are conducting their psychic, financial, and social lives. This massively multiplayer online game continues to roll out content for its users in the form of expansion packs, frequent software updates, action figures and a feature film in development, and an extensive content-rich and frequently updated website forits community of users. Users are invited by Blizzard to get involved in some aspects of this world's production by contributing interesting screen shots, machinima, personal narratives, and advice ongame play to its site, and even in cases when they are not, players actively produce in defiance of its wishes. Topics that the game industry may wish to avoid because they may seem divisive or may reflect badly on the virtual world are confronted frequently in participatory media created by its users.
Machinima as User-Generated Racial Narrative: The Media Campaignagainst Chinese Player-Workersin WoW
Machinima is à crucial site of struggle over the meaning of race in shared digital space, and it is a central part of the culture of MMOs such as World of Warcraft. Machinima has recently become the object of much academic interest because it exemplifies the notion of participatory media, an influential and useful formulation that is the basis for Jenkins's (2006) book Convergence Culture. In it, Jenkins describes how machinima are prime examples of users' seizing the right to contribute to media universesin defiance of industry wishes, standards, and control; their value lies in the ability to produce counternarratives whose impact lies in their active subversion of the narrow messages available in many dominant media texts. Machinima literally extend the story space of the games upon which they are based, and the most interesting of these actively work to reconfigure their original meanings in progressive, socially productive ways. Jenkins explains that transmediated story spaces that exist across media platforms permitincreased opportunities for engaged users like fans to insert their own content into these “synthetic worlds," to use Castronova's (2005) phrase—while game developers like Blizzard provide limited, licensed, and fairly tightly controlled virtual space for players to navigate, users extend this space by writing fan fiction, creating original artwork, and making their own movies or machinima using images, narratives, and tropes from the game.
Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game
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