Asians don't count as other players, or as people. In this sense, they are nonplayer characters, or NPCs, which are typically artificial intelligence modules, or AIs, that give players information or missions. NPCs can also refer to the game's monsters, or “mobs." This characterization of Asian farmers as either automated service workers or monsters fits neatly into their racialization within Ni Hao, for the video depicts them as all owning exactly the same avatar, a man wearing a red and gold outfit and wieldinga pickax. This dehumanization of the Asian player—they “all look the same" because they all are the same—is evocative of earlier conceptions of Asian laborers as interchangeable and replaceable.
As Robert Lee (1999) notes, language, food, and hair were all privileged sites of boundary crises set up between Chinese and whites in minstrel shows in nineteenth-century America. 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. But, of course, neither are there real-world races in WoW, until they are actively produced and shaped in visual form by fans' media production. In addition, the exoticism and supposed unintelligibility of the language is highlighted by the use of a spikylooking, irregular font that spells out the title Ni Hao. The management of race within the virtual worlds of MMOs is reflective of earlier methods of managing race in U.S. history, but it also offers some. new twists. Though gold farming is not a form of labor that is exclusively practiced by Chinese player-workers, it has become racialized, partly through the dissemination of texts such as these. This has been well documented in other MMOs as well; as Steinkuehler (2006) notes, the player class of female dwarfwas tainted by its association with Chinese gold farmers, and thus became an unplayable class because female dwarfs became racialized as Chinese.11
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The Violence of Participation