Ni Hao depicts the killing of gold farmers in-game amid a mise-en-scèneof gongs, dog-filled egg rolls, fortune cookies, Chinese flags, and photographs of Chinese people dining in a restaurant. Even in a theoretically body-free space such as an MMO, the calculus of race, nation, and class result in user-produced algorithms based on player behaviors, equipment type, language use, and player class that result in racist discourse, both in real-time interaction and in the construction of WoW's transmedited synthetic world.12
As Dibbell (2007) notes, WoW isn't a game for everyone in a literal sense: for player-workers, it is à virtual sweatshop. Player-workers in MMOs 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: 115) explains, “depends on and reproduces racialized and gendered exploitation." Gold farming is an example in extremis of informationalized capitalism, for the avatar is aform of property that is composed of digital code yet produced by the sweat of a worker's brow.
Castronova (2005) makes the excellent point that much of the attraction of MMOs lies in the pleasure of accumulating “avatarial capital." Like the notion of cultural capital or human capital to which it refers, avatarial capital is a "soft" form of accumulation; as Castronova puts it, “things like education and on-the-job experience that enhance earning power.. . are intangible and inalienable" (2005: 110). Unlike the physical capital that is linked to both in-game currencies and real world economies, avatarial capital is a different but equally compelling scale of value based on the virtual accumulation of “experience points and skills and attributes" that “allow people to make investments, investments whose returns are in the form of increases in their ability to do and see things in the world" (Castronova 2005: 110). This is precisely the style of capital accumulation that player-workers are denied; the repetition of value-producing labor in WoW greatly curtails their movements within the game as well as the range of activities available to them. The Timbermaw area in WoW nicknamed China Town that Dibbell (2007) describes is favored by farmers not because of its beauty, exciting activities, or opportunities for exploration and creative social play, but rather because it is a good source of saleable virtual property.
Don't Hate thePlayer, Hate the Game
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