Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game
The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft
Lisa Nakamura
Cartman: “I am the mightiest dwarf in all of Azeroth!”
Kyle: “Wow, look at all these people playing right now.”
“Yeah, it’s bullcrap. I bet half of these people are Cartman: Koreans.”
South Park, Season 10, Episode 8, “Make Love Not Warcraft” <sup>1</sup>
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
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) such as World of Warcraft (WoW), Lineage II, and Everquest are immensely profitable, skillfully designed, immersive, and beautifully detailed virtual worlds that enable both exciting game play and the creation of real-time, digitally embodied communities. In 2011, World of Warcraft surpassed 10 million users, confirming games economist Edward Castronova’s (2005) predictions for exponential growth, and these players are intensely interested in and protective of their investments in the virtual world of Azeroth. This stands to reason: as Alexander Galloway (2006) writes, “virtual worlds are always in some basic way the expression of utopian desire.” One of players’ primary rallying points as a group has been to advocate strongly that American video game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment regulate cheating within the game more stringently. However, the definition of cheating is unclear, despite the game’s end-user license agreement, since many players break these rules with impunity, a state of afairs that is actually the norm in MMOs.<sup>2</sup> As Mia Consalvo (2007) argues, it makes much less sense to see cheating within games as a weakness of game design or a problem with player behavior than to see it as an integral part of game culture, a feature that keeps players from getting stuck and quitting. Cheating thus benefits players and the game industry alike. However, cheating is as varied in its forms as is game play itself, and some varieties are viewed by players as socially undesirable, while others are not.
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