{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","uuid":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":267,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/DIGITAL%20LABOR%20THE%20INTERNET%20AS%20PLAYGROUND%20AND%20FACTORY","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/search"},"page":{"printed_page":194,"pdf_page":201,"physical_index":201,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"595045be061cc30183065080c6a2966c50d578f85802e379883d42bb4f4920ac"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"While part of the pleasure of World of Warcraft consists in navigating its richly imaged, beautifully rendered spaces, users must rely upon the company to provide more of this valuable commodity in the form of expansion packs such as “The Burning Crusade\"and “The Wrath of the Lich King,\" eagerly anticipated and extremely profitable products for which users are willing to stand in line for days. Machinima permits users to expand this space for free; while navigable space is still tightly controlled by the company—unlike in Second Life, where users are unable to build their own structures or objects to insert in the world—machinima allows users to extend its representational or narrative space, creating scenarios that are genuinely new because they depict activities or behaviors impossible in the space of the game. This is a fascinating area of study and one that is a thriving and integral part of WoW in particular. The struggle for resources integral to the structure of MMOs can also be re-envisioned as the struggle to own or claim virtual space and to police national boundaries as well.8 Player-produced machinima accessed from warcraftmovies.com make arguments about race, labor, and the racialization of space in World of Warcraft.9 These highly polemical texts employ the visual language of the game, one of the most recognizable and distinctive ever createdfor shared virtual play, to bring into sharp relief the contrast between the privileges of media production available to empowered players with the time and inclination to create machimina and those who are shut out of this aspect of WoW by their status as player-workers. Participatory media is a privilege of the leisure class; active fandom is too expensive a proposition for many digital workers, who, as Dibbell explainspoignantly, can't afford to enjoy the game that they have mastered, much less produce media to add to it.10\n\nNot surprisingly, there are two tiers of this type ofuser production—Blizzard frequently solicits screen shots, holds art contests, and showcases user-produced machinima that become part of the official canon of the game. However, thereis extensive traffic in content that is not endorsed by the developer but that is nonetheless part of the continuing rollout of the world. Racial discourse is a key part of this rollout. If the official World of Warcraft game is a gated community that users pay toenter, its covenants consist in its end-user license agreement. However, part of Jenkins's (2006) argument is that media technologies such as the Internet have made it impossible to gate media in the same way. The underground machinima I will discuss in this essay build and expand the world of WoW in regard to representations of race in just as constitutive a way as its official content. As Lowood (2006) notes, WoW players have been creating visual moving image records as long as, or perhaps even longer than, they have been playing the game. Thus machinima is anything but à derivative or ancillary form in relation to WoW, for its history runs exactly parallel, and in some sense, slightly in advance of the game itself—as Lowood notes, users were employing the beta version of WoW to make machimina before the game was available to the public. Lowood claims, “WoW movies, from game film to dance videos, have become an integral part of the culture shared by a player community\" (Lowood 2006: 374).\n\n194\n\nThe Violence of Participation","previous_page":193,"next_page":195}