{"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":200,"pdf_page":207,"physical_index":207,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"141edddfe446b3599c908fd603d0811b586964cc3a9230ddd650170a2e6fad78"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"While scholars such as Greg Lastowka (2007) have done an excellent job describing the rules and constraints that govern the creation and movement of physical capital within the server economy, less research has been done on avataria capital within WoW (see also Balkin and Noveck 2006). Though as Castronova (2005: 45) notes and most gamers already know, “coming to own the avatar, psychologically, is so natural among those who spend time in sónthetic worlds that i is barely noticed.\" This emotional investment in avatars is relatively little studied in MMOs, and certainly not from the perspective of player-workers. Filiciak' (2003) psychoanalytically informed scholarship on avatar creation and ownership posits an intimate relation between a player's real-life bodily identity and hi or her avatarial body. He writes, citing Reid, “avatarsare much more than a few bytes of computer data—they are cyborgs, a manifestation of the self beyond the realms of the physical, existing in a space where identity is self-defined rather thar pre-ordained\" (Filiciak 2003: 91). However, while Chinese gold farmers creaté and deploy avatars, they are unable to accumulate avatarial capital since their job consist in selling level-ups as well as gold and equipment. Thus, the notion tha avatars are manifestations of the self when applied to gold farmers neatly sums up the problematics of informationalized capitalism. The privilege of avatarial selfpossession is, like capital itself, unevenly distributed across geopolitical borders Though emotional investment is an unavoidable side effect of avatar usage, the luxury of either hard or soft capital accumulation is denied player-workers ir virtual worlds. If late capitalism is characterized by the requirement for subject to be possessive individuals, to make claims to citizenship based on ownership o property, then player-workers are unnatural subjects in that they are unable to “come to own an avatar.\"The painful paradox of this dynamic lies in the ways tha it mirrors the dispossession of information workers in the Fourth Worlds engen dered by ongoing processes of globalization.13\n\nConclusion\n\nThe anti-Asian racial discourse in Ni Hao, as well as that noted in Brookey's (2007) Steinkuehler's (2006), and Taylor's (2006) research, are not necessarily representativ of the WoW population as a whole (thoughit must be said that, while YouTub and warcraftmovies.com are full of machinima or trophy videos of farmer-killing replete with racist imagery, there are no pro-farmer user-produced machinima to be seen).14Machiminais abreakthrough medium because it differs from previou mass forms of media or performance; it is the product of individual users. How ever, like the minstrel shows that preceded it, it shapes the culture by disseminating arguments about the nature of race, labor, and assimilation. As a Ni Hao commenter on YouTube on October 31, 2007, notes: “GO MADCOW!! lol kick gold farmer's asses;) the place in nagrandwhere u cant get witout fly mount is nice fo china-man killing.\"Similarly, it is certainly not the case that games must be entirely free of racist discourse in order to be culturally important or socially productive in short, to be “good.\"No multiplayer social game could meet that criterion at all times. On the other hand, if we are to take games seriously as synthetic worlds, we must be willing to take their racial discourses, media texts, and interpersonal conflicts seriously as well. As Dibbell (2006) claims, it is constraint and scarcity—the challenge of capital accumulation—that makes MMOs pleasurable, even addictive. Game economies based on cultures of scarcity engender real-money trading, and as long as this form of player-work is socially debased and racialized, it will result in radically unequal social relations, labor types, and forms of representation along the axes of nation, language, and identity. Asian player-workers are economically unable to accumulate avatarial capital and thus become persons; they are the dispossessed subjects of synthetic worlds. As long as Asian farmers are figured as unwanted guest workers within the culture ofMMOs, user-produced extensions of MMO space such as machinima will most likely continue to depict Asian culture as threatening to the beauty and desirability of shared virtual space in the World of Warcraft.\n\n200\n\nThe Violence of Participation","previous_page":199,"next_page":201}