{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","uuid":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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":325,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":11,"pdf_page":236,"physical_index":236,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ca6a834aa44b3ab123e45cfe37b91206df849a45de5932a14cb0dd1a250b476c"},"chapter":"Digital Labor","content":"Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game\n\nThe Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft\n\nLisa Nakamura\n\nCartman: “I am the mightiest dwarf in all of Azeroth!”\n\nKyle: “Wow, look at all these people playing right now.”\n\n“Yeah, it’s bullcrap. I bet half of these people are Cartman: Koreans.”\n\nSouth Park, Season 10, Episode 8, “Make Love Not Warcraft” <sup>1</sup>\n\nWhere did all the doggies and kitty cats go Since the gold farmers started to show   \nDon’t want to know what’s in the egg roll And they keep comin’ back   \nCuz you’re giving them dough   \nTake one down and I felt inspired   \nCorpse camp until   \nThis China-man gets fired   \nThat’s one farmer they’ll have to replace   \nNot supposed to be here in the first place. I don’t know any other way to convey   \nHow much we wish you’d all just go away Server economy in disarray   \nGuess I’ll just fear your mobs around all day.\n\nNi Hao (A Gold Farmer’s Story), warcraftmovies.com\n\nMassively 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.\n\n11","previous_page":10,"next_page":null}