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# DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

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The social calculus of race, nation, and class are burdens borne by Chinese gold farmers, Chinese leisure players, and, ultimately, the gaming community as a whole Hatred of Chinese gold farmers drives WoWusers to produce visual and textual media that hews closely to earlier anti-Asian discourses, media that they broadcast to other users through forums, general chat in-game, and homemade videos.

World of Warcraft is a virtual world where significant numbers of people are conducting their psychic, financial, and social lives. This massively multiplayer online game continues to roll out content for its users in the form of expansion packs, frequent software updates, action figures and a feature film in development, and an extensive content-rich and frequently updated website forits community of users. Users are invited by Blizzard to get involved in some aspects of this world's production by contributing interesting screen shots, machinima, personal narratives, and advice ongame play to its site, and even in cases when they are not, players actively produce in defiance of its wishes. Topics that the game industry may wish to avoid because they may seem divisive or may reflect badly on the virtual world are confronted frequently in participatory media created by its users.

Machinima as User-Generated Racial Narrative: The Media Campaignagainst Chinese Player-Workersin WoW

Machinima is à crucial site of struggle over the meaning of race in shared digital space, and it is a central part of the culture of MMOs such as World of Warcraft. Machinima has recently become the object of much academic interest because it exemplifies the notion of participatory media, an influential and useful formulation that is the basis for Jenkins's (2006) book Convergence Culture. In it, Jenkins describes how machinima are prime examples of users' seizing the right to contribute to media universesin defiance of industry wishes, standards, and control; their value lies in the ability to produce counternarratives whose impact lies in their active subversion of the narrow messages available in many dominant media texts. Machinima literally extend the story space of the games upon which they are based, and the most interesting of these actively work to reconfigure their original meanings in progressive, socially productive ways. Jenkins explains that transmediated story spaces that exist across media platforms permitincreased opportunities for engaged users like fans to insert their own content into these “synthetic worlds," to use Castronova's (2005) phrase—while game developers like Blizzard provide limited, licensed, and fairly tightly controlled virtual space for players to navigate, users extend this space by writing fan fiction, creating original artwork, and making their own movies or machinima using images, narratives, and tropes from the game.

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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

Not 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).

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If indeed machinima extend the world of game play, how are players cocreating this world? Antifarmer machinima produces overtly racist narrative space to attach to a narrative that, while carefully avoiding overt references to racism or racial conflict in our world, is premised upon a racial war in an imaginary world—the World of Azeroth.While Jenkins (2006) celebrates the way that fans, particularly female fans, have extended the worlds of Star Trek in truly liberatory ways, inserting homosexual narratives between Captain Kirk andSpock that the franchise would never permit or endorse, a closer look at user-produced content from warcraftmovies.comreveals a contraction and retrenchmentof concepts of gender, race, and nation rather than their enlargement.

Warcraftmovies.com, the most popular World of Warcraftmachinima website, organizes its user-generated content under several categories.“Underground" machinima deals with topics such as “bug/exploit," “exploration,"and “gold farming." Ni Hao (A Gold Farmer's Story), by “Nyhm" of “Madcow Studios," has earned a “4x Platinum" rating, the highest available, from warcraftmovies.com, and the video is also available on YouTube, where ithas been viewed 533,567 times, has been favorited 1,998 times, and has produced 981 comments from users (Ni Hao). This extremely popular, visually sophisticated machinima music video features new lyrics sung over the instrumental track of Akon's hit hip-hop song "Smack That." This polemical anti-Asian machinima's chorus is:

I see you farmin primals in Shadow moon Valley, 10 cents an hour's good money when you are Chinese, I buy your auctions you sell my gold right back to me, feels like you're bendin' me over, you smile and say “ni hao' and farm some gold, “ni hao" it's getting old, ni hao, oh. (see Figure 11.1)

The claim that“10 cents an hour's good money when you are Chinese" displays awareness that the farmers' incentive for exploiting or “bending over"betterresourced players comes from economic need. Another part of the video shows a farmer shoveling gold into a vault, with the subtitled lyric "IGE'smaking bank now." The International Gaming Exchange is one of the largest resellers of gold, avatar level-ups, and other virtual property, and it is a U.S. business, not an Asian one. Nonetheless, this commentary on the gold farming economic system resorts to thefull gamut of racial stereotypes, including aChinese flag as the background for à video scene of a sexy singing female troll in a scanty outfit flanked by the human farmers wielding pickaxesand shovels.

Later in the video, a Chinese gold farmer is killed by another player, who comments as he kneels next to the corpse that “this China-man gets fired, that's one farmer they'll have to replace, not supposed to be here in the first place"(see Figure 11.2). Clearly, Asian players—specifically those suspected of being farmers but, as can be seen in this image, all “China-men"—have a diminished status on WoW: manyAmerican players fail to see them as “people." As Cartman notes in the Emmy Award-winning “Make Love Not Warcraft" episode of South Park,

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Asians don't count as other players, or as people. In this sense, they are nonplayer characters, or NPCs, which are typically artificial intelligence modules, or AIs, that give players information or missions. NPCs can also refer to the game's monsters, or “mobs." This characterization of Asian farmers as either automated service workers or monsters fits neatly into their racialization within Ni Hao, for the video depicts them as all owning exactly the same avatar, a man wearing a red and gold outfit and wieldinga pickax. This dehumanization of the Asian player—they “all look the same" because they all are the same—is evocative of earlier conceptions of Asian laborers as interchangeable and replaceable.

As Robert Lee (1999) notes, language, food, and hair were all privileged sites of boundary crises set up between Chinese and whites in minstrel shows in nineteenth-century America. Player-produced videos such as Ni Hao mock Chinese food ways, implying that Chinese eat dogs and cats. This is a nonsensical accusation, since there are no dogs or cats in WoW, nor any egg rolls. But, of course, neither are there real-world races in WoW, until they are actively produced and shaped in visual form by fans' media production. In addition, the exoticism and supposed unintelligibility of the language is highlighted by the use of a spikylooking, irregular font that spells out the title Ni Hao. The management of race within the virtual worlds of MMOs is reflective of earlier methods of managing race in U.S. history, but it also offers some. new twists. Though gold farming is not a form of labor that is exclusively practiced by Chinese player-workers, it has become racialized, partly through the dissemination of texts such as these. This has been well documented in other MMOs as well; as Steinkuehler (2006) notes, the player class of female dwarfwas tainted by its association with Chinese gold farmers, and thus became an unplayable class because female dwarfs became racialized as Chinese.11

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Avatarial Capital: The Disenfranchisement of Player-Workers and the Neoliberal Discourse of Colorblindness in MMOs

Nick Yee (2006) has written eloquently about the resonances between anti-Chinese rhetoric during the gold rush and some of WoW's anti-Chinese farmer discourses, resulting in a lively discussion on his blog that contains in miniature some key neoliberal positions on race. His excellent article, “Yi Shan Guan," yielded over a hundred comments from readers as of October30, 2007, many of whom dismissed anti-Chinese gold farmer racism as not really racism, but rather a result of legitimate anger over player-workers ruining other players’ immersion in the game as well as creating in-game inflation. These positions are mirrored in the lively discussion forums for Ni Hao on warcraftmovies.com. After one poster left a comment saying simply "racist," another replied:

g2 lv love people who consider things racism when in actuallity they are rascist for making the diffrence in their head, if every one just veiwed every one else as “people" theyd be no problem belvie i rated alrdy also.

Another remarked:

what's rasict, no we are only one race the human race, now if there where another species and he was making fun of them, then it would be rasict no he is only being anticultural, not rascist. anyway good job with the song Nyhm but the movie wasn't as good.

This last comment is an excellent example of the liberal position, an ideology that eschews outright racism based on bodily characteristics, favoring instead a "liberal democratic state where people of color could enjoy equal rights and upward mo bility" (Lee 1999: 145) if they could succeed in assimilating to American culture As Lee writes, the triumph of liberalism and the racial logic of the Cold Wa produced an “emergent discourse of race in which cultural difference replace biological difference as the new determinant ofsocial outcomes"(1999: 145) Asian Americans became the “model minority" after the Cold War because they could be pointed to as successfully assimilated to American capitalism but also, a Lee points out, because they were not black.

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Neoliberalism is premised on the notion of colorblindness. The first com ment cited above advocates exactly this position: racism is not the result of ar individual's bad behavior, but rather the result of the person who identifies it for they are they ones who see race, or “make the difference in their head. As is also evident in the readers' comments to Yee's essay, posters are eager to prove that their hatred of Chinese gold farmers isn't racist, is not a prejudice against "biological difference," but is rather a dislike of unsuccessful assimilatior to American social norms, what the poster calls the “anticultural" position. Thé problem with gold farmers isn't that they are Chinese; it is that they“act Chinese." The characterization of American WoW player behavior as self-sufficient law-abiding, noncommercial, and properly social is belied by their role as gol buyers within WoW's server economy: the purchasingof virtual property lie: within the bounds of American gaming behavior while selling it does not. Bu this is only the case if one is Chinese—IGE is not targeted in racialized terms if at all. The notion that it is permissible to condemn someone for how they behave rather than what they are is a technique for avoiding charges of racism for culture is seen as something that can be changed, hopefully through assimilation to American norms, but raceis not. However, asYoshino (2006) notes, this neoliberal position results in a compulsion to cover one's identity, to behave in ways that are normatively colorless or sexless, in order to take one's unchangeable race, gender, or sexualitó out of play.

Ni Hao is one of many examples of machinima thatdemonstrate that anti-Asian racism is both common within the game and that the problems with the server economy are attributed to Chinese gold farmers. Judging from its popularity on YouTube, this is a widespread belief. It also employs an unusual technique to stress the equivalence between Chinese culture and gold farming: one episode depicts a WoW avatar entering a Chinese restaurant whose image is nor taken from in-game, but rather is a photographic image featuring several Chinese people eating. The next scene depicts a Chinese fortune cookie opening up to reveal the words “Buy gold" as the title proclaims “it's another gold farm ad from Beijing." This insertion of photographs of actual people within the world of WoW machinima violates a generic convention—generally, machinima makers stick to in-game images. This exceptional moment invokes images of real Chinese people to make clear the connection between their racialized bodies and gold farmers in-game. WoW allows players to hide their race during game play, and an enormous amount of player energy goes into outing gold farmers. Though, as noted earlier, WoW and other MMOs are populated by as many legitimate or leisure players who are Asian as those who are European or American, it is clear that being profiled as Korean or a “China-man” in-game can be dangerous. Ni Hao’s introduction asks, “I see you there, could you be the farmer?"It is crucial to note that online anonymity makes it impossible to verify whether a player is Chinese and whether he or she is, by extension, a gold farmer. Many WoW forums and video clips such as “Chronicles of a Gold Farmer"address this problem by sharing strategies for profilingChinese worker players.

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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.

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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

Conclusion

The 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.

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Notes

national boundaries have been reproduced in cyberspace, and the location of the servers that generate these virtual environments are used to demarcate the borders. These respondents claim that if Chinese players experience discrimination on US servers, it is because they have crossed the border into territory where they do not belong and are not welcome.

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9 The phrase “player-produced machimina”is in some sense a redundantone, since machinima is from its inception an amateur form; however, it is becoming an increasingly necessary distinction as professional media producers appropriate it. South Park's “Make Love Not Warfare" was coproduced with Blizzard Entertainment, and Toyota has aired a 2007commercial made in the same way. See http://www.machinima.com/ film/view&id=23588. In an example of media synergy, South Park capitalized on the success and popularity of the episode by bundling a World of Warcraft trial game card along with the DVD box set of its 2008 season.

10 See Dibbell for an eloquent account of “Min," a highly skilled player-worker who took great pride in being his raiding party's “tank," a “"heavily armed warrior character who. . . is the linchpin of any raid" (2007: 41). Min's raiding team would take “any customer"into a dangerous dungeon, where a lower-level player could never survive alone and let them pick up the valuable items dropped there—thus acting like virtual African shikaris or Nepalese porters. Min greatly enjoyed these raids but was eventually forced to quit themand take up farming again when they proved insufficiently profitable.

11 As Steinkuehler writes, because adena farmers often play female dwarves, they

have become the most despised class of character throughout the game.... Girl dwarfs are now reviled by many players, systematically harassed, and unable to find anyone that willallow them to hunt in their groups. . . it seemsas if awhole new form of virtual racism has emerged, with an in-game character class unreflectively substituted for unacknowledged (and largely unexamined) real-world difference between China and America.(2006: 208)

12 Interestingly, gender is not part of this profiling practice. This may have to do with the depiction of Chinese farmers as male in both the popular press and in photo essays depicting MMO game players and their avatars. See Cooper (2007).

13 As Castells (2000: 60) writes of the Fourth World, “the rise of informationalism at the turn of the millennium is intertwined with rising inequality and social exclusion throughout the world.

14 University of California, San Diego, doctoral candidate Ge Jin's distributive filmmaking project on the lives of Chinese player-workers in MMOs can be viewed at www. chinesegoldfarmers.com. His films, which can also be viewed on YouTube, contain documentary footage of Chinese player-workers laboring in gaming workshops in Shanghai. His interviews with them make it clear that these player-workers are well aware of how despised they are by U.S. and European players, and that they feel a sense of inferiority that is articulated to their racial and ethnic identity.

References

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