DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

A mediatic approach to the sphere of operations would restore the technical and economic components—the realia—of affective dispensations. Media platforms are not merely technologies in the sense of being objects or machines or practices that have an objective character; rather, they are social formations and, more particularly, gender and racial formations. For example, the geopolitical emergence and role of photography during the violent racialization processes of slavery and colonialism tells us not simply about the visual sculpting of racial formations but about the coevolution of two ostensibly separate technologies for graphing people(s) by their external appearances. Which is to say that, as surely as the camera and the photograph have had a role in the transmission and productive (for capital) development of the various racisms, intrinsic to the camera and the photograph is the history of racial exploitation. This is part of the Program that Flusser does not see

Just as an interest in labor should force us to rethink the logistics of media platforms and see them as technologies formed in the struggle between labor and capital and thus by and for the expropriation of labor, we must understand that the flesh, in Hortense Spillers's sense of the word, is now the surface of inscription, the medium in the last instance, for all transmissions. Which is to say that for the 2 billion people who live on two dollars or less per day, it is their labor of survival that bears the burden of the messages considered to be worthy of transmission.3º The medium is the flesh of the world. Dialectically, the flesh is the other side of the vanishing mediator called money and, hence, necessarily, the other side of the digital.

A rigorous mediological approach would also attend closely to the politics of the utterance. Is it really possible to talk anymore as if race, class, nation, and gender were issues that were marginal or have been surpassed? Even though it is fair to say that the meaning of these terms has shifted—moreover that the very forms of racial and class oppression are being reimagined and repurposed to fit the emergent exigencies of domination—these terms remain at the very least the names for technologies of violence and expropriation that are brought to bear in full force upon, to use an old-fashioned term, the masses. The fragmentary character of the multitudes, such that each of us has the multitude within, and the monadic character of geopolitics, such that each of us bears the signature of the globopolitical jetzeit, cannot license the emergence of a purportedly valueneutral, degree-zero, commonsensical, highly civilized speaking subject that a/ effects a deafness to the call of the enslaved, the savaged, the raped, and the expropriated even as it claims to listen. If the enormity of the crimes that make us what we are, if the unspeakable violence and unendurable pain of history does not haunt our words, then we have said too much and not enough. This invocation of the myriad agonies (past and present) against the pat presentation of the iterations of capital logic (cynically or ironically self-conscious or not) is not a mere poetic gesture; it is the informing call to which liberatory work must be of fered in response. Answering this spectral calling would endeavor to reanimate a the sedimented dead labor that is the condition of possibility for the living labo of this day’s utterances; these calls as the eternal return of the oppressed are th very principle of organization (a subterranean genealogy) that might inform ou cognitive-linguistic labor such that it is not merely the productive reproductio of yesterday's unheralded violence.

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Notes

1 For example, “In his acceptance speech of the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the advancemer of human rights on March 9,2006Habermas said that the use of the Internet has bot broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Intern can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the sam time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens th achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonómous an dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate o the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price w pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized acce to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power t create a focus."" (http://ejournalist.com.au/v6n2/ubayasiri622.pdf, editor's note)

4 Vilém Flusser, “The Codified World," in Writings, ed. Andreas Strohl, trans. Erik Eis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 37–8.

6 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Ma millan,1983).

7 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Matthews (Londo Reaktion Books, 2000), 27.

8 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

Of course, critical awareness can still be awakened so as to make the photograp transparent. Then the photograph of Lebanon becomes transparent as regards i newspaper program and the program behind it belonging to the political part programming the newspaper. Then the photograph of the toothbrush becomes transparent as regards the program of the advertising agency and the program behind it belonging to the toothbrush industry. And the powers of “imperialism," “Zionism," “terrorism"” and “tooth-decay”are revealed as concepts contained within these programs. But this critical exercise does not necessarily lead to a disenchantment of the images. That is, it can itself have been put under a magic spell, thereby becoming “functional." The cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School is an example of such a second-order paganism: Behind the images it uncovers secret, super-human powers at work (e.g. capitalism) that have maliciously created all these programs insteadof taking for granted that the programming proceeds in a mindless automatic fashion (italics mine). Athoroughly disconcerting process in which, behind the ghosts that have been exorcized, more and more new ones are summoned up. (63-4).

184 The Violence of Participation

Aren't we to conclude from this that capitalism is not to be considered among the programs and much less the operating system of the current juncture of computations that currently constitute the clutch of the species?

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29Brian Holmes, Escape the Overcode, http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/20 escape-the-overcode/. Additionally, Wlad Godzich,in an important essay called"Lan guage, Images, and the Postmodern Predicament," charts the increasing alienation of th subject of language over the long durée of European modernism, linking its existentia crisis to the decreasing purchase of language on reality orchestrated by the rise c mechanically reproducible images. And Nicholas Mirzoeff finds that the term visualit is first employed by Thomas Carlyle in “On Heroes and Hero Worship" to describ the perspective ofthe conservative hero who will savethe republicfrom the risin power of the hordes. The suggestion is that the technomediated perceptions that ar in the contemporary at once unavoidable and constitutive—perceptions that we nov identify under the rubric ofvisuality—continue to be tingedwith this reactionar perceptual modality, in short, a suppression of the masses. Put another way, we coul say that the contemporary formation of visuality continues to conspire against th progressive forces of history. Here I would also include my own work on the cinemati mode of production as the emergence of a technology for the industrialization of visua perception and the transformation of the form of both work and the wage.

For more on this issue of inscription on the flesh of the global-social body, see my essa "Paying Attention,"in Cabinet 24(New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007). Th essay was republished for Documenta XII. (Documenta is the largest contemporary ai exhibition in Europe—similar to the Venice Biennial but curated by a single curato http://d13.documenta.de/)

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11

DON'T HATE THE PLAYER, HATE THE GAME

The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft

Lisa Nakamura

Cartman: "Iam the mightiest dwarf in all of Azeroth!" Kyle: “Wow, look at all these people playing right now." Cartman: “Yeah, it's bullcrap. I bet half of these people are Koreans." South Park,Season 10, Episode 8,"Make Love Not Warcraft"1

Where did all the doggies and kitty cats go
Since the gold farmers started to show
Don't want to know what'sinthe 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 affairs that is actually the norm in MMOs.2 As Mia Consalvo (2007) argues, it makes much less sense to see cheating within games as a weakness ofgame 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.

Though Consalvo (2007) stresses the extremely subjective ways that MMO players define cheating, asserting that “a debate exists around the definition of cheating and whether it actually hurts other players [and] players themselves see little common ground in what constitutes cheating" (Consalvo2007: 150), real-money trading—or buying and sellingin-game propertyfor realmoney—is widely considered the worst, more morally reprehensible form of cheating. The practice of gold farming, or selling in-game currency to players for real money, usually through resellers such as the International Gaming Exchange (IGE) or eBay, is especially disliked. Leisure players have been joined by player-workers from poorer nations such as China and Korea, who are often subject to oppression as both a raciolinguistic mínority and as undesirable underclassed social bodies in the context of game play and game culture.3 These “farmers," as other players dismissively dub them, produce and sell virtual goods such as weapons, garments, animals, and even their own leveled-up avatars or virtual bodies to other players for real-world money. As Consalvo (2007 164) writes, the “gill-buying practice is viscerally despised by some players."

Constance Steinkuehler's (2006)analysis of Lineage II, a KoreanMMO, discovered this to be true as well and, more importantly, uncovered some of the ways in which the condemnation of virtual currency buying is far exceeded by a visceral hatred of gold sellers or farmers. This hatred is strongly articulated to race and ethnicity: many (though by no means all) gold farmers are Chinese, and there is a decidedly anti-Asian flavor to many player protests against Chinese gold farmers. As Steinkuehler notes, hatred of gold farmers has given rise to polls querying players on North American servers: “Is it OK to Hate Chinese Players?" (32% of players responded yes; the majority, 39%, replied, "I don't hate China, just what they stand for in L2"; and 10% checked “I am CN and you should mind yourself, you racist pig"). Though she notes “calling someone ‘Chinese' is à general insult that seems aimed more at one's style of play than one's real-world ethnicity" (Steinkuehler 2006: 200), the construction of Chinese identity in MMOs as abject, undesirable, and socially contaminated racializes the culture of online games, a culture that scholars such as Castronova (2005) have claimed are unique (and valuable) because they are exempt from real-world problems such as racism, classism, “looksism," and other types of social inequality.4 Though, as T. L. Taylor (2006) notes, MMOs are distinguished by their “enormous potential in a fairly divisive world," the “fact that people play with each other across regions and often countries"as often as not results in ethnic and racial chauvinism: “as a tag the conflation of Chinese with gold farmer has seemed to come all too easy and now transcends any particular game" (Taylor 2006: 321). Robert Brookey (2007) expands upon this claim; in his analysis of gaming blogs, he discovered “overt racist attitudes" towardChinesefarmers; most importantly, that “some players, who harbor negative feelings toward Chinese farmers, do not believe that these feelings denote racial discrimination." Thus, although it is the case that players cannot see each others bodies while playing, specific forms of gamic labor, such as gold farming and selling, as well as specific styles of play, have become racialized as Chinese, producing new forms of networked racism that are particularly easy for players to disavow.

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Unlike the Internet itself, MMOs have always been a global medium, with many games originating in Asia.⁵ Korea has been a major player in the industry from its beginning, but Asian players are numerous evenin U.S.-run MMOs such as Blizzard's WoW; in 2008, the number of simultaneous players on Chinese WoW servers exceeded 1 million, the most that have ever been recorded in Europe or the United States (“Blizzard” 2008). Thus, although gold farmers are typecast as Chinese, most Asian players are leisure players, not player-workers. WoWsells Chinese, European, Japanese, and U.S. versions of its game software and also organizes its players into groups once they are signed on. MMOs support thousands, sometimes millions, of players from all over the world simultaneously in a live environment; therefore, to make the game playable and pleasurable and take pressure off of resources and space, players sign up to play on a specific “shard"or “server"when they create their user accounts. These servers are divided by region and language to facilitate efficient connections and handshaking as well as to promote social discourse between players who speak different languages, but users can choose to play on any server they wish. Blizzard disables virtual currency transfers between servers, which means that each server contains its own economy. Thus, players who engage in real-money trading can be found on every server—MMO virtual property resellers such as IGE offer level-ups, gold, and other property on every server in WoW.

Like the biblical poor, in the world of MMOs, gold farmers are and will probably always be with us. Perhaps because most digital game scholars are players themselves, the economics of gold farming are usually discussed in the scholarly literature in terms of their negative impact upon the world of leisure players, who buy gold because they lack the time to earn virtual capital through “grinding or performing the repetitive and tedious tasks that are the basis ofmost MMOs.

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The Violence of Participation

However, as Toby Miller (2006) has advocated, digital games scholars need to tend to its medium's political economy, and to “follow the money"to its less gla orous, less virtual places, such as games console and PC manufacturing plants, g farmer sweatshops, and precious metals reclamation sites—in short, to China. while many players are fairly unaware that their computer hardware is born a dies, or is recycled, in China, they are exceptionally aware of the national, racial, a linguistic identity of gold farmers. Gold farmers are reviled player-workers who position in the gamic economy resembles that of other immigrant groups w cross national borders to work, but, unlike other types of “migrant" workers, th labors are offshore, and thus invisible—they are “virtual migrants" (see Anee 2006). However, user-generated content in and around MMOs actively visu izes this process. Machinima fan-produced video production racializes this revil form of gameplay as “Oriental" in ways that hail earlier visual media such as mu videos and minstrel shows. Gold farming, a burgeoning gray-market labor practi in a disliked and semi-illegal industry that, as Consalvo (2007) notes, may so outstrip the primary games market as a source of revenue, has become racializ as Asian—specifically as Chinese. The impact this racialization has had upon t medium and culture of gaming is tremendous and echoes earlier examples of o line community such as MUDs (multiplayer real-time virtual world) and MO (text-based online virtual reality system), which also encouraged the developme of racialized personae in a supposedly race-free medium.6

A Short History of Racial Identity in Virtual Worlds: From Public to For-Profit

While early text-only online social environments such as MUDs and MOOs en bled users to adopt virtual personae or avatars across the lines of race, gend and sexuality in order to experience pleasure, their contemporary counterpar MMOs, put users to work to create profit. Earlier online environments such LambdaMOO were usually run by volunteers and academic institutions such Xerox PARC at Stanford andwere accessed free of charge by users. Though the virtual worlds are the direct ancestors of MMORPGs, there is at least one maj difference: MMORPGs are heavily capitalized entertainment media and are ra idly converging with other digital forms, such as cinema, online commerce, ar advertising (Mortensen 2006). Cross-media franchises such as the Lord of the Rin Star Trek, and Star Wars have all producedsuccessful digital games as well as a tion figures, spin-off novels, and other officially licensed media products. MUI and MOOs employed narratives and imagery from licensed media such as scien fiction novels and films but were not owned or developed for profit. However, Jenkins (2006) notes, participatory media technologies like the Internet, digit video, and video game engines have permitted fans to broadcast their own, uno ficial, unlicensed additions to these franchises, thus changing the political econon of media irrevocably and for the better. The Internet takes pride of place amor these technologies; it is the distribution channel that has permitted fans to broadcast their work for minimal cost and with maximum impact. The mass adoption of the Internet in recent years has led to both an increase in user production and the increased licensing of digital media products, creating a delicate balance between media industries' desire to control their products and fans' desires to contribute to them. While many scholars have noted the democratic, empowering effects of participatory media upon media for users, it can also provide fans with a powerful vector for distributing racializing discourses that reflect the concerns of an online culture obsessed with determiningidentity online through virtual profiling.7

190

MUDs—virtual communities based upon gift economies that were distinguished by their key differences from the real world of capital, labor, and profit— have given way to for-profit virtual worlds that increasingly dominate the media landscape. This has created an increasingly polarized social environment; one divided into leisure players and player-workers, virtual property buyers and laborer/ sellers, and Asians and non-Asians. Asian “farmers" or virtual capital laborers have a significant cultural and social impact on MMOs. Though not all farmers, or for-profit workers, are Asian by any means, the image of the farmer has come to include race as part of the package. This racialization of the player-worker in online social spaces is actively constructed by WoW fans, who have produced an extensive body of writing and digital cinema that cybertypes Asian farmers as unwanted, illegal, and antisocial workers (Nakamura 2002).

In an essay on the social lives of guilds in WoW, Dmitri Williams (2006: 358) asks, “How is race being managed within the anonymity of avatar space?" While Castronova (2005) and Julian Dibbell (2006) have produced excellent book-length treatments of digital economies in online gaming spaces, there is little scholarship on the way that the rapidly expanding economies of MMORPGs are creating differentially racialized profiles, images, and behaviors (see Chan 2006; Yee 2006) While WoW and other MMOs do permit users to choose their own avatars within the range offered by the game's protocols, they are far from anonómous spaces for avatars. Race is indeed managed in MMOs, both by the affordances or rules of the game and by the game's players. While others have noted that the game narrative is structured around the notion of racial conflict between distinct races that players must choose, my focus here is upon the racializations that players bring to the game (Gotanda 2004). Player resentment against Asian player-workers results in a continual process of profiling other avatars to determine their status aslegitimate leisure players or as unwanted farmers. Player class (as Yee 2005 notes, rogues and hunter class avatars are often chosen by player-workers because they can accumulate saleable property without needing to group with other players), language use or unwillingness to speak to other players, equipment type, and repetitive behaviors are noted by other players as evidence that a player is a Chinese gold farmer. Although these behaviors, player classes, uses of language, and equipment types are often employed by other leisure players, prejudice against farmers who are “ruining the game" results in the production of media texts that reproduce familiar

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192 The Violence of Participation

tropes from earlier anti-Asian discourse. Though players cannot detect other players’ races by looking at their physical bodies, they constantly produce a taxonomó of behaviors that create new racializations of avatar bodies in digital space. A player who speaks either Chinese or ungrammatical or broken English, who refuses to speak at all, or who repetitively harvests the game's prizes or “mobs" is often assumed to be a Chinese gold farmer and may be targeted for ill treatment or even virtual death. This profiling activity is the subject of the fan-produced machinima that I will discuss in this essay and is part of a larger biometric turn initiated by digital culture's informationalization ofthe body (Hammonds 2006; Chun 2007).

The Racialization of Player-Workers in MMOs

Gold farmers were a fairly mysterious, almost mythic group while Dibbell (2006) was conducting much of the research for Play Money; however, as Yee (2006) notes, since 2005, a surge of information about Chinese farmers has become available in the popular press as well as online. Gold farmers, or workers who are paid to “play online all day, every day, gathering artificial gold coins and other virtual loot that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash,” were the topic of a New York Times story on December 9, 2005 (Barboza 2005). They are also a major source of controversy and division among players. As Dibbell writes, the rise in WoW’s popularity gave rise to a flourishing economy in virtual loot, such that “millions now spoke knowledgeably of the plague ofChinese gold farmers"”(Dibbell 2006: 294).

In his New York Times magazine article, “The Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer," Dibbell (2007) writes quite sympathetically of their plight, noting that, while players complain vociferously about the way that gold selling has plagued or “ruined" the game economy,

as a matter of everyday practice, it is the farmers who catch it in the face... .In homemade World of Warcraft video clips that circulate on You-Tube or GameTrailers, with titles like “Chinese gold farmers must die’ and “Chinese farmer extermination," players document their farmer-killing expeditions through that same Timbermaw-ridden patch of WoW in which Min does his farming—a place so popular with farmers that Western players sometimes call it China Town. (Dibbell 2007: 40).

Their position as virtual service workers mimics that of illegal immigrants and other low-end workers in service economies in the global South. They are routinely racially profiled and harassed by other players in MMORPGs, producing a climate of anti-Asian sentiment.

WoW and other virtual worlds have been touted for their democratic potential:

People entering a synthetic world can have, in principle, any body they desire. At a stroke, this feature of sónthetic worlds removes from the social calculus all the unfortunate effects that derive from the body...all without bearing some of the burdens that adhere to the Earth bodies we were born with. (Castronova 2005: 25–6)