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# Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory
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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 enabled users to adopt virtual personae or avatars across the lines of race, gender, and sexuality in order to experience pleasure, their contemporary counterparts, MMOs, put users to work to create profit. Earlier online environments such as LambdaMOO were usually run by volunteers and academic institutions such as Xerox PARC at Stanford and were accessed free of charge by users. Though these virtual worlds are the direct ancestors of MMORPGs, there is at least one major diference: MMORPGs are heavily capitalized entertainment media and are rapidly converging with other digital forms, such as cinema, online commerce, and advertising (Mortensen 2006). Cross-media franchises such as the Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and Star Wars have all produced successful digital games as well as action figures, spin-of novels, and other oficially licensed media products. MUDs and MOOs employed narratives and imagery from licensed media such as science fiction novels and films but were not owned or developed for profit. However, as Jenkins (2006) notes, participatory media technologies like the Internet, digital video, and video game engines have permitted fans to broadcast their own, unoficial, unlicensed additions to these franchises, thus changing the political economy of media irrevocably and for the better. The Internet takes pride of place among 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 efects 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 determining identity online through virtual profiling.7
MUDs—virtual communities based upon gift economies that were distinguished by their key diferences 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).
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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 diferentially 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 ofered by the game’s protocols, they are far from anonymous spaces for avatars. Race is indeed managed in MMOs, both by the afordances 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 as legitimate 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 tropes from earlier anti-Asian discourse. Though players cannot detect other players’ races by looking at their physical bodies, they constantly produce a taxonomy 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 of the body (Hammonds 2006; Chun 2007).
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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 of ‘Chinese 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 synthetic worlds removes from the social calculus all the unfortunate efects 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)
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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 WoW users 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 for its 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 on game 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.
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Machinima as User-Generated Racial Narrative: The Media Campaign against Chinese Player-Workers in WoW
Machinima is a 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 universes in 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 permit increased 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.
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 reenvisioned 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 created for 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 explains poignantly, can’t aford to enjoy the game that they have mastered, much less produce media to add to it.10
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Not surprisingly, there are two tiers of this type of user production—Blizzard frequently solicits screen shots, holds art contests, and showcases user-produced machinima that become part of the oficial canon of the game. However, there is extensive trafic 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 oficial World of Warcraft game is a gated community that users pay to enter, 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 oficial 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 a 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).
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 and Spock that the franchise would never permit or endorse, a closer look at user-produced content from warcraftmovies.com reveals a contraction and retrenchment of concepts of gender, race, and nation rather than their enlargement.
Warcraftmovies.com, the most popular World of Warcraft machinima web-site, 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 it has 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:
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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’s making 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 the full gamut of racial stereotypes, including a Chinese flag as the background for a video scene of a sexy singing female troll in a scanty outfit flanked by the human farmers wielding pickaxes and 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: many American 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 wielding a 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. Playerproduced 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 spiky-looking, 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 ofers 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 dwarf was 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 October 30, 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 difrence 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 mobility” (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 War produced an “emergent discourse of race in which cultural diference replaced biological diference as the new determinant of social 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, as Lee points out, because they were not black.
Neoliberalism is premised on the notion of colorblindness. The first comment cited above advocates exactly this position: racism is not the result of an 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 diference 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 diference,” but is rather a dislike of unsuccessful assimilation to American social norms, what the poster calls the “anticultural” position. The 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-suficient, law-abiding, noncommercial, and properly social is belied by their role as gold buyers within WoW’s server economy: the purchasing of virtual property lies within the bounds of American gaming behavior while selling it does not. But 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 race is not. However, as Yoshino (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 sexuality out of play.
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