Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

Ni Hao is one of many examples of machinima that demonstrate 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 not 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 “Chinaman” 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 profiling Chinese worker players.

Ni Hao depicts the killing of gold farmers in-game amid a miseen-scène of 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 realtime 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 a virtual sweatshop. Playerworkers 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 a form 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 diferent 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.

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 avatarial 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 synthetic worlds that it is barely noticed.” This emotional investment in avatars is relatively little studied in MMOs, and certainly not from the perspective of player-workers. Filiciak’s (2003) psychoanalytically informed scholarship on avatar creation and ownership posits an intimate relation between a player’s reallife bodily identity and his or her avatarial body. He writes, citing Reid, “avatars ‘are 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 selfdefined rather than pre-ordained” (Filiciak 2003: 91). However, while Chinese gold farmers create and deploy avatars, they are unable to accumulate avatarial capital since their jobs consist in selling level-ups as well as gold and equipment. Thus, the notion that avatars are manifestations of the self when applied to gold farmers neatly sums up the problematics of informationalized capitalism. The privilege of avatarial self-possession is, like capital itself, unevenly distributed across geopolitical borders. Though emotional investment is an unavoidable side efect of avatar usage, the luxury of either hard or soft capital accumulation is denied player-workers in virtual worlds. If late capitalism is characterized by the requirement for subjects to be possessive individuals, to make claims to citizenship based on ownership of 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 that it mirrors the dispossession of information workers in the Fourth Worlds engendered 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 representative of the WoW population as a whole (though it must be said that, while YouTube and warcraftmovies.com are full of machinima or trophy videos of farmer-killing replete with racist imagery, there are no profarmer user-produced machinima to be seen).¹⁴ Machimina is a breakthrough medium because it difers from previous mass forms of media or performance; it is the product of individual users. However, 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 nagrand where u cant get witout fly mount is nice for 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 of MMOs, 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.

Notes

1 Air date October 4, 2006, Comedy Central Network.

2 Players of WoW regularly use an arsenal of “mods” and “add-ons” that are circulated on player boards online. Although these are technically in violation of the end-user license agreement, many players consider the game unplayable without them, especially at the terminal or “end game” levels. Blizzard turns a blind eye to this, and in fact tacitly condones it by posting technical updates referring to the impact of add-ons on game performance.

3 See T. L. Taylor (2006), in-game language chauvinism and the informal enforcement of English-only chat in WoW, even by players of non-Anglophone nationalities.

4 Castronova writes that avatar use in MMOs creates new bodies for users, and that they “erase, at a stroke, every contribution to human inequality that stems from body diferences” (2005: 258).

5 See Chan (2006) as well as the January 2008 special issue of Games and Culture on Asia, volume 3, number 1, in particular Hjorth’s (2008) introductory essay, “Games@Neo-Regionalism: Locating Gaming in the Asia-Pacific.”

6 See Nakamura (2002), in particular chapter 2, “Head Hunting on the Internet: Identity Tourism, Avatars, and Racial Passing in Textual and Graphic Chatspaces.”

7 Machinima has been credited with enormous potential as a means by which users can create their own cinematic texts and is often seen as an ideal means for fans to make new, socially progressive meanings out of old texts. See Lowood (2006) and Jenkins (2006).

8 As Brookey (2007) argues:

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.

9 The phrase “player-produced machimina” is in some sense a redundant one, 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 2007 commercial 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 them and take up farming again when they proved insuficiently 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 will allow them to hunt in their groups … it seems as if a whole new form of virtual racism has emerged, with an in-game character class unreflectively substituted for unacknowledged (and largely unexamined) real-world diference 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 playerworkers 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

PART IV
Organized Networks in an Age of
Vulnerable Publics