Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/15295030902860252
ISSN1529-5036
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoAbstract This article examines the racialization of informational labor in machinima about Chinese player workers in the massively multiplayer online role playing game World of Warcraft. Such fan-produced video content extends the representational space of the game and produces overtly racist narrative space to attach to a narrative that, while carefully avoiding explicit references to racism or racial conflict in our world, is premised upon a racial war in an imaginary world—the World of Azeroth. This profiling activity is part of a larger biometric turn initiated by digital culture's informationalization of the body and illustrates the problematics of informationalized capitalism. 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 obtain avatarial self-possession. 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. As long as Asian "farmers" are figured as unwanted guest workers within the culture of MMOs, user-produced extensions of MMO-space like 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. Keywords: World of WarcraftRaceLaborTransnationalityAsia Acknowledgements Robert Brookey and two anonymous reviewers helped immensely with revision and deserve many thanks as well 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; though these are technically in violation of the EULA, 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 Taylor, T. L. 2006. Does WoW change everything? How a PvP server, multinational player base, and surveillance mod scene cause me pause. Games and Culture, 1(4): 318–337. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) in-game language chauvinism and the informal enforcement of "English only" chat in WoW, even by players of non-Anglophone nationalities. 4. Castronova (2005 Castronova, E. 2005. Synthetic worlds: The business and culture of online games, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]) writes that avatar use in MMO's creates new bodies for users, and that they "erase, at a stroke, every contribution to human inequality that stems from body differences" (p. 258). 5. See Chan (2006 Chan , D. 2006 . Negotiating Intra-Asian games networks: On cultural proximity, East Asian games design, and Chinese farmers . Fibreculture 8 . Retrieved May 28, 2008, from http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue8/issue8_chan.html [Google Scholar]), as well as the January 2008 special issue of Games and Culture on Asia, volume 3, number 1, in particular Hjorth's (2008 Hjorth, L. 2008. Games@Neo-regionalism: Locating gaming in the Asia-Pacific. Games and Culture, 3(1): 3–12. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) introductory essay "Games@Neo-Regionalism: Locating Gaming in the Asia-Pacific." 6. See (Aneesh, 2006 Aneesh, A. 2006. Virtual migration: The programming of globalization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 7. See Nakamura (2002 Nakamura, L. 2002. Cybertypes: Race, identity, and ethnicity on the Internet, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), in particular Chapter 2, "Head Hunting on the Internet: Identity Tourism, Avatars, and Racial Passing in Textual and Graphic Chatspaces." 8. 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 Jenkins (2006 Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide, New York: New York University Press. [Google Scholar]) and Lowood (2006 Lowood, H. 2006. Storyline, dance/music, or PvP? Game movies and community players in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 1(4): 362–382. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 9. See Chan (2006 Chan , D. 2006 . Negotiating Intra-Asian games networks: On cultural proximity, East Asian games design, and Chinese farmers . Fibreculture 8 . Retrieved May 28, 2008, from http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue8/issue8_chan.html [Google Scholar]) and Yee (2006 Yee , N. 2006 . Yi-Shan-Guan . The Daedalus Project, 4–1 . Retrieved May 28, 2008, from http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001493.php [Google Scholar]). 10. As Brookey (2007 Brookey , R. A. 2007 , November . Racism and nationalism in cyberspace: Comments on farming in MMORPGS . Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Chicago . [Google Scholar]) 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. 11. 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 co-produced 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 most recent season. 12. See Dibbell (2007 Dibbell , J. 2007 , June 17 ). The life of the Chinese gold farmer . The New York Times Magazine , 36 – 41 . [Google Scholar]) for an eloquent account of "Min," a highly skilled worker player who took great pride in being his raiding party's "tank," a "heavily armed warrior character who … is the linchpin of any raid" (p. 41). His 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 insufficiently profitable. 13. As she 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 difference between China and America. (p. 208) 14. 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 Cooper, R. 2007. Alter ego: Avatars and their creators, London: Chris Boot. [Google Scholar]). 15. See also Balkin & Noveck (2006 Balkin, J. M. and Noveck, B. S. 2006. The state of play: law, games, and virtual worlds, New York: New York University Press. [Google Scholar]). 16. As Castells (2000 Castells , M. 2000 . End of millennium (2nd ed.) . Oxford : Blackwell . [Google Scholar]) 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" (p. 68). 17. UC San Diego doctoral candidate Ge Jin's distributive filmmaking project on the lives of Chinese worker players in MMOs can be viewed at http://www.chinesegoldfarmers.com. His films, which can also be viewed on YouTube, contain documentary footage of Chinese worker players laboring in "gaming workshops" in Shanghai. His interviews with them make it clear that these worker players are well aware of how despised they are by American and European players, and that they feel a sense of "inferiority" that is articulated to their racial and ethnic identity. Additional informationNotes on contributorsLisa NakamuraLisa Nakamura is a Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She would like to thank Matthew Crain, Mimi Nguyen, Nancy Abelman, Scott Van Woudenberg, Jeffrey and Shaowen Bardzell, and audiences at the 11th Annual Biennial for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College's Ammerman Center, the Association of Internet Researchers, 2007, the UIUC Asian American Studies Program, and the Global Communication Center at the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale for their help with this essay
Referência(s)