The Daedalus Project

Slideshow

In the last issue, I had asked players to submit screenshots that showed interesting things they had encountered or just simply showed what it is they enjoy about MMOs. Here are some of the most interesting images I received. Below each image, I have included the description that was given by the person who submitted it. You can submit images of your own on the last page of this article.

The guild Ancient Vengeance pre-raid time in the Cazic Thule instance. We're casting our buffs and getting ready for the 7-8 hour long haul. (Yes, that's how long that raid can last.)

Korina Noctiferre

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we were bored one day and started thinking about Redridge and how the whole area is basically farmland. We got to thinking farther and decided that it would be a blast to get dressed in Blue coveralls and russet hats and go smack lowbies with fishing poles, brooms, shovels, blacksmith's hammers, and pitchforks. This turned into a weekly event with many people going and gearing up when the higher lvl's started showing up to defend the town. It eventually got so out of hand that one guy put Fiery enchant (worth about 50 gold) on his shovel. Anyway heres a group photo of us in the process of gathering for the raid.

Farmers Unite raid

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My guild mates find it interesting that I take screenshots every time I level up. To me, it's like a birthday party; you take pictures to capture the moment.

Aeiou of Aurora Spirits

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Running into the cathedral in Stormwind (WoW) I nearly collided with a guild initiation ceremony. The initiates had come to a point in their guild career when they had earnt the right to a guild tabbard. After watching a moment, I completed my quest and left quietly, thinking that I didn't want to disturb them. However it had a great impact on me - I thought I was privaliged to have seen such RP in action, 6 or 7 people meeting in a virtual cathedral to proudly accept their guild tabbard and congratulate the new members. Coming from a D&D background, I've always liked the RP side of the game, but this has inspired me to role play more. Very moving.

Blayse

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This is very important to me because it's my new guild breaking the castle of my old guild. I left because of their corrupt leader... and winning this castle from them means a lot to me.

Lucca Ashtear

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An invasion in Ironforge of the Argent Dawn RP realm by players from the Blackrock PvP realm. The Blackrock players created a swarm of naked Gnome characters to "protest" stability issues with their server (it was down at the time.) Many of the players spammed channels such as Yell and General with messages either ridiculing roleplayers, espousing their dislike for Blizzard, or with pure nonsense; others quietly hopped around the city. The invading players even created a guild called BLACKROCK EXILES which nearly all of the players involved joined. Some time during the event a train of protesters formed and I decided to follow them around "in costume" and silently observe. A large number of native Argent Dawn players attempted to "fight back" by submitting complaints to GMs, and many Warlocks attempted to summon Infernals to kill the invading Gnomes. Eventually the Blackrock server came back online and the protesters began to disappear.

Sean

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This is my favorite City of Villains character, the Desperate Housewife. She is the technology mastermind class and has a number of robots she controls plus a secondary powerset of poison. This all plays well into her backstory, which is that she tinkered with her household appliances and cleaning products to develop her terrible powers.

Lisa

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I'm looking to gather some more visual data points of all the interesting social phenomema happening in MMOs. If you have any screenshots that fall into the following categories, please consider submitting them. Any images you submit will be credited to you if they are ever displayed on The Daedalus Project.

In particular, I am looking for the following kinds of images:

- Player Gatherings: protests, demonstrations, vigils, etc.
- Guild / Avatar Portraits: images of your guild (posed or not), or well-composed screenshots of your avatar
- Raid / PvP Combat: well-composed screenshots that show the chaos and intensity of raids or PvP combat.
- Strange Bugs: like the recent WoW Plague
- Others: any other screenshots that you think are interesting but don't fall into a category above.

Please send your screenshot as a JPG file. Screenshots that are well-composed and where the interface elements are hidden are much appreciated. Please note that there is a file size limit of 800k per image.

Email: (optional)

Name: (this is how I will credit the image)

Give a brief description of this image. Tell me more if there's significant background information that I will need to understand what's going on.

Select file:


It may take a moment to upload larger files. Please be patient.

Fun and Fatigue

How much fun are MMO players really having with their current game? And which players are the most likely to quit because they’re bored? Four questions in a recent survey explored these issues:

- How much fun are you having with your current MMO?
- How likely are you to quit in the next month?
- Would you sell your account for $200?
- How excited are you about experiencing content (skills, spells, dungeons, etc.) you haven’t seen yet?

With regards to the amount of fun with the current MMO, there were no age differences. Players of all ages were having comparable levels of self-reported fun. There was a mild gender differences. Female players reported having more fun overall than male players. A multiple regression with player motivations as predictors found a weak model (r-squared = .06) where the Socializing motivation emerged as the best predictor of current fun. The more a player chats and socializes in an MMO, the more likely they report having fun.

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Female players reported a lower likelihood of quitting in the next month. There was also a mild age correlation. Younger players reported that they were more likely to quit (r = -.11). An ANCOVA showed that the age and gender differences were significant independent of each other. In other words, it’s not the case that the age difference is only driven by the gender difference, or vice versa.

A multiple regression with player motivations as predictors found a weak model (r-squared = .04) where again the Socializing motivation emerged as the strongest predictor. The more players chat and socialize, the lower their likelihood of quitting.

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Male players are more willing to sell their accounts. There was also a moderate correlation with age. Younger players are more willing to sell their accounts (r = .20). An ANCOVA showed that the age and gender differences were significant independent of each other. In other words, it’s not the case that the age difference is only driven by the gender difference, or vice versa.

A multiple regression with player motivations as predictors found a weak model (r-squared = .09) where the Competition and Relationship motivations emerged as the strongest predictors. The more competitive a player is, the more likely they will sell their account. On the other hand, the more a player enjoys forming relationships in an MMO, the less likely they will sell their account.

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Male and female players are equally excited about getting to content they haven’t seen yet. There was a mild correlation with age. Younger players were slightly more likely to be excited about inexperienced content (r = -.11). A multiple regression with player motivations as predictors found a weak model (r-squared = .13) where the Discovery, Advancement and Socializing motivations emerged as the strongest predictors. The more a player enjoys exploration, socializing or leveling, the more excited they are about unexperienced content.

Prior Gaming Experiences

For how many MMO players is their current MMO their first real video gaming experience, or is it more likely the case that MMO players have extensive prior experiences with video games? Players were asked about their prior experiences with other genres of video games as well as how often they played video games before their current MMO.

There were sharp gender differences with responses to both questions. Male players are more likely to have been avid gamers prior to their current MMO, while female players are more likely to have had less prior experience with video games in general.

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When asked to indicate their favorite gaming genre prior to playing MMOs, most players choose role-playing games (RPG), first-person shooters (FPS), and real-time strategy games (RTS). Male players were more likely to prefer FPS and RTS gamers, while female players were more likely to prefer RPG, city building simulations (SIM) and card or parlor games (CARD). In the graph below, the response options for driving and flight simulations, adventure games, and puzzle games received few responses and are omitted for clarity.

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Respondents were also asked about their experiences with MUDs/MOOs as well as table-top role-playing games.

Of all respondents (N = 1911), 54% have had experiences with MUDs/MOOs. Among those who have had MUD/MOO experiences, most of those experiences were rated as brief. Female players were more likely to have had more extensive experiences with MUDs/MOOs.

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With regards to table-top role-playing games, 75% of respondents replied that they have had experiences with them. Among those who have had experiences with table-top RPGs, male players were more likely to have had extensive experiences with table-top RPGs.

Experience with table-top RPGs is most likely among those who are currently between 29 - 35 of age - people who would have been teenagers in the 80s when D&D was popularized (and then demonized).

The overall pattern that emerges is that even though male players have slightly more experience with video gaming than female players, overall, current MMO players seem to have a fairly substantial background in games that were the predecessors of MMOs - i.e., table-top RPGs and MUDs/MOOs. In other words, it seems that MMOs were more of a logical next-step for many current MMO gamers than a truly new kind of activity.

Playing with Someone (Part 2)

In the last issue, we saw that many players play with someone they know in RL on a regular basis - whether this is a family member, a romantic partner, or a friend. There’s a related issue that we couldn’t tease out from that last dataset. Specifically, it would help to know how many MMO players are in romantic relationships to begin with, and of those, how many are playing with their romantic partners. In a sense, this is the inverse of the question that was addressed in the previous article. It also helps us make more sense of the percentage of players who play with a romantic partner. For example, we know that about 25% of players play with a romantic partner. But of all the players who have romantic partners to begin with, do a low or high percentage of them actually play with their romantic partner? And we could ask the same question for parents who play with their children. For both these questions, we need to know the base rates for players who have romantic partners or children.

These are the questions that a newer dataset has addressed. About 80% of female players and 60% of male players are in a romantic relationship. On a tangential note, this gives rise to an interesting “singles” imbalance. If we assume an 85:15 gender ratio and the noted singles rate, then for every single woman in an MMO, there are 10 single men.

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Respondents were then asked whether their romantic partner plays the MMO they do, and if so, whether they usually play together or separately. Of the female players who are in a romantic relationship, about 50% of their romantic partners play with them on a regular basis. Of the male players who are in a romantic relationship, only about 20% of their romantic partners play with them on a regular basis. The most striking difference is that the romantic partners of female players are about three times more likely to play the MMO they play than the romantic partners of male players.

A large part of what we’re seeing here is probably the “introduction” effect. Because a much higher percentage of female players are introduced to the game via their romantic partner, this increases the likelihood that a female player is playing with their romantic partner. The overall story is that not only are female players more likely to be in romantic relationships to begin with, but they’re very likely to be playing with their romantic partner.

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The differences for players who play with their children was less pronounced. About 28% of female players and 20% of male players have at least one child. Of the male players who have children, about 11% play the game with them. For the female players, this was about 18%. It’s interesting to note that the children of female players are more likely to be playing an MMO. I don’t have a good explanation for this though. Any thoughts?

The Labor of Fun

The following is an essay that has just appeared in the founding issue of the journal, Games and Culture. It is an essay on the blurring boundaries of work and play in online games. The final manuscript version is linked below:

The Labor of Fun

Citation:
Yee, N. (2006). The labor of fun: How video games blur the boundaries of work and play. Games and Culture, 1, 68-71.

A New Disorder is Born

I want to start off by saying that it is clear that sometimes gamers play too much and their game playing impacts their work and relationships in negative ways. There are many many anecdotes by friends and family of gamers as well as gamers themselves who describe how extreme game-playing can become. On the other hand, making this observation in no way necessitates creating a new psychological disorder with which to stigmatize games and gamers. It is this distinction and the gap between those two notions that I want to explore in this article.

A New Disorder is Born

The American Psychiatry Association does not officially recognize Internet Addiction Disorder (even though that term has appeared in academic papers quite often recently). There are several reasons why. The foundational work behind the concept of Internet Addiction Disorder derives from survey studies using a set of criteria developed by Kimberley Young (1996).

1. Do you feel preoccupied with the Internet (think about previous on-line activity or anticipate next on-line session)?
2. Do you feel the need to use the Internet with increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction?
3. Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop Internet use?
4. Do you feel restless, moody, depressed, or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop Internet use?
5. Do you stay on-line longer than originally intended?
6. Have you jeopardized or risked the loss of significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of the Internet?
7. Have you lied to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet?
8. Do you use the Internet as a way of escaping from problems or of relieving a dysphoric mood (e.g., feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression)?

A person who answers “yes” to five or more of the above questions is considered to have Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). Thus, in the original survey work, it was found that some people fell into this criteria and thus a new disorder was born. The primary objection to this methodology of creating psychological disorders is that for any given media form, hobby, or activity, it is probably true that some percentage of people will fall into this criteria of “addiction”. The only difference is that researchers choose only certain activities to investigate for addiction disorders. And thus, we have IAD and we are asked to believe that people never watch TV too much, never play golf too much, and never work too much. The Internet is dangerous whereas other activities are wholesome and good. But if any and every activity can have its very own addiction disorder, it’s not clear that such a notion is meaningful. On the other hand, picking and choosing which activities we deem “addictive” seems more and more arbitrary.

Another problem is that it conflates all kinds of things that people do online. In this model, shopping online, chatting online, looking for information online, and playing games online are all the same thing. It were as if any normal activity suddenly becomes potentially deviant and dangerous when it happens online. And by fudging the important differences among those activities in terms of motivations and social interactions, these survey studies typically manage to sidestep the most important question of all - what causes people to become addicted to the Internet to begin with? What is it about the Internet that is so dangerous?

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Call It What It Is

Young has proposed a model for IAD known as the ACE model - Accessibility, Control, and Excitement. She argues that these three aspects of Internet use encourage addictions. One problem is that most forms of media have ACE components. For example, TVs are accessible, remotes give us a great deal of control, and there’s plenty of sex, gore, and action on TV. The same is true of non-media activities such as rock climbing or golf. Now it is true that living close to a golf course increases accessibility and thus the likelihood of developing an intense interest in golf, but using that as an argument for creating an addiction disorder for golf seems strange. It is equally strange when it is done for the IAD.

More importantly, the ACE model leaves out one very important fact. Not everyone gets “addicted”. In fact, I know many first-person shooter gamers who find MMORPGs to be the most boring games in the world (and vice versa). If IAD were solely caused by aspects of the technology, then either everyone or no one would get addicted. In other words, whatever is causing IAD has to involve something more than just pointing fingers at the technology itself. It’s got to have something to do with the individual as well.

The emphasis on the media creates the illusion that the blame belongs to the media itself. It portrays the Internet as a predator that every person can fall prey to. But the more we look, the less this seems to be the case. Being addicted to one thing makes you more likely to be addicted to other things. People who are depressed are more likely to spend too much time online. People who are diagnosed as online gaming addicts typically have other problems - such as depression or low self-esteem. Recent studies show that one out of ten teenagers is depressed. The overall picture is quite clear, internet addiction may just be an expression of other well-understood problems such as depression. In other words, it may have more to do with the people than it does with the technology.

For a long time, we've known that people who are severely depressed may do harmful things to themselves, but whether we create a whole new set of "addictions" to explain it (and shift the blame from the person to the technology) or whether we call it as it is - depression, low self-esteem, etc. - is very much a social decision that is tied to the paranoia and mindset of the world we live in. If IAD were really about the person rather than the technology, then taking away the technology alone won’t solve the problem. And if the technology isn’t really the problem, then why create a disorder that stigmatizes a technology and its users?

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The 7 o’clock News

If someone dies while watching TV, that is not newsworthy. If someone dies on a golf course, you can bet that you won’t see it on the 7 o’clock news. But every time someone dies when they’re playing online games, it will be all over the news. We treat the Internet and online gaming as if no other media forms or leisure activities exist. On average, people watch 25-30 hours of TV a week, yet we seldom question whether people watch too much TV these days. But is that because TV has become a socially acceptable “addiction” that everyone is guilty of?

In a more recent paper, Young devotes several pages to the online affair as a common dangerous consequence of internet “addiction" (2004 - need academic access). It were as if affairs are somehow one of the defining reasons why the Internet is dangerous. But it is clear that affairs happen in the real world too. People have affairs at work, while playing golf, and while shopping at the mall. Young states that “at an alarming rate, once long-term and stable marriages are destroyed by a cyberaffair”. I would like to point out that long-term and stable marriages are destroyed by affairs, period. Just because they are more likely to occur now over the internet rather than over the phone or over written letters is simply a shift in communication modality. Besides, do we really know how many marriages are ruined by affairs carried out via traditional means (telephone, mail, water coolers at work, the gym, etc.)? Do we know whether people are simply having more affairs regardless of communication modality? To argue that the internet is to blame for cyberaffairs is akin to blaming kleptomania on shopping malls.

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Fun

Do spouses of golfers never feel estranged from their loved ones leaving them to go to a golf course every weekend? Do they never worry that a romantic affair may spark on the golf course? Do they never complain that their romantic partner plays too much golf? Or what about the investment banker who grinds 60-80 hour weeks and has no time to be with their family? Why do we stigmatize and pathologize certain activities when other similar activities are unquestioned?

Society is in the habit of legislating what we should and should not have fun doing, even when it comes to love and the bedroom. Not so long ago, homosexuality was diagnosed as a pathology. And sodomy laws were and are an attempt to criminalize sex among men. The variation in what constitutes wholesome enjoyment across cultures shows that certain kinds of fun can be deemed pathological, but that these decisions are inherently tied to the local culture and belief system. Labeling certain activities as addictive and potentially pathological is society’s way of marking what it deems to be unacceptable forms of fun.

We live in strange times. Watching TV for almost 30 hours a week in passive lethargy next to family members who barely talk to each other is considered to be socially acceptable. But if you play an interactive game instead of just watch a passive display for that same amount of time, and if you actually talk with people around the world instead of ignoring the people around you, then you may have the chance of developing a psychological disorder. It is ironic that apathy and laziness will never be questioned as psychological disorders, but a bit of passion can get you in deep trouble. Personally, I think apathy and laziness are far bigger problems.

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Ending Note

People can develop dependencies on many substances and activities. Creating new psychological disorders for every substance and activity seems like overkill if behavioral dependencies are more tied to the person rather than the specific activity that the dependency tethers to. And singling out only a few activities as potentially addictive seems disingenuous and arbitrary. Indeed, why do we not just have a general diagnosis called “behavioral dependency” rather than picking and choosing which behaviors are addictive? Language shapes how we think about technology use as well as our role as technology users. The notion that "video games are addictive" frames us as the helpless victims, whereas the notion of “developing a dependency” frames the excessive behavior as a function of the individual’s state of mind.

By calling it “online gaming addiction”, the media encourages us to think that we’re dealing with a very new problem. But if behavioral dependency is a general problem that tethers to many different kinds of activities, then “online gaming addiction” is actually a very well-understood problem because clinicians have treated depression and anxiety for a long time. If people can develop behavioral dependencies on any activity, then why are we surprised that some people develop dependencies on online games? Why is it news? I contend it is mostly because we’ve always used the word “addiction” to mark out deviant social activities in a way that treats them as unique predators, as emergent problems which we’ve never seen before. But once we shift our framework to one of general behavioral dependencies, then we have to abandon this view. What we’re seeing is actually a very old problem.

See Also (more recent articles listed first):

- The Trouble with "Addiction"
- A Q&A with a Therapist
- Problematic Usage
- The Seduction of Achievement
- Addiction
- Understanding MMORPG Addiction

Yi-Shan-Guan

Note: As I'm reading over the comments here and from referrer links, I'm noticing that a lot of people are under the mistaken impression that I'm mainly arguing that most gold farmers are not Chinese and that it's this aspect of the stereotype that I'm writing about. To decrease the amount of local comments based on this misreading, I want to make it clear that I do not make this argument in the article. I in fact point out, based on a variety of sources, that many gold farmers do appear to be based in China on page 11.

There’s been a lot of talk about gold farmers and RMT (real money transactions) lately. The part that both fascinates and frustrates me is not the gold farming itself, but the stories we’re telling about what’s going on. We tell stories to make sense of the world. And these stories use shared experiences to make sense of novel events, but they inevitably emphasize certain elements while sidelining other equally meaningful elements. In this article, I want to describe the story that we usually tell and hear about gold farmers as well as re-readings and alternatives to that story. My goal is not to justify what gold farmers do, but rather to complicate the typical story we tell about gold farming.

What’s the Problem?

Gold farmers are typically seen as problematic for several reasons. The following player articulates the key problems using his own experiences in the game.

Thus, gold farmers are perceived to create two main problems. First, they harass normal players. And secondly, they ruin the economy over time.

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If it ain’t English, it’s gotta be Chinese

While news articles that have dealt with gold farmers have implicated workers in Romania, Tijuana, and Indonesia, the belief that the majority of, if not all, gold farmers are Chinese is quite pervasive. The stereotype surfaces in many forum posts. On the official forums for World of Warcraft this past summer, one thread was titled “Chinese people make me mad”. Another thread countered with the title “Stop calling people Chinese farmers”. Posts such as the following reflected the general sentiment:

And even players who are hesitant at applying the racial stereotype are very aware of its existence.

Other players make the link more explicit with imagery. Of course, this stereotype holds not just for World of Warcraft but for other MMOs as well. For example, Constance Steinkuehler’s presentation of Lineage 2 showed these same sentiments among Lineage 2 players.

The extensive application of this stereotype becomes quite striking in certain cases. For example, the following French-Canadian player recounts an encounter in the game.

Other players explained their own perspectives in the following way.

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The Pestilence Trope

With the Chinese stereotype firmly in place, a familiar trope comes into play - the association between Asia and diseases. The Asian flu pandemic of 1957, and the more recent Asian bird flu crisis and SARS crisis all tie diseases to Asia repeatedly in a way that are seldom tied to Western countries and regions (except perhaps the British mad cow outbreaks). Margaret Cho highlights this trope with her parody of SARS:

But this trope plays out on forums and player narratives as well. In the “Stop calling people Chinese farmers” thread, one reply stated:

Extermination

The pestilence trope then brings into forefront notions of eradication and extermination. Depending on the game and the game mechanics, this is typically a combination of systematic harassment and slaughter:

In 2004, a fan video titled “Farm the Farmers Day” showed actual footage as players tracked down and massacred players they suspected to be adena farmers (see Constance’s paper for more on this).

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Yi-Shan-Guan

At this point, I want to briefly segue to a different story that paves the way for multiple re-readings of the story typically told about gold farmers.

This story sounds incredibly familiar, but the year is 1870 and I am, of course, talking about the genesis of the Chinese laundry shops (“yi-shan-guan”) during and after the California Gold Rush. During the Gold Rush, dirty laundry was routinely shipped to Hong Kong (among other Asian cities) partly because laundry was seen as demeaning domestic work that burly beardy miners should not perform. The turn-around time for this process was 4 months. Immigrant Chinese workers took advantage of this opportunity. The Chinese laundry business, as it bloomed, was suddenly seem as a threat by Americans. Laws were enacted in 1870 that tried to cripple Chinese laundry businesses (as well as preventing the Chinese from gaining US citizenship - which effectively barred them from voting). Documented mob lynching and pillaging of Chinatowns occurred in 1871 and 1877 (See “The Chinese in America” by Iris Chang, 2003, for more on this topic).

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Historical Vermin and Extermination

And the tropes of pestilence and eradication are particularly chilling because there are historical parallels of this exact rhetoric against the Chinese. During the late 1800s, as Chinese immigrants were blamed for many problems ranging from unemployment to the economic depression itself, they were portrayed as vermin that lived on rats and thus were a sub-human race that should be exterminated to protect the American way of life.

The images below are taken from Iris Chang's book, "The Chinese in America", and are depictions of the Chinese taken from periodicals published during the late 1800s.

And indeed, there are well-documented mob lynching and massacres of Chinese immigrants. These were particularly prevalent in the period known as the “Great Driving Out”.

Of course, the story of prejudice against the Chinese during the 1800s is far more complex and nuanced than stemming from just the laundry workers. And, of course, the parallel that I’m trying to draw isn’t perfect. But the juxtaposition of this historical narrative with the much more recent narrative we typically tell about “Chinese” gold farmers reveals its disturbing metaphors and framings. The contemporary narrative starts to feel too much like the historical one - Chinese immigrant workers being harassed and murdered by Westerners who feel they alone can arbitrate what constitutes acceptable labor.

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Double Standards

But let’s leave the historical parallel behind for now and focus more on gold farmers in MMOs. Because of the presumed nationality of gold farmers, some players use an interesting litmus test on probable farmers.

In other words, it is not the behavior per se that is the damning piece of evidence as to whether a player is a gold farmer, but rather, whether they are fluent in the English language. Other players are understandably troubled by this double standard.

One player elaborates and points out that blame is always easier to place on “other people”.

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Stay Out Of My Country

Having players from other cultures in the same virtual environment might have been seen as a positive thing. After all, this is presumably why we have study abroad programs and why we attempt to teach foreign languages. In the discussion about gold farmers and language fluencies in MMOs however, responses on the official WoW forums suggest otherwise.

Even in the most positive light, there is something xenophobic about these statements, but more importantly, it’s hard to not interpret them as the digital variation of “go back to your own country”. And beneath all that is the eerie undertone of “this land belongs to us and we prefer to keep it that way” - a digital country club where language fluency is the membership fee. In other words, even in a land of Orcs and Night Elves, some people simply don’t belong in Azeroth.

Rethinking Fluency

The language fluency issue is also strange because many forum posts are dedicated to illustrating that players who do speak perfect English can also be just as annoying and infuriating in the game. For example, in a thread titled “Whats the STUPIDEST whisper u ever got” on the WoW forums, we can find many examples of these:

And several players described requests such as the following, all done in perfect English:

Finally, I offer you this player’s experience which I think hits at the heart of the issue of language fluency:

But my point is that the language fluency issue is ironic given that players who do speak English can say far more offensive and annoying things.

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Rethinking The Economy

There is a common belief that gold farming ruins virtual economies over time. We saw this sentiment earlier in the article and it is a fairly widespread belief.

The problem is that the impact of these secondary markets on the in-game markets of MMOs is not well understood. Moreover, it is not clear that they would have the same impact across MMOs with different economic mechanics. Some players in fact argue that gold farming may have a positive effect on their game economies:

A recent discussion over at Terra Nova also highlights that classical definitions and measures of inflation and deflation may not make sense for talking about certain game economies. Thus, it is oftentimes hard to tease out the impact of gold farming from the naturally-occurring process of inflation due to the never-ending influx of normal gold. And there are reasons to believe that gold farming may in fact help stabilize some game economies.

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Who’s Out Of Sight?

But our retellings so far of the gold farming narrative have left out two crucial players from the picture. The first are the gold buyers.

Like the historical parallel, what we really have is a service industry of immigrant Chinese workers being driven by a market composed almost entirely of Westerners. The secondary market cannot function without demand. And as the above player correctly points out, it is Westerners who drive the demand in the market. As one poster on a Final Fantasy XI forum mentions:

Another group of Western players left out of the picture are the middlemen who buy gold from the gold farming operations and then resell it at a significant profit. Typically, it is on one of these portals where actual virtual currency is bought. As one forum poster put it bluntly:

The actual gold farmers are the losers in this market in several regards. These workers are harassed as they try to accumulate gold and then are fleeced by the middlemen. IGE makes publicly available their buy and sell rates. To give you a sense of where most of the profits go, on WoW’s Suramar server, they will buy 1000 gold for 25 USD. They sell that same 1000 gold for 66 USD. So for every dollar spent on buying virtual gold, only 37 cents of it goes to the actual gold farmers. The gold farming industry is not only driven by Western demand, but most of its profits in fact also go to Westerners.

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A Valuable Service?

Even as systematic harassment of gold farmers appears widespread, it is also clear that some players feel that gold farmers in fact are offering a valuable service.

In a recent survey, 20% of respondents indicated that they have bought virtual gold online. Thus, even though many players make use of this service, gold farmers remain a stigmatized group.

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The Reality of Gold Farming

Over the past 6 months, several reports of who these gold farmers are and what they do has emerged and the overall picture is quite consistent. Some of these reports rely on extensive conversations with actual gold farmers in the game. Others are based on documentation of actual gold farms in Asia and interviews with managers and workers.

New York Times - Ogre to Slay? Outsource it to China
Game Guides Online - Secrets of Massively Multiplayer Farming
The Observer - They play games for 10 hours - and earn £2.80 in a 'virtual sweatshop'
1UP - Wage Slaves
FFXI Forum - Confessions of a Gil-Seller

The overall picture seems to be that many gold farms are based in China (although there are a few in other countries). Most of these workers are students in their late teens or early 20s. They work for a boss who owns the machines and software and need to accumulate virtual currency on a daily quota system. Sometimes, multiple workers share the same account and cannibalistic behavior emerges where one worker will sell the character’s equipment to make the quota, thereby putting their “partner” at a disadvantage. While some use the term “sweatshop” to describe these gold farming operations, most of these establishments would probably be considered normal or well-furnished in local standards. Gold farming pays a livable wage. As the following manager implies, most other employment options for people who do gold farming involves hard labor.

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Harsh World

Players who have interacted with gold farmers in a non-confrontational manner typically have very different views of gold farmers. Understanding why gold farmers do what they do changes how they interact with them.

One player ties together many of the threads in this article and helps reframe the reality of gold farming.

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Harsh World (continued)

The theme of immigrant worker being harassed by Westerners who feel they own the land and can arbitrate what constitutes as acceptable labor is one that is hard to escape. Another player draws out why this is so frustrating for her.

Let me end this section with a narrative that hints at the many ambiguities in the interactions between these foreign workers and the “native” players.

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Equal Treatment

The most interesting narratives I received were ones where players had befriended these foreign players in spite of the language barrier. In many of these cases, Western and Eastern players had learned to work together to their mutual benefit. For example, in World of Warcraft, a few instance raids now accept known gold farmers given the right looting arrangement (master loot and then random roll) because some gold farmers are recognized as decent players of their class.

Others have found out that it is possible to work with instead of against the gold farmers.

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Friends Don’t Let Friends Buy Gold

It is unfortunate that gold farmers are the most visible tip of a much larger iceberg - consisting of buyers as well as middlemen. As we’ve seen, most of the profit from gold farming does not go to the actual gold farmers. However, they bear the brunt of daily harassment and slaughter. One player had a more progressive perspective on curbing gold farming.

Currently, MMOs do not allow players to police and govern themselves in a practical way regarding gold farming, but imagine if this were possible. If it is true that most players are against the practice, then by giving them a practical means to detect these transactions, self-regulation might emerge. For example, if a character’s financial transaction history is made public, then it becomes possible for that character’s friends or guildmates to detect gold buying behavior. Very few characters would have good reason to get a sudden 300 gold increase from the mail. The problem right now is that gold buying is invisible and thus these players have no accountability. But once that behavior is made public, then accountability emerges. Other players will question that sudden windfall in the mail. Guild members and friends will exert a social pressure where it was impossible to exert before.

If we are indeed serious about dampening the gold market, the best solution isn’t tormenting the suppliers, it is in curbing the demand itself. Currently, there are no social disincentives to avoid buying gold because that behavior is entirely hidden. Developers can reveal that behavior and create accountability by showing what is already tracked by the server. Why insist on tormenting foreign workers when Western players are equally culpable?

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Hearthglen - A Short Story

My goal here wasn’t to justify gold farming. It is true that some gold farmers employ a range of cutthroat and deplorable tactics to drive normal players from certain areas in MMOs. On the other hand, the typical racialized story that is told about pestilence and extermination is quite chilling and leaves out important aspects of what’s going on. The racialized story is a very comfortable one for us to tell because it frames us as the victims, as the arbitrators of justice, and as the unquestioned owners of the land. It is a story that sustains our privileged status. But gold farming isn’t simply about foreign workers who harass Western players and deserve to be killed. My goal here was to show that it’s a little more complicated than that.

Let me end with a story of my own. Recently in WoW, I ran into an Undead Mage in Hearthglen who frost-AE farmed the non-elites (literally 10-12 at a time). As a frost mage myself (on the Alliance side), I attempted the same trick. The first time I tried, the Undead Mage pulled elites into my Blizzard range in an attempt to kill me. I escaped. The second time I tried, a stealthed Undead Rogue turned his PvP flag on as he walked into my Blizzard, thus setting off my PvP flag. Another Undead Rogue then backstabbed me. Using a variety of ice blocks, blinks, and ice barriers, I somehow managed to survive that as well.

As I recovered and pondered how to exact revenge against these 3 gold farmers, I realized that in my mind I had instinctively cast them as Chinese gold farmers. And in return, they had probably instinctively cast me as the white leisure player. And in this mesh of historical and contemporary racial narratives where we all suddenly seemed to be playing out our expected racial roles, I found myself pondering what it really meant to be Chinese-American … because somehow, in this land of Elves and Orcs, I suddenly felt more Chinese than I usually do in the real world.

Discussion Links:

Here are some interesting external links I've found that bring up new points or discuss the points made here.

Are farmers necessary? An intelligent and surpringly flame-free post on the WoW forums.

EvE in China. A thread in the EvE China forums where Chinese players react to Chinese gold farmers. Unfortunately in simplified Chinese, but Babelfish comes in handy.

The Second Opium War: An interesting post on Scott Jennings' blog.

The English Test: An article in TG Daily on the use of English competency tests in instance raid groups.

Chinese Nannies: A slightly tangential but apropos and provocative piece in the BBC news about the demand for Chinese-speaking nannies in New York.

How a Gold Farm Works: A post on Terra Nova about american gold farmers which gives great detail of how farming works on this side of the Pacific.

Joystiq Blog: A brief entry on Joystiq about anti-chinese discrimination in WoW that drew a lot of comments. As a sidenote, I think they picked up this idea from WoW Insider which is based on this article (note the same cropped graphic - I link to the full image on page 2). Unfortunately, Joystiq did not mention the source of all this.

The Daedalus Project is Three Years Old :)

I thought I would have been able to get this issue out sooner, but I picked up a copy of Civ 4. If you think WoW is dangerous, Civ 4 is lethal. The "just one more turn" hook is amazing and they revamped some very important game mechanics and got them right this time. So this issue came out a little later because of that just in time for the 3 year mark.

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