Come On People, Look Alive!

When I logged into the role-playing server, I expected to be plunged into a medieval world where people called each other by titles and sincerely believed in the preservation of Azeroth’s security.  However, instead I bunch of apathetic players who actually found it strange when I played my part.  I do not understand why this had happened.  Blizzard created RP servers to give players a chance to really live out the lore of Warcraft.  This was supposed to be the true outlet for those who wanted to live out a fantasy world uninhibited and without fear of prejudice.

In my little mini experiment I logged onto a high population RP server as a paladin and beseeched my fellow “adventurers” to go on a quest or sell me their wares.  All I received was expressions of incredulity or indifference.  I don’t think this can be attributed for player who just couldn’t log onto to other servers, thus they came here.  Probably playing a role is just too much work.

One can speculate why this is happening.  Perhaps WoW has its draw in allowing player to pursue whatever adventure that fancied them.  RP would be to impose a set framework that forced the player to work within.  To bypass such limitations, players are abandoning the rules altogether.  The GMs are getting lax too in their enforcement.  The lack of enforcement coupled with apathy just spells doom for the RP servers.

This is sad.  As strange as RP may be sometimes, player apathy and maybe laziness, is destroying one of the avenues of play.  This is just unfair for those that want to experience the RP way of play.  Blizzard should revamp their patrol of RP servers and try to stimulate some creativity.  Otherwise if nothing is done, then the RP way of play shall be just an empty name.

-Tom

Racism

As Angy mentioned, I don’t believe that racism elicited by our Chinese gold selling was necessarily a consequence of our gold selling.  Instead, I think our blatant, persistent, and extremely agressive spamming in chinese was the reason for our harassment.  My theory was that people were extremely angry that we were filling chat and private messaging them, and latched on to our indecipherable Chinese as an outlet for their hate.  I think the racist responses had little or nothing to do with the fact that we were selling gold.  It seems more of an alienation of the “other,” a hatred and fear of foreigners rather than a hatred of gold farmers.  I propose to carry out two final experiments: the first is to do the exact same thing we did with Jinnongming (spamming in chat and spamming random individuals in Chinese in all caps), except with absolutely no reference to selling gold.  If this spamming elicits the same racist response, we’ll be well on our way to determining that WoW players are just xenophobic and don’t really care (or are extremely jaded at this point) about goldfarming.  In a second auxilliary experiment we should actually sell gold in plain (or broken) english, and try to elicit some sort of racist response/connection.  This, of course, would have to be our last experiment since selling gold is extremely illegal under Blizz’s terms and conditions.

-Max

Why Does It Come Down to This?

With the new direction our blog is going, we start delve deeper into sociological aspects of the WoW world.  We were first working within the frameworks of the game, providing a communication service that was actually utilized many times.  However, Blizzard has taken many steps that illustrate their plans for WoW.  The company has been trying to make its game more accessible to players over the years.  They have been lowering level requirements so that players can obtain their cool gear faster, such as lowering the requirement for a mount.  Their most recent patch allowed players to create both horde and alliance characters on the same server which noticeably reduced the amount of users willing to use our service.  Therefore we turned our experiment in a new direction.

As Angy’s mega posts have shown, there is much antipathy shown to gold farmers.  But our experiment, crude as it was, demonstrated a very interesting point.  Angy was basically trying to see if gold farming had cast a pall over Chinese players.  First we tried some friendly banter in pinyin (a Romanized way to pronounce Chinese), to see if we would garner a hostile response.  We received some actual Chinese from other players on the server, including some threats though.  We then tried to take it up a notch by speaking some innocent Chinese and adding some numbers that would suggest financial transaction.  This is when things got interesting.  We quickly received some threats and cruel remarks.

This experiment probably can’t allow us to draw causal conclusions, but it suggests that players are associating all Chinese communication will gold farming.  Players go into WoW to explore another world, separated from reality.  In this world, a player can shed the trappings of reality to do what they please.  It is an egregious crime to disrupt that norm.  Gold farming takes the worst part of reality and injects it into a fantastical world, bringing the illusion to a halt.  People then lash out at these poor people, who sometimes work in sweatshop conditions.  But the overall scary thing is that generalizations can now be immediately placed on certain groups in a fantastical game.

-Tom

More thoughts: Chinese Gold Farming and the Language Barrier(s).

All in all, the Chinese gold farming experiment was far more entertaining than our usual translation service. This experiment also plays with a language barrier; however, this time we were using a genuine language barrier. I was by and large surprised at the reaction that people had to us. If the complaint is that gold farmers spoil gameplay and facilitate cheating, then shouldn’t the reaction have more been along the reaction of, “Stop selling gold, you’re ruining the game for us”? Here the reaction was overwhelmingly racist in nature, and not even just anti-Chinese or anti-Korean – it was anti-Asian in general. People not only caricatured Chinese images, they also drew upon Japanese and Vietnamese imagery, and referenced everything from Pearl Harbor to genitalia size. Max speculates that this was because we went out of our way to emphasize the fact that we were Chinese, by typing in Pinyin, and hence the reaction to us was racist. Had we simply tried to sell gold in broken English (we tried to avoid selling gold overtly, since that would probably get us banned by Blizzard for real), would we have gotten a less racist response? I’m not entirely sure about that. I suspect that the concept of gold farming and race are rather inextricably conflated now.

However, this anecdotal evidence suggests that real world language barriers have a far more profound effect on hostility than do artificial constructs of race and language barriers, such as the one that Blizzard naturalizes in WoW. The translation service, while it does facilitate certain interfaction interactions such as dueling, is interesting to WoW players, but for the most part, players are largely uninterested in transcending the interfaction language barrier (I suspect that a dedicated amateur cryptographer probably could break the code if they wanted to, but no one does). Nor does the language barrier have such dire consequences on fomenting racism or hostility. It’s possible to cooperate with the other faction to do a quest if you really want to, and the speciesism found in WoW serves as a justification to kill other players on PvP servers, but the language barrier has little to do with that. Racism on WoW is not serious because it’s “just a game” and racism is an accepted part of the gameworld (the history of Azeroth as explained by Warcraft I, II, and III is violently racist) and so actions such as mooing at Taurenfeels like playacting (it is, after all, a role-playing game).

On the other hand, our usage of a real world language, just as unintelligible as Blizzard’s interfaction code to most WoW players, provoked a serious and immediate xenophobic response. While racism against blood elves or orcs might not extend into the real world, discrimination against real world races does extend into Azeroth, although this racism might take on a different guise (for example, the KKK might burn crosses on lawns, while WoW players spam “Chinese” gold farmers”). Real world languages fuel this racism because they add a layer of “otherness” that is long-established and evoke stereotypical images and responses, which the Blizzard cryptography cannot imitate.

It was suggested in class that perhaps people used racial slurs against us not as an actual xenophobic response but because racism is just simply a really effective way of expressing hate. This has some merit, since some of the epithets used against us were derogatory against other races (we were told to be “deported, like a Mexican”) or homophobic (we were frequently called a “faggot”), and were probably just ways of showing their ire against us. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that the response to us wasn’t actually racist in nature. It’s no accident that the immediate assumption from our language was “Chinese gold farmer” and the response provoked was strongly anti-Asian in sentiment, as opposed to anti-gold-farming.

- Angy

Chapter 13: In which my grandmother gave me $13.50 over Paypal, and Keepers of the Kode have their first run-in with Blizzard

This took a little while to write and post, sorry. On Wednesday, in addition to usually running our translation service, we decided to run a little social experiment, especially in light of our reading of Nakamura. We made a character (a human female warlock) tnamed “Jinnongming”, which is literally Chinese for “gold farmer”. We then went onto a normal server and commenced spamming. At first we just spoke in Pinyin (the transliteration of Chinese), talking about mostly bogus subjects not related to gold, farming, or gold farming, garnering little response (except for one character who responded to us in Japanese).

However, we then began a campaign of slightly more aggressive “advertising” and tried to see what kind of response we would elicit in the World of Warcraft. We were very careful to not actually be advertising gold; instead, we simply shrouded a few key words in pinying. Jinnongming began by announcing in city chat, “$13.50 RMB SHI SHEN ME, 1000G HEN PIAN YI”. So to the average non-Chinese speaking WoW, the only understandable parts of that phrase were “$13.50” and “1000G”; we hoped that this would be suspicious enough to start eliciting a response. A Chinese speaker, however, would know that our spam actually translates to, “What is $13.50, 1000G is very cheap”, so it was actually very innocuous. At first, the only response was being told to shut up; one guy even had us group with him specifically so he could tell us to shut up, and then promptly left the group.

We then modified our approach slightly to begin spamming people with whispers, since we weren’t getting very immediate results. Instantly, people began to complain that we were spamming them in whispers on the trade chat, and more experienced WoW players quickly identified us as a Chinese gold farmer for those who were confused by what we were saying. People also complained that we were speaking Chinese on an English server.

To be fair, most responses were mild (we were told to shut up and quit spamming, which I think was pretty justified, since we were going out of our way to be extremely irritating). A lot of people simply ignored us. We were, as expected, quickly reported, although we have yet to figure out if this was due to the fact that they suspected us of selling gold or simply spamming the trade chat. One guy even tried to see how dedicated we were as gold sellers and tried to take us up on our offer (we captured this snippet of conversation using WoWscribe, a chat log):

To Finklelaurn: WO DE WAI PO GEI WO $13.50, 1000G SHI DUO SHAO QIAN

Finklelaurn whispers: sure trade it to me now

To Finklelaurn: WO DE WAI PO GEI WO $13.50, 1000G SHI DUO SHAO QIAN www.baidu.com

To Finklelaurn: keepersofthekode.wordpress.com

*Name changed to protect privacy. “Baidu.com” is the Chinese equivalent of Google. We actually took this opportunity to attempt to generate some interest in our blog and experiment, but I’m not sure he took it very seriously. After this, however, we changed our message slightly to incorporate the word “paypal” in our message, so that it was clear we weren’t just going to give them the gold. (Our message was changed to “Wo de wai po yong paypal gei wo $13.50, 1000G shi duo shao qian”. This literally translates to, “My grandmother used Paypal to give me $13.50; how much is 1000 gold?” Later, we added on, “Wo zen me da dao Lvl 80”, to add suspicion to our message, when actually this just means, “How do I reach Level 80”?)

Figure 1. Jinnongming hard at work!

On the other hand, a few players reacted very negatively to our presence. It’s interesting that the people who chose to mock and complain about us were those who did not just simply ignore us; they definitely chose to keep us in their chat so they could spam us. Here are just a few examples,

Figure 2. Some people were very angry with us.

Sunday whispers: PING PONG NI SHO MEW MEW

Sunday whispers: PING PONG DING DANG NO MI HO

*Name changed to protect privacy.

For a little while, the trade chat was dominated by different players either complaining about us or insulting Jinnongming and Asian culture in general. I think it surprised us how quickly people went from lambasting Chinese people and stereotypes to a generalized anti-Asian sentiment. One player took it upon himself to write in the trade chat in Chingrish or stereotyped Chinese to mock us, starting with “Ni Hao Ping Pong”, which he later amended to “PING PONG MEW MEW SUSHI HO CHI MINH”, conflating a lot of Asian images and cultures. Another player called us a “Jap” on the public chat ((Tim’s outburst was along the lines of, “‘Jap’? That doesn’t even have anything to do with China!”). The conversation on the trade chat eventually evolved from degrading Asian culture, to discussing Asian food and then Mexican food; afterwards, most players lost interest. However, one extremely irritated player kept going:

Deathspear whispers: F*** U RICE FARMER

Deathspear whispers: N**** IMA CAP YO FISH FACED A** IF U DONT BACK THE F*** OFF

Deathspear whispers: IMA WO PING YO A** B****

Deathspear whispers: YO FISH FACED BETTER GET BACK TO MAKEN SUSHI B4 UR PPL STARVE U JAP A** WAR STARTED

Deathspear whispers: STARTER

Deathspear whispers: IL SHOVE MY CTRL ALT DEL UP YO A**

Deathspear whispers: THATS RIGHT B**** BE AFRAID

Deathspear whispers: F*** U 2 DICK THE SIZE OF A PENNY

Deathspear whispers: F*** U JAP

Deathspear whispers: NOW STFU JAP

*Name changed to protect privacy. Certain words censored to preserve some semblance of academic seriousness in this blog.

On the other hand, as close as I was to losing my faith in humanity (being Chinese, hearing all this really racist terminology, most of which I had not even heard of before, was pretty jarring, if amusing), at least one person took our side and actually reported the people lambasting us for racist comments:

Figure 3. Someone takes our side!

I have no idea if that ever actually had any effect or if anyone else was banned, but we certainly were:

Figure 4. Blizzard's response to us.

This was quite an exciting response on Blizzard’s part, terminating the experiment (most people had lost interest in us at this point anyways; I suspect most people had ignored us by that point). We have yet to find out what their justification was: for being obnoxious and spamming the chat and going out of our way to harass people, or because we presented as a Chinese gold farmer. The latter possibility is the more interesting one.

More later.

- Angy

Patch 3.2

Our translation service has been getting markedly less hits since patch 3.2.  In preparation for allowing characters to switch between PvE and PvP servers, Blizzard removed the rule that kept players from making both Horde and Alliance characters on the same PvP server.  This means that instead of using our service, players can just make a lvl1 character on the other faction and just whisper whoever they want to talk to.  Our service still has its place; it’s much much faster and more convenient to use us, and players can use us while still adventuring in the world or fighting in battlegrounds.  We modified our advertisement to reflect this, and to reinforce that our service is free (which people tend not to understand, often whisper things to us like “Or we could just make our own horde character for free…”).

So even though our service still has use and stills gets traffic, because of the decreased use we’re going to augment translation service with other experiments.

-Max

A Day Spent Horde-side

Today was the first time I’d actually sat down and managed the translation service for an extended period of time. Apparently just yesterday a new patch had been released that actually impacted our translation service somewhat. Blizzard now allows players to create both Horde and Alliance characters and play them on the same server. This changes our premise somewhat, since now we aren’t the only ones able to transcend the language barrier, as players can log off and log on as a different character in order to communicate across the language barrier (a lot of players told us, sometimes rudely, that our service is now obsolete with this new patch). On the contrary, however, I doubt this will change the service too much, since having two people manage two accounts allows for real time communication, which the patch doesn’t allow. Also, I think we still retain the niche as translators; one player remarked, “You guys must be really bored or something.” So I guess no one else is willing to sit there and translate for free while they could be playing.

I was advertising Horde-side today. No sooner had I started spamming the chat channel than people started asking questions. Only a few people actually acted on the instructions I gave in the advertisement (namely, to privately message us the name of the person they wanted to contact); most reacted first with incredulity (“How are you guys doing it?”). One of the first people I talked to, who was also more curious about the service than actually using it, was a character whom I’ll call Entor. We actually had a reasonably long chat that extended beyond a curt explanation of how the service worked. He talked about the fact that he actually did something similar before, by dual-boxing windows. I asked him how that went, and he told me that it usually wound up in people organizing very large fights against one another. Entor had some pretty interesting things to say about why he thought these very large vendettas were justified – namely, that people at one time or another were killed by members of the opposite faction, and have been using that ever since as justification for violence against the other side. He himself stated that he was willing to kill any “man, woman or child just because they’re Alliance”, especially if it would further a quest. That’s justification enough for him. Granted, he was saying it somewhat in jest, because it’s only a game (and also I’m taking everything he says with a grain of salt, since I don’t know MMORPGs well enough to know if this sentiment is widespread) but there’s something to be said about inter-faction racism created within the game. I guess I’ll have to see if other say the same.

On a lighter note, we mediated a very entertaining exchange (granted, with some profanity and topics I probably shouldn’t bring up in an academic blog) between some players who were clearly friends bantering through our service. I think they were Horde players who made Alliance accounts for the first time and were using us to talk to each other on the same channel. It’s nice to know that humor is another reason to use our translation service.

– Angy

Socializing?

Today was a slow day for the messaging service.  We conducted a three hour session and only carried a few conversations, but what little we had to say turned out to be very interesting.  Today’s session was marked by more profanity and disbelief.  Many did not have a message but just repeatedly reminded us that our idea was quite foolish.  I do not understand why people seem to be so antagonistic to things that they believe are beneath them.  These players used quite a few expletives to convey their opinions.

The other conversations that we facilitated were actually conversations between friends.  People who played opposite factions would have lighted hearted conversations.  People seemed to trust us, to whisper intimate messages back and forth faithfully.  It seemed as though player had forgotten that we were real people and thought of us as a mod to the game.  They seemed to not care that we were delivering private and sometimes embarrassing messages back and forth.

I am struck by how trusting some players are.  Those that used our service came in with the assumption that we would transcribe their messages without tampering.  The question that will really interest me is that, who will people actually trust if we were to tamper with their messages?  If we were to alter their messages, would they suspect that it was us or the other player?

I hope things will be more interesting when we try a busier server time!

-Tom

On Another Note: Virtual Agon

“There is also an aspect of ludus that, in my opinion, is explained by the presence of agon within it: that is, that it is strongly affected by fashion. The yo-yo, cup-and-ball, diabolo, and ring puzzle appear and disappear as if by magic and soon are replaced by other games. In parallel fashion, the vogues for amusements of a more intellectual nature are no less limited in time; e.g. the rebus, the anagram, the acrostic, and the charade have had their hours. It is probable that crossword puzzles and detective stories will run the same course. Such a phenomenon would be enigmatic if ludus were an individual amusement, as seems superficially to be the case. In reality, it is permeated with an atmosphere of competition. It only persists to the degree that the fervor of addicts transforms it into virtual agôn.”

-Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games.

When I think of my experiences playing World of Warcraft I find that they resonate quite strongly with Caillois’s above concept of “virtual agôn.”  I understand this concept of virtual agôn as a kind of competition with oneself, but one that is dependent on other people playing the game.  It’s the drive to self betterment (or in the case of MMOs, character betterment) for a kind of implicit competition: more comparing than competition.  The player enthralled by virtual agôn in a puzzle such as Sudoku knows that he will never “compete” against another Sudoku player in some sort of time trial, but he increases his abilities nonetheless, to know that if such a competition were to happen that he would come out victorious.  I find that this sort of comparison permeates the grinding experience in PvE in World of Warcraft.  A player raiding late-game dungeons wants to get better gear.  Why?  To complete harder dungeons, in order to get better gear.  And given the structure of WoW’s separation of PvE and PvP gear, nobody can even make the argument that the end goal is to fight other players with the gear.  It’s merely for the ability to implicitly or explicitly compare their gear to others’.  I’d hazard the claim that the driving force for players to play WoW (and most MMOs) is a sense of virtual agon.  Finally, this could probably be posited to be at least a driving force for many single player digital games.  Think about it: would you really want to continue playing Fallout 3 if nobody else had ever played it?

And what’s nice is our experiment could help affirm my theory (which nobody but me seems to agree with) by showing very little competition between the factions.

-Max

The Fundamental Problems of the Service, Part I

At this stage of our experimental project, these are the primary problems :

1. Producing a satisfactory answer to those who ask why such a translation service may be of significance or interest.
2. The current lack of different sub-experiments exploring more than the need to communicate outside of faction lines.
3. Efficiency and standardization in the translation service.

I will address each problem at length in subsequent posts.
Suffice it to say, I find the first problem to be particularly pressing and daunting.

- Timothy