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