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