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

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