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

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