"The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer"

[atlasien]

I'm not a gamer so this stuff is very new to me, and very weird. Long article in the NY Times Magazine.

The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html?ex=1339819200&en=0bdff5fbb739a41f&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink)

Some quotes:

And in shops where daily wages are tied to daily harvests, every minute lost to death is money taken from the farmer’s pocket. But there are times when death is more than just an economic setback for a gold farmer, and this was one of them. As Min returned to his corpse — checking to make sure his attacker wasn’t waiting around to fall on him again the moment he resurrected — what hurt more than the death itself was how it happened, or more precisely, what made it happen: another player.

It isn’t that WoW players don’t frequently kill other players for fun and kill points. They do. But there is usually more to it when the kill in question is a gold farmer. In part because gold farmers’ hunting patterns are so repetitive, they are easy to spot, making them ready targets for pent-up anti-R.M.T. hostility, expressed in everything from private sarcastic messages to gratuitous ambushes that can stop a farmer’s harvesting in its tracks. In homemade World of Warcraft video clips that circulate on YouTube or GameTrailers, with titles like “Chinese Gold Farmers Must Die” and “Chinese Farmer Extermination,” players document their farmer-killing expeditions through that same Timbermaw-ridden patch of WoW in which Min does his farming — a place so popular with farmers that Western players sometimes call it China Town. Nick Yee, an M.M.O. scholar based at Stanford, has noted the unsettling parallels (the recurrence of words like “vermin,” “rats” and “extermination”) between contemporary anti-gold-farmer rhetoric and 19th-century U.S. literature on immigrant Chinese laundry workers.


Fan himself is a striking case of how off-hours play can serve as a kind of unpaid R. and D. lab for the farming industry. He is that rarest of World of Warcraft obsessives, a Chinese gold farmer who has actually bought farmed gold. (“Sure, I bought 10,000 once,” he said, “I don’t have time to farm all that!”) When Fan shows up at the wang ba after work, it is a minor event; the other Donghua workers pull their chairs over to watch him play — his top-level warlock character is an unbelievable powerhouse that no amount of money, real or virtual, can buy.

[nskripchun]

As an ex-WOW player, I can attest to the blatant racist comments people make in regards to Chinese players / Asians.

While it did piss me off, I don't think I ever made the mental connection in my head to the parallels with 19th century / early 20th century anti-Chinese sentiment here in the US. A bit eerie, I suppose.

[Scowl]

As an ex-WOW player, I can attest to the blatant racist comments people make in regards to Chinese players / Asians.

While it did piss me off, I don't think I ever made the mental connection in my head to the parallels with 19th century / early 20th century anti-Chinese sentiment here in the US. A bit eerie, I suppose.

If you think about it, it kinda makes sense and follows historial precedent. Chinese people find some way to work and make money in a foreign country (in this case, without having to move there), the locals get mad and all xenophobic and shit. Everyone in WoW farms, most people just don't sell their shit to other players for real money. Players don't like it when they have a good spot to farm and there's someone else there doing the same thing. And most of these assholes are racist to begin with, so it's not much of a stretch for them to turn this into an online yellow peril.

As I understand it, the same thing is happening in South Korea with Lineage II (or III, or whichever one is out now). Lots of Korean players are plenty pissed at Chinese gold farmers, and I heard that they get together groups for the sole purpose of killing Chinese gold farmers wherever they're found.

Yeah, fucking with the game economy is a valid concern, but as far as WoW goes, there's plenty of other shit that fucks with the economy just as much, if not more. The Chinese didn't invent the auctioning of characters on ebay, and I've seen single players completely fuck up the auction house by putting up shit at ridiculous prices. Soon, everyone follows suit because they see how this asshole is getting rich off of that.

Of course, everyone in the online gaming community bitches about griefers, but in this case it's okay to grief people.

It's just like the article stated, there's a demand for farmed gold, but the Chinese people providing the cheap labor are the ones taking the hits. Blizzard isn't going to fuck with its American subscribers who are buying it all up. And, you know, in terms of enjoyment of the game for all players, gold farming as a business is bad. So is all kinds of shit that players over here pull without provoking the same kind of hate. Anyway, Chinese gold farmers are here to stay. Chinese people are everywhere and you can't get rid of us no matter how hard you try, even in the virtual world.