The Proteus Paradox (12 page)

Again, this demonstrates the assumed one-to-one relationship between two independent categories: Chinese players and gold farmers. If a person cannot speak English, he or she can only be Chinese and thus a gold farmer. Other players are troubled by this logic.

I've never run into someone I assumed was a gold farmer, mostly because (unlike many people) I don't tend to assume that someone who doesn't speak English is automatically a gold farmer. I've seen people assume that because someone isn't a native English speaker and they see them playing for 8 hours straight they must be a gold farmer. Mind you, they know this person is playing there 8 hours straight why? Because they also are playing in the same general place for 8 hours straight. But because Player A used Chinese-inflected English they must be a gold farmer, because apparently Asians don't play games for fun. [/sarcasm] [
City of Heroes,
female, 36]

I really feel though that about half of the people that are accused of being farmers are just people who cannot speak English that well. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 27]

Perceived resource-hogging is most apparent and frustrating to players who are themselves hogging resources. Often, a player who complains about a presumed gold farmer would like the resource the accused has gathered.

In 2006, an Australian businessman moved to Beijing for work and for a change of scenery. Being a
World of Warcraft
player, he wanted to continue his hobby even after the move to China. And since he was
bored with his high-level male Night Elf hunter, he decided to create a new character—a female Dwarven hunter—on the same server. Wanting to mix a part of his new life in Beijing into his gaming, he gave this female Dwarf a Chinese name, Meiyuan. On his blog, he detailed Meiyuan's misfortunes:

My wee yellow pig-tailed dwarf Meiyuan; body like a barrel, legs like tree trunks and the chest of a pocket battleship, she got called names. She has been insulted or players chat between themselves about Meiyuan in sometimes insulting ways. The general assumption seems to be that Meiyuan, actually me the player, am Chinese and that I am gold farming. Nothing to support any of this except apparent Chinese ethnicity because of the name.

Meiyuan was neither Chinese nor a gold farmer, but once other players assumed she was both, an interesting social dynamic emerged.

There was one time I remember when I had fought my way through to an ore deposit. In the process, as I got to the ore, I saw that another player had also been embattled on the other side of the hill. I helped him out by assisting in the kill of his last opponent. I then turned to the ore. Since he too came to the ore deposit I had expected to share but the other player started calling me names, inter alia a gold farmer. His pals turned up, he again accused me of all sorts of things and his mates started name calling too. So I ignored him and emptied the ore deposit. I was there first and had first dibs and he apparently did not like that (and had no patience to find out if he got a turn or not—mouth first, thought second). Sod him.

Meiyuan was accused of being a Chinese gold farmer, and so Meiyuan behaved exactly how Chinese gold farmers are expected to behave. Meiyuan did not respond in English, remained mute, ignored threats, and continued to hog the resource. From the perspective of the accuser, Meiyuan was a Chinese gold farmer.
¹²

Two English-speaking, Western players encounter each other in a
virtual world. They have a disagreement, and one player accuses the other of being a Chinese gold farmer. The Australian businessman unwittingly becomes part of the Chinese gold farmer rhetoric and provides another concrete example of how Chinese gold farmers hog resources and need to be eradicated. We began this section by asking how players confidently identify someone as a Chinese gold farmer. One valid answer is that they don't. Chinese gold farmers and real-world ethnicities aren't simply identified in virtual worlds; Chinese gold farmers are created in virtual worlds and forced on characters to support a negative stereotype.

People came to this newly discovered land to become what they could not become elsewhere—heroes and millionaires. The early, undeveloped economy meant inconveniences. Certain mundane tasks required a great deal of time to complete. Many enterprising Chinese workers took advantage of the opportunity by providing a service that dramatically enhanced the quality of life. Providing this service required tedious repetition and painstaking attention to detail, and most of their waking hours were consumed by working in a small room in front of a machine. Nevertheless, their hard work did pay off. Some became wealthy, and the Chinese began to refer to this place as Gold Mountain. Yet their frugal industriousness incited others, particularly the Westerners who had arrived earlier. This triggered a period of systematic ethnic abuse and harassment. Individual Chinese workers were harassed and sometimes physically assaulted. Mob lynchings and massacres followed.

This story may sound incredibly familiar, but it did not take place in a game. I am describing the mid-nineteenth-century genesis of
Chinese laundry shops (
yi-shan-guan
in Chinese) during and after the California Gold Rush. Due to the perception of laundry as women's work and the scarcity of women in California during the Gold Rush era, the local cost for doing laundry was exorbitant. Miners, both white and Chinese, routinely shipped their laundry to Honolulu and even Hong Kong for cleaning and pressing. Even then, the price was high and the process took four months. As Iris Chang describes in
The Chinese in America,
Chinese entrepreneurs took advantage of this economic opportunity and created local laundry shops. This laundry work was neither easy nor glamorous; it was backbreaking work: “In time, the laundry became a humid prison. The typical washerman not only worked in his laundry but slept there at night. . . . On some days, a laundryman might labor twenty hours continuously, without even stopping to eat.” But it was stable work that allowed Chinese workers to eke out a living in the United States.
¹³

Chinese businesses—laundry shops, curio stores, and restaurants—multiplied quickly, but as the nation slid into depression in the 1870s, Chinese immigrants became scapegoats for a host of economic problems. They were accused of destroying the economy by working for less pay and by being pathologically frugal, and of draining the nation's wealth by sending wages to China. Newspapers and magazines portrayed Chinese immigrants as vermin and as consuming vermin as their main food source. Chang reproduces a magazine lithograph showing a dozen Chinese workers living in crammed rat-infested quarters, with two Chinese men in the foreground, squatting and feeding on rats. Anti-Chinese attitudes led in 1882 to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Instead of quelling anti-Chinese attitudes, the bill emboldened fanatics and led to a period of terror now called “the Driving Out.” Chang reports that “several Chinese
communities in the West were subjected to a level of violence that approached genocide.”
¹⁴

With both the Chinese laundry workers in the 1800s and today's Chinese gold farmers, workers identify and exploit an economic opportunity, providing a service to Westerners that improves their quality of living. However, complex economic problems are blamed on these immigrant workers, leading ultimately to genocide. What the 1800s story provides, crucially, is a rereading of gold farming not as a story of offshore outsourcing but as a story of immigrant labor—Chinese immigrants perceived to be encroaching on Western soil. At its heart, economic stress caused by inevitable resource competition is blamed on a vulnerable minority. As we saw earlier, resource hogging is something that many players engage in. What differentiates acceptable and unacceptable resource hogging is whether a player belongs to the in-group or the out-group.

The nineteenth-century history of Chinese in the West also highlights how complex economic outcomes can be pinned on vulnerable scapegoats. This is actually also true in the case of gold farming in online games. One common economic critique of gold farmers is that they ruin game economies by causing runaway inflation. This inflation in turn makes it incredibly difficult for low-level characters to succeed in the game. And indeed, inflation has been observed in many online games, which bolsters the argument against gold farmers. Yet the actual effect of gold farming on game economies is anything but obvious.
¹⁵

When I was playing
World of Warcraft
in 2005, I noticed something odd about the game economy. The price of many goods in the market fell gradually over time. Large radiant shards, used as a reagent in enchanting, fell by about 50 percent within a few months. The same
was true for crafted weapons and other player-produced goods. As Heeks has pointed out, this makes sense because gold farmers don't accumulate gold directly. Instead, they farm goods that are in high demand and sell the goods on the market to get gold. Assuming stable demand, the price on those goods will actually fall due to the increase in supply. In addition to keeping the cost of needed goods low, gold farmers might actually stabilize game economies by minimizing unpredictable shortage of goods. This is particularly true for hard-to-find components and items in the game.
¹⁶

In Lineage 2 they are everywhere, and everyone knows who they are. Initially, players were very hostile and attempted to harass them in large groups. After a while, players have realized that they are in fact necessary for the in-game economy to function properly and many of the farmers have become friendly with regular players. [
Lineage 2,
male, 22]

Heeks also points out that the effect of gold farmers is likely small in relation to the effect of normal players, simply because the majority of online gamers are not gold farmers. And because gold farmers are competing with normal players for resource-rich locations, gold farmers cause inflation only to the extent that normal players would abandon those resources if gold farmers left. Since normal players would exploit those same resources even in the absence of gold farmers, it's unclear whether gold farmers actually increase the in-game gold supply beyond what would otherwise have occurred.

What is more, game currency inflation has been a standard feature of virtual environments long before there were gold farmers, even back in text-based virtual worlds. Since monsters keep respawning and are an infinite source of in-game currency, inflation is guaranteed unless game designers create money sinks. It is only through money sinks that game currency can leave the system. For example,
in
World of Warcraft,
players pay the game a set cost to purchase mounts (for example, horses and griffons). This currency then disappears from the game economy. But balancing virtual economies is a difficult task, subject to the interaction of hundreds of game variables and the actions of millions of players. Most game economies are inherently unbalanced and difficult to control. This also means that gold farmers are being blamed for economic problems that would exist even if they weren't present in the game.
¹⁷

The gold-selling market in the West exists only because of the demand from Western players. In short, gold farmers are providing a service valued by a sizeable portion of the gaming community.

I have no problem with gold farmers; I'm a professional and work full time, so my time is valuable, and they are providing a service. I've bought a total of about 5000g in WoW from an online website. I initially thought it was uncommon for people do to this, but the practice is actually very widespread, although people don't seem to like to talk about it. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 32]

I have made it a habit of buying game-currency for real money, either from EBay or from
www.ige.com
(IGE). The reason for this is that making money in the game is a very slow and tedious process, and DAoC requires you to level up a crafter for the sole purpose of turning unusable loot into raw material, and then into trinkets that can be sold. . . . I spend $25 at IGE and can go back to enjoying the game rather than spend countless hours “working” (i.e. farming). [
Dark Age of Camelot,
male, 29]

In this sense, Western players are blaming Chinese workers for problems they themselves are creating.

We should also consider the role that game developers play in this story. After all, what we have is a form of entertainment that is so tedious and so repetitive that many people are willing to pay to not
play the game. This is an artifact of game paradigms that reward time played rather than player skill—again a direct consequence of the deeply numerical leveling-up mechanics whose origins I described in
chapter 1
. You have to kill five hundred monsters to get to the next level no matter how competent or incompetent you are. Any player playing
World of Warcraft
can reach the highest level if he or she puts enough hours into the game. This game paradigm creates a powerful incentive to bypass the time sink. Instead of castigating the Chinese, we have to ask whether gold farming is simply a symptom of bad game design.

Between 1882 and 1930, the price of cotton in the southern United States was directly correlated with the number of black lynchings. As economic conditions affecting the wealth of southern whites worsened, the frequency of mob violence against southern blacks increased. A more recent study of six central and eastern European countries has revealed similar correlations. In the mid-1990s, the perception of minority groups fluctuated according to economic conditions. Negative stereotypes of these minority groups increased when economic conditions deteriorated. These studies show that economic frustrations are most easily vented on a vulnerable minority group.
¹⁸

As in the history of the Gold Rush, minority groups become most vulnerable when economic conditions are poor. Sudden surges of new players into an online game certainly lead to overcrowding of resource-rich areas. Players cannot always find or collect what they are seeking, especially since many game economies are inherently unbalanced and runaway inflation is difficult to control. It is also
unfortunate that wealthy players are able to purchase in-game advantages. Players experiencing these economic frustrations may find it psychologically convenient and comforting to identify a scapegoat, blaming all the world's troubles on a vulnerable minority group that cannot even respond in English. And just like that, Chinese gold farmers become the singular cause of complex economic outcomes driven by diverse actors and variables.