CHAPTER 1.4: CONTESTATION OVER VIRTUAL TERRITORY
Also, as explained in the previous sub-chapter, with the gold farmers’ status as unwanted members of the virtual population comes hostility. A portion of gold farmers in World of Warcraft originate from China, and the attacks against them in chat rooms and against their avatars sour into racism. To Barlow’s dismay, the majority of gamers who see gold farmers in the virtual space do not replace the racism we can find in the physical world for the fictional racism outlined in World of Warcraft’s lore. The players’ frame of reference for the gold farmers’ identities does not solely stem from whatever fictional race they selected for their avatars in character creation, or a title from a fantasy name generator that a gold farmer might sport as an in-game title. The internal lore and in-game racial dynamics are overlapped with physical world racism. As Nakamura states, “an enormous amount of player energy goes into ‘outing’ gold farmers” (139). To do so, players accumulated a set of in-game racial “cues” to search for when interacting with other avatars: in other words, players had no issues bringing real world racial dynamics into MMORPGs. This racism was enacted through many ways; badgering Chinese-speaking players and attacking players who played in strict patterns are some examples. It was even common practice for these aggressive players to call the area where gold farmers congregated “China Town” (Dibbell).
Where might Barlow have gone so wrong in his prediction of virtual worlds being untethered from reality’s myriad personal identities? The largest assumption that Barlow made was that virtual space would be a new and separate reality. Instead of seeing the virtual as an extension of the real world’s web of interpersonal dynamics and geopolitics, virtual space in Barlow’s declaration of independence is portrayed as its own contained realm running in parallel to the physical. To achieve a truly independent virtual space, like in Barlow’s vision, we would somehow have to shed all inequalities that affect us in the physical—or at least strip them of their power in the virtual. Otherwise, power inequalities would still hold weight in virtual space, as they do in the physical, and they would be exploited by virtual users with the advantage. A true calculation of what it would take to approach virtual space without personal identities as a factor would result in enough material to fill a separate thesis altogether. One aspect of this identity-less virtual space seems necessary though, and that is a general acceptance across users that they are online for the same reasons. If you want to participate in the virtual space, you must agree (to an extent) with the goals of the virtual space. Without an agreement on what the environment is for, a conflict of individuals’ interests occurs—one that must fundamentally include factors from offline, since there has to be a reason for why you might enter the virtual differently. Including such individualized factors from offline will undoubtedly carry the influences of personal identities from the physical. This is similar to how different fliers arrive at an airport for individualized reasons that extend beyond the airport itself. If two people want to take a flight to Rome but for different reasons, then those reasons must involve an aspect of their lives before or after they have left the airport—in other words, there is an external condition affecting their decisions within the airport’s controlled environment.
Attempts at getting users to unanimously accept the terms of a virtual space are usually done through legal avenues. The overall restrictions to user-world interaction tend to be outlined in “Terms of Service” (ToS) and “End User License Agreement” (EULA) documents (Balkin 65), but this does not make the laws of the virtual land immutable. There is no guarantee that the legal documents tied to virtual spaces will even be read. According to Deloitte, 97% of Americans aged 18 to 34 do not read the ToS documents before signing them (Cakebread). Whether gold farmers are part of the 3% who read them or not, their very usage of MMORPGs as sources for real world income is their disagreement with the proposed laws of the virtual space. This is why their presence is so controversial in gaming spaces, and why they are refused a peaceful gaming experience from the other players who do not use the virtual space for work. Gold farmers and other players do not use game worlds for the same reasons. Whether or not each groups’ interpretations of the virtual world is legitimate is not important. In an analysis of users in virtual worlds and their connections to technological disruptions, it is nearly impossible to say which party would have the “correct” vision of what the goals of the virtual space they inhabit should be—let alone what having a “correct” interpretation would mean in this sense. What really matters is whose interpretations of the space are supported by systemic power? When a gold farmer and a recreational player get in a conflict, which of them can point to EULAs to bolster their claims in this game world with legal jargon imported from the physical? Who can call on customer support from the company that built the virtual world to back up their position? Of course it will be the recreational players, the ones that engage with the game world through ways deemed acceptable by the virtual world’s creators.
A technological disruption is action against the established ideology of a virtual space. Gold farmers commit an act of defiance against the restrictive rules of video game worlds by simply existing in them—by bringing into question whether the space can only be used for play. They have brought visible labor into a world that vehemently rejects the concept, and in the process they become unwanted by the majority population. In trying to financially support themselves through the virtual, gold farmers have to battle the overwhelming sentiment that they are not welcome in the games they work in. As New York University professor Alexander Galloway states in his essay "Warcraft and Utopia," “in contemporary life the tool used for labor, the computer, is exactly the same tool that is used for leisure.” This goes for the software that computers run as well. Leisure and productivity blend together in the virtual, an uncomfortable truth for the average World of Warcraft player when they log onto the game’s servers to search for escapism. The fantasies that these video games create can only work when everyone plays along. Even when a good portion of MMORPG play involves “grinding” and microtransactions—both indicative of the processes and products of labor—the illusion that the game world is solely about recreation continues to be maintained by the majority of players. While labor embedded within the game by the creators can be rationalized as another aspect of gameplay (in the process becoming invisible labor), gold farmers do not try to hide their work behind the veil of recreation.
Essentially, gold farmers enact a technological disruption through calling the creators of the virtual space on their bluff: labor still has a place in games no matter how much it is rendered invisible. Game creators attempt to separate the realm of labor and productivity from their world of play (the virtual world), even though the creators tend to still ask for financial support from users. This is not to say that a separation of play and work is never possible, but if the separation is actually successful, then gold farmers would not exist in those spaces. What critics of gold farmers like to gloss over is how these virtual workers are selling their goods to recreational players. The very people who claim that gold farmers are ruining their games are the ones also benefiting from the gold farmers’ labor. Both parties contribute to the merging of the virtual space as one designed for recreation and productivity. The main difference is that the majority of players are dishonest with their role in the purchasing of in-game goods, and refuse to acknowledge their participation in the blurring of the virtual space’s roles.
This technological disruption is the side effect of applying Barlow’s philosophy of separating virtual space to an environment that primarily functions through an integration of conflicting goals: in other words, MMORPGs thrive off of making money from users and providing entertainment for users, which leads to a conflict in purpose since moneymaking requires labor. Like many other technological disruptions, this one reveals the paradox between what the creators of the environment desired and the actual user-environment interactions that occur. In the case of gold farmers, the disruption that they are participating in is impossible for the game developers to “fix” in an update. Nowadays, anti-cheating algorithms and official in-game auction houses have been refined for MMORPGs to prevent gold farmers from accumulating resources, but that has failed to end the phenomenon. Countering a problem of ideological conflict with a solely material solution that does not acknowledge the many external factors contributing to the issue will prove to be ineffective. Using the technological disruption framework to incorporate the reason behind these unique failures in virtual spaces brings the context back. Whether this is positive or not depends on your personal opinion, but it is obvious that we do not live in Barlow’s “new home of the Mind” (1996). Instead, we have built a home of paradoxes—a home that plants our lives across the physical and the virtual. It is time to accept the ways in which they merge together, and what might be learned from confronting our interactions on- and offline.