Footnote 6
1 2020-03-29T16:07:28+00:00 Kola Heyward-Rotimi b6ce735eff1db38be8e9634d258a41ea477727e0 1 1 plain 2020-03-29T16:07:28+00:00 Kola Heyward-Rotimi b6ce735eff1db38be8e9634d258a41ea477727e0This page is referenced by:
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2020-03-29T15:55:45+00:00
CHAPTER 1: THE GOLD FARMER PHENOMENON
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2020-04-08T20:20:50+00:00
There was a time when the vulgarity and looseness of the Internet was a new, troubling aspect of modern life. This was the late 90's. Wild optimism about the virtual networks of the future clashed with the turbulent reality of online interaction. The devout belief in virtual decentralization, equality, and resilience reaches back to hypothetical communications networks even before the military-born ARPANet (Hu 9), but this was the first time that those myths were seriously challenged. Listservs, forums, and Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) games were beginning to establish themselves. Online interactions grew further from the more restrained, academic/military email chains from the previous decade. A wider demographic gained access to the internet. This would be years before infamous message boards like Something Awful and 4chan would even be created, and the concept of a social media platform was practically nonexistent. Despite the early internet seeming relatively tame compared to the contemporary era's virtual landscape, the nation was starting to worry about how lawless the world online seemed to be. Near the end of the 90's the U.S. Government attempted to pass the Communications Decency Act, a law concerned with regulating the distribution of online pornography and obscene language. The Communications Decency Act resulted in an uproar among multiple communities on the early internet who were concerned for their autonomy and free speech. One of the more vocal attackers of the law was John Perry Barlow—an essayist, Grateful Dead lyricist, and a pioneer of the cyberlibertarian movement.
As a response to the Communications Decency Act, Barlow declared the whole web as a “new home of the Mind” free from the shackles of “weary giants of flesh and steel” (1996). Barlow found the act of physical sovereign powers meddling in the affairs of virtual space disgusting. For him, the virtual/physical divide was of utmost importance, and petty real world politics should not trespass into holy, digital ground. He goes so far as to call these government interferences “hostile and colonial measures [to] place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers” (Barlow 1996). The irony of Barlow implicitly referencing colonial struggles in an argument around the inherent lack of history and identity politics in the internet is never addressed. What Barlow might not have realized while drafting his declaration is that he inserts the very inequalities and historical baggage he wants to avoid into the internet through simply existing. The identities and experiences that constitute an individual do not get washed away through going online. Ideology, inequality, and exploitation are played out in the virtual as well as the physical—not in the same ways, but they occur nonetheless. Otherwise, the far-right political movement in Brazil would not credit their success to YouTube radicalization pipelines (Fisher 2019), and the impact of ideological echo chambers and illegal data mining on social media platforms like Facebook would not be national points of contention (Cadwalladr 2019). Virtual networks and spaces are not truly sparkling new worlds for us to experiment in, probably because when we land in the realm of binary code and screens we forget to leave our luggage behind. It is impossible to separate the virtual from the physical because the boundary we attempt to draw never truly exists. They are constantly bleeding into each other.The World of Illegal Gaming Transactions
The “gold farmer” phenomenon is an example of this bleeding. Gold farmers are a very special type of gamer, one playing more for financial reasons than for recreational ones. This is unlike competitive eSports teams and players who also play games for money, since in the gold farmers’ case the virtual worlds of the games are being exploited in an unexpected way. They traipse through the in-game worlds of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) and perform an assortment of menial side quests and tasks to collect resources for their avatars. After they have amassed a large amount of resources, gold farmers pass on all of this to other avatars in-game—for a real world price. Since a good portion of MMORPGs revolve around these “grinding” aspects where repetitive, small tasks are required to advance throughout your avatar’s progression, a lot of players find any way they can to avoid that process. Gold farmers provide a shortcut for many players, giving them rare items, significant chunks of in-game currency, and specific forms of weaponry/armor for money that means something in the real world.
When it comes to video game economies affecting real-world ones, there are more than a couple of examples that do not involve gold farmers. A classic video game economy is Second Life’s complicated free market system centered around the exchange of a currency called Linden Dollars (Frankenfield 2018). According to Second Life CEO Ebbe Altberg in a conversation with Martin Bryant at The Next Web, as of 2015 the MMORPG’s in-game GDP is expected to be “around $500 million, and users cashed out a total in excess of $60 million last year” (Bryant 2015). Though it has not been seeing the type of annual growth during its peak in the mid-to-late 2000s, Second Life’s virtual economy is impressively stable and has resulted in users become millionaires in the real world as well through a combination of virtual real estate and virtual item exchange. Of course, these sort of occurrences would not have been possible in Second Life without there being a direct exchange rate between Linden Dollars and real currencies, along with other ways to connect the virtual economy to real world ones. The difference between the virtual/physical economic interactions in Second Life with the moneymaking practices of gold farmers is in the virtual world creators’ intentions. The people at Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, wanted to make an economy separate but linked to the real world. Gold farmers aim to do the same, though they take it upon themselves to make it happen. They are not using virtual systems that are made financial interactions that also affect the real world. That does not stop them from exploiting real world needs to make money anyway.
This is where the technological disruption makes itself seen. One of the main arguments against gold farmers among other players is primarily financial. Critics of gold farming claim that by accruing so many in-game resources, including rare items and massive amounts of the game’s currency, the game’s economy is subject to inflation. At its peak in the mid 2000's, the gold farming industry was valued at around $900 million (Bailey). It was a major virtual economic powerhouse through the exchange of goods on third-party markets. The gold farming industry reached such productive peak that major investors from American financial companies started to get involved. In 2006, Goldman Sachs sent Steve Bannon to assess the investment opportunities of Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), an online market that specialized in gold farmer transactions (Dibbell). Bannon was apparently capable of glossing over the potential exploitation involved with gold farming, especially when the practice was funneled through IGE's unequal trading practices. He got Goldman Sachs to invest approximately $60 million into IGE, along with becoming CEO. [Continue from here, bring in Nakamura's viewpoints on racism.] A practice that some players use to support their livelihoods apparently has a direct impact on the game. Gold farmers are not even necessarily cheating, though their form of methodical play to maximize profit from fallen enemies and completed missions is supposedly too disruptive for video game economies to handle. Nothing is technically malfunctioning, no cheat codes are being slipped in to gain an upper hand. And yet, gold farmers are commonly seen as the enemies by Western players who log into MMORPGs for recreation instead of work (Yee). Compared to video games with planned economies, the gold farmers’ behavior bares no difference. But in a game like Second Life, the trade of in-game resources for real world money does not come with aggression and isolation.
The Second Life economy, along with many other MMORPG in-game economies, is created with an intent to facilitate financial exchange with the physical and the virtual. There is an agreement being made between the creators of the virtual space and the users that financial gain and loss through selling in-game resources is acceptable. In a sense, this acceptance of financial interaction within the space becomes a part of the ideology that guides the space. As Julian Raul Kücklich points out,
Kücklich speaks to how we tend to carry concepts from the physical world into the virtual. In this case, Kücklich is talking about the ways in which we think of virtual spaces. The idea of the virtual frontier and its relation to pioneering/colonization is clearest in video games, where a lot of the worlds that the player interacts with are portrayed as vast areas to explore and understand. An emphasis on this exploration, this “new land,” leads to the concept of territory following suit. If virtual space is to be explored, then that implies that there are areas that are already known. Even if that known space is simply the physical world that the player actually exists within, that is more than enough to bring along the ideas of new populations encountering a different land. If population and territory are ideas that are brought into virtual space, then so do all of the nuances and complications that we are used to dealing with in the physical world.The conceptualization of virtual worlds as a frontier draws attention to the fact that it is becoming increasingly common to apply the two central concepts that are used to determine the governmentality of nation states—population and territory—to virtual worlds. (342)
The Contestation Over Virtual Territory
Continuing with this application of the concepts of physical “exploration” and new populations to virtual spaces, then we might see the gold farmers as an unexpected population in the video games that they create money within. They are a disruption in the ideology of these virtual worlds because they do not align themselves with the accepted rules that the creators have imposed. Kücklich reinforces that as the case for most technological disruptions, the gold farmers’ subversive behavior cannot be evaluated through quantitative means. Tracking the amount of in-game resources they accumulate will not explain why they are interpreted as an unwanted population within the virtual space—the ideology of the space that they are actively contradicting must also be taken into account. If they played Second Life instead of other MMORPGs, they would transform from gold farmers to entrepreneurs.
With the gold farmers’ status as unwanted members of the virtual population comes hostility. Gold farming can cause in-game inflation and the methodical clearing of enemies through certain regions of the world map, interrupting a more organic progression flow of a conventional player. Their behavior is seen as disruptive not just by the creators of these virtual worlds, but to a good amount of players as well. Because a significant amount of gold farmers in World of Warcraft originate from China, 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 Lisa 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 reality, 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 have 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. In the case of the gold farmers, 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 Alexander Galloway states, “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. -
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2020-04-09T18:46:33+00:00
CHAPTER 1.4: CONTESTATION OVER VIRTUAL TERRITORY
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2020-04-15T05:46:59+00:00
Continuing with this application of the concepts of physical “exploration” and new populations to virtual spaces, then we might see the gold farmers as an unexpected population in the video games that they create money within. They are a disruption in the ideology of these virtual worlds because they do not align themselves with the accepted rules that the creators have imposed. Kücklich reinforces that as the case for most technological disruptions, the gold farmers’ subversive behavior cannot be evaluated through quantitative means. Tracking the amount of in-game resources they accumulate will not explain why they are interpreted as an unwanted population within the virtual space—the ideology of the space that they are actively contradicting must also be taken into account. If they played Second Life instead of other MMORPGs, they would transform from gold farmers to entrepreneurs.
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.