This week I will be exploring the argument of Lisa Nakamura in her article Don’t Hate the Player Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft.

Claim: In this article Nakamura argues that World of Warcraft (WoW) creates a racist space with it’s racist fictional narrative as well as through the interactions between players playing for leisure and players (typically from asian countries) who use the game to make money.

Reasons to Support Claim: To support this claim she uses excerpts from media such as South Park referencing to the game that have strong negative biases against asian people. Another support she uses is a poll that the players themselves created asking “Is it okay to hate chinese players?” 32% of players answered yes, “39%, replied ‘‘I don’t hate China, just what they stand for in L2,’’ and 10% checked ‘’I am CN and you should mind yourself, you racist pig’’” She is using this to show that these players clearly shows an overall hatred in some regard towards asian players of the game.

Evidence to Support Claim: She uses the support of an expert opinion (T.L. Taylor) as evidence by saying “MMOs are distinguished by their ‘’enormous potential in a fairly divisive world,’ the ‘fact that people play with each other across regions and often countries’’ as often as not results in ethnic and racial chauvinism: ‘as a tag the conflation of Chinese with gold farmer has seemed to come all too easy and now transcends any particular game’” She uses this to parallel her argument with an argument of an expert, saying that this racism towards asian characters is is not only in WoW, but all across the MMO space.

Another expert opinion she uses as evidence is Robert Brookey in his analysis of gaming blogs, saying: “he discovered ‘overt racist attitudes’ towards Chinese farmers; most importantly, that ‘some players, who harbor negative feelings toward Chinese farmers, do not believe that these feelings denote racial discrimination.’ Thus, though it is the case that players cannot see each others’ bodies while playing, specific forms of gamic labor, such as gold farming and selling, as well as specific styles of play have become racialized as Chinese, producing new forms of networked racism that are particularly easy for players to disavow.”

Acknowledgment of Objections: In this article Nakamara does agree that the MMO space can be an incredible space with beautiful landscapes, and that it can appear to bring people together from all over the world.

Sources

Nakamura, Lisa. 2009. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26 (2): 128–44. doi:10.1080/15295030902860252.