In chapter 6 “Biological Involution? The Production of Diseased Citizens,” Ticktin (2011) interrogates “the production of the disabled subject in France, at the intersection of the global political economy and universal regimes of care—a counterintuitive subject that is more mobile when disabled, injured or diseased than when ‘healthy’” (p. 192). This sick subject must be visible and apolitical in its display, and must travel through systems that treat the disadvantaged body as separate from the macropolitical conditions that produced and continues its sickness, including the aid network to which that diseased body comes to belong. In digital spaces there are multiple opportunities to performed one’s embodied-ness or perform bodies that may differ from the one irl. However, even in avatar spaces, where the game player has the option of creating a differently sexed, differently gendered, differently raced body, behaviors and performances lead to speculation about who is controlling the virtual body and what secrets it holds.
Pearce (Pearce & Artemesia, 2009) recounts in her ethnographic notes on existing among users of There.com multiple instances of men behind female avatars “coming out” as being not their avatar. One participant identified as questioning their gender, another was playing female at his girlfriend’s insistence to prevent flirting (and she later joined as a male avatar), a third was putting into practice a rule he set for his daughter to not reveal any true information about themselves online. The reasons for gender swapping were diverse, and generally seen as innocuous. There was little discouragement from members of the group and overwhelmingly the response was to play as whatever gender they wanted to, using any voice they felt comfortable with. Ticktin writes about social, political, and biological conditions that intersect under the illness clause (p. 214). Different sans-papiers experienced their situation as falling under different conditions. In the gender-swapped gamers, taking on a female avatar reflected a host of different concerns.
A more political, thornier issue is discussed in Nakamura’s (2009) assessment of “Chinese gold farmers” in World of Warcraft (WoW). (Here I feel a little like I’m bringing up the dirty laundry of gaming culture, when everyone has already seen it…). Since the introduction of commercial multiplayer games such as WoW there has been the illegitimate work of power-leveling and gold farming. Labor networks produce and sell both avatars ready for engaging in end-game activities (it takes 80+ of hours of play time to produce an avatar ready for end-game dungeons and raiding) and gold that can be exchanged for in-game items. These labor networks have been investigated in both popular and academic literature and cast a laboring (Chinese) body in a small sweltering room playing the game for 20 hours a day in order to produce avatars ready for sale and piles of gold to be sold for real-world currency (RMT or “real money trade). However, these bodies breaking the terms and conditions of the commercial game (players are doling out $20 a month to play) are rendered visible again and again, and frequently radicalized. Instead of performing illness in order to obtain papers, they must perform specific in-game actions in order to level characters and accumulate gold. Highly repetitive behaviors attached to random-sounding avatar names are accused of being (Chinese) gold farmers. Other gamers may converge on the character and in some games may have the opportunity to kill the avatar or otherwise disrupt their ability to do their work. Power levelers may be more difficult to detect as their robotic actions, efficient, perfected, are highly valued traits in end-game players who want to move through content quickly in the hopes of acquiring better loot. In either case, however, the behaviors on screen mark gold farming and power leveling avatars as attached to radicalized, laboring bodies. The laboring body in China is seen as disruptive to the playing body in the West, South Korea, or Japan. (This is why the body comes to be marked as specifically Chinese, and not “Asian.”)
The other side to this is the playing body who has purchased the power leveled character. While the gold farmers are more clearly spotted in the labor stage, power leveling is more apparent in play. An avatar body is not performing to the skill level associated with the equipment it is wearing. For example, I was in a dungeon last week with 3 other players. None of us had played together before and were randomly matched together by the game. After dying on the final boss twice, one player accused another of having bought his/her character (playing with the produce of power leveling labor). The reasoning for this was that the avatar was wearing good gear, but his/her damage output was low. He/she wasn’t “playing right.” I had noticed this as well, but it can happen for a variety of reasons, kids playing with their parent’s avatars, a friend handing the controls over to another friend who wants to try out the game, etc. But the accusation here was that the character had been bought and this illegitimacy was rendered through the player’s digital, and by extension, physical body. The behaviors on screen were “wrong,” which meant the hands controlling the avatar were “wrong,” this wrongness meant that the avatar should be expelled from the dungeon.
All of these discussions ignore the global labor system that creates the demand for power leveled avatars and gold-on-demand. Scholars in video game studies absolutely note the labor conditions that make farming an attractive job in certain economies. They have also spoken to those who purchase avatars. This work is being done, but perhaps not quite from a perspective that considers how such labor markets intersect with issues outside of economics and labor. Nakamura’s contribution includes adding race to the discussion, but there is certainly more work that can be done.
One avenue is similar to one Ticktin raises but does not pursue as it would take her slightly off course, the glorification of similar behaviors in other contexts. Sports and sadomasochism are allowed, but contracting AIDS deliberately is not. Like the (Chinese) gold farmer, the (Korean) competitive gamer exhibits precise control, quick movements and efficiency. For North American champions, saying that they have been known to “beat Korean champions” is a mark of exceptional skill. The (Korean) competitive gamer is engaging in the game space for financial gain just as the (Chinese) gold farmer likewise makes a living from activity in the game space. One thing I would like to touch on in class is alternative interpretations of actions that appear similar (the hunger strike vs anorexia for example) and how these bodies are cast as different, and to what ends?
Nakamura, L. (2009). Don't hate the player, hate the game: The racialization of labor in World of Warcraft. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26(2), 128-144.
Pearce, C. & Artemesia (2009). Communities of play: Emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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