Issue 8 - Gaming Networks
Negotiating Intra-Asian Games Networks: On Cultural Proximity,
East Asian Games Design, and Chinese Farmers
Dean Chan - Edith Cowan University
The East Asian online games boom started in South Korea in the
late 1990s. Following unqualified domestic success, South
Korean games were subsequently exported to other regional markets
throughout East and South East Asia. During this time, game development
companies specialising in online games for the Asian market also
emerged in China and Japan. This essay proposes that one of the
key features in this networked gaming context is the relationship
between the adaptation of regional East Asian aesthetic and narrative
forms in game content, and the parallel growth in more regionally-focused
marketing and distribution initiatives. East Asian online games
design and marketing play to notions of perceived cultural proximity
within the region. By encompassing these considerations, this essay
aims to offer a contextual analysis of intra-Asian games networks
in terms of production processes and related emergent concerns.
How have these online games networks evolved? What are the cultural
politics inherent in present-day games networks within East Asia?
How may ongoing developments in these games networks contribute
to an understanding of contemporary transnational Asianness and
its signification within regional cultural flows? To what extent
are intra-Asian game networks reflective of imbalanced power relations
within the region?
A basic chronology of key moments in the cultural history of intra-Asian
games networks is presented in this study. The essay begins by mapping
the development of this mode of cultural production and concludes
by chronicling specific issues that have recently transpired within
these networks. At the same time, however, this is not a simplistic
narrative of exponential progress - or incremental decay, for that
matter. Production processes and their attendant problematic aspects
overlap in the middle section of the essay where I address the cultural
politics of East Asian online games and the constituencies of intra-Asian
cultural flows. Chinese farming (a term that refers to the activities
of certain types of Chinese gamers believed to be proliferating
in online game worlds) serves as a detailed case study for analysing
how these issues coalesce. My hermeneutical agenda is explicit:
what general lessons might be drawn from this relatively short -
but rapidly evolving - cultural history in order to advance current
understandings, and inform future research on games networks in
East Asia?
My analysis of intra-Asian games networks centres on the production
and circulation of massively multiplayer online role-playing games
(MMORPGs). MMORPGs enable thousands of players to simultaneously
engage in group-based interactive gameplay in evolving virtual worlds.
They are also known as persistent world games in the sense that
such virtual worlds continue to evolve even when an individual player
logs off. Lineage attracted significant international press
attention from 2001 onwards for being the world's most heavily populated
MMORPG at the time, with over 4 million subscribers worldwide (e.g.,
Levander, 2001). This South Korean designed MMORPG is still regarded
as one of the most popular persistent world games, even warranting
the launch of its follow-up Lineage II in 2003. Most of
the subscribers are located in East Asia, particularly in South
Korea, Taiwan and China. Even though World of Warcraft,
a persistent world game launched in November 2004 and developed
by the North American studio Blizzard Entertainment, had reached
over 6.5 million subscribers worldwide by July 2006 (Mmogchart.com,
2006), it must be noted that a significant number of these subscribers
are based in China and South Korea. World of Warcraft had
reached 1.5 million subscribers in China by July 2005 (Blizzard
Entertainment, 2005), increasing to an estimated 3 million in July
2006 (Schiesel, 2006). The game continues to perform strongly in
China where it attained peak and average concurrent users of approximately
630,000 and 330,000 respectively for the second quarter of 2006
('The9 Soars', 2006). [1] Indeed,
if anything, this example clearly shows that networked games have
become ensconced as a key mass popular cultural form in this region.
How, and why, did this popularity develop in such a short period?
The Development of Online Game Networks in
East Asia
Japan's role in developing console-based videogames culture is
unquestionable. The Nintendo Corporation was responsible for the
global distribution and mass popularisation of NES, SNES and Nintendo
64 videogames as well as portable GameBoy games in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. Sony entered into the videogames market with PlayStation
in 1994; and currently enjoys nearly unrivalled international market
dominance with the PlayStation 2 console and its associated games.
This continued emphasis on developing videogame consoles and videogames
for both domestic and international markets has arguably come at
the expense of both stand-alone PC games and online computer games
in the Japanese context. By contrast, online games currently tend
to dominate in South Korea, Taiwan and Mainland China. There are
a number of factors contributing to the rise of online games in
these territories. Console games were never officially marketed
in these locations on a mass scale. South Korea, for instance, had
placed restrictions on the import of Japanese popular culture following
the Second World War when Japan occupied Korea. These restrictions
were only officially lifted in 1998. Moreover, international game
companies have been reluctant to focus on the videogames market
in these East Asian territories because of widespread games software
piracy. Local PC game developers in South Korea, Taiwan and Mainland
China similarly experienced limited success in the 1990s (e.g.,
Liu, 2001).
In the meantime, online games culture was already steadily evolving
especially in South Korea. Imported games such as Blizzard Entertainment's
StarCraft (1998), a real-time strategy computer game with
networked multiplayer capabilities, proved to be an early success
and was a contributing factor in the mass popularisation of computer
games, particularly in relation to networked games. Over the years,
StarCraft has achieved a wide following in South Korea
(e.g., Herz, 2002); and its iconic status is ratified by the fact
that it continues to feature regularly in televised player competitions
as well as government and corporate sponsored tournaments (K. Cho,
2006; Kanellos, 2004). While the appeal of such eminently playable
imported game titles - together with the explicit domestic acculturation
of computer games as a form of mass culture - undoubtedly helped
cultivate local audience interest on a mass scale, there are other
factors to consider as well.
The rapid uptake of persistent world games in South Korea in the
late 1990s may be further attributed to two inter-linked infrastructural
conditions, namely the expansion of national broadband networks
and the proliferation of Internet cafés (known in Korea as
PC baangs). Both of these may, in turn, be linked to the
Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. The intensive governmental focus
on developing the domestic information technology infrastructure
as a means to rebuild the national economy, together with an attendant
interest in supporting local cultural industry initiatives like
the fledgling games industry, soon produced tangible results (Yoshimatsu,
2005: 17). By 2003, South Korea had the highest usage of broadband
connections in the world. As persistent world games generally rely
on high-speed Internet connections, the comprehensive national broadband
infrastructure was undoubtedly a contributing factor in enabling
the widespread uptake of these games. Indeed, by 2003, South Korea
also had the highest proportion of online gamers per capita in the
world (Chou, 2003).
In addition, the Asian financial crisis had created a situation
where many retrenched middle managers turned to making a living
by setting up their own Internet café businesses, often with
the aid of government subsidies to connect to broadband networks
(Yoshimatsu, 2005: 17). The Internet cafés, in turn, provided
a cheap form of entertainment for students and the unemployed alike,
thereby cultivating gamer usage at these locations. Despite increasing
rates of personal or home computer ownership, Internet cafés
continue to be significant social locations for playing online games.
According to the Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute,
84 per cent of Internet café users play online games (KGDI,
2004: 22). Game companies such as NCSoft derive up to 72 per cent
of total sales from Internet cafés (Yoshimatsu, 2005: 18).
By 2003, there were over 20,000 Internet cafés in South Korea,
where online games are played using a variety of micro-payment schemes
including pay per play, hourly charges and pre-paid billing cards
(KGDI, 2004: 30). Such payment schemes act as a means of getting
around the problem of software piracy and offer a measure of revenue
protection for the game companies. Needless to say, this commercial
model has acted as a determining factor in fuelling the exponential
growth of the online games development industry, and in the subsequent
proliferation of similar online games industries and networks in
East Asia.
There are strong parallels among East Asian games network economies
in terms of the development of key infrastructures that support
the continued growth in online games usage. In China and Taiwan,
for example, broadband usage continues to grow, while Internet cafés
are also increasingly being used for playing online persistent world
games (Chou, 2003; Tambunan, 2004: 4-6). The South Korean
games industry exemplar remains dominant in East Asian creative
industry contexts. The online games development industry in South
Korea has been consistently supported by extensive government intervention
and preferential cultural industry policies. As Hidetaka Yoshimatsu
notes, 'the government offered comprehensive and integrated support
for creating favourable environments for the development of the
industry in broad policy areas ranging from technological upgrading,
managerial and human resource development, global connections, and
education' (2005: 23). Such extensive and programmatic governmental
endorsement of the online games industry has seen it rapidly grow
to become an extremely lucrative export sector. Indeed, the Korea
Culture and Content Agency reports that in 2005 online games accounted
for 43.3 per cent of total entertainment and culture-related exports
including music, movies, TV dramas, books and animation (J. Cho,
2005).
Comparable levels of governmental backing are now being replicated
in China, where comprehensive efforts are being made to seed the
growth of the local online games development sector. The Chinese
government is reportedly investing US$242 million in the local Chinese
games development industry with a view to developing over 100 original
online game titles (Feldman, 2004). The Japanese government started
to actively support its domestic games industry from 2001 onwards
by assisting in key areas such as media content development and
export-oriented initiatives. According to Yoshimatsu (2005: 9-15),
the market-led growth in the 1980s and 1990s had to give way to
more programmatic government-coordinated development in the Japanese
game industry because of specific contextual considerations. Owing
to a combination of factors including local videogames market saturation,
declining domestic sales and Japan's persistent economic recession,
Japanese companies are now increasingly concentrating on international
markets and starting to expand into online games development (Japanese
Economy Division, 2004: 13-15). Perhaps the most significant example
to date of ongoing troubles in the Japanese games industry is the
domestic and international distribution of Square Enix's Final
Fantasy XI (2002), a persistent world game that is notably
part of an already well-established and lucrative console game franchise.
Final Fantasy XI is also the first cross-platform MMORPG
in which both PC and PlayStation 2 console versions connect to the
same servers. The official mass distribution of Japanese consoles
and videogames in the South Korean and Chinese markets in 2002 and
2003 respectively was initially successful but market stagnation
soon followed (KGDI, 2004: 13; 'Spoiling the Game', 2004). Current
schemes to improve the console games market in these territories
centre on the introduction of videogame network services and the
introduction of networked videogame rooms as an equivalent to Internet
cafés (KGDI, 2004: 13-14). These scenarios are collectively
indexical of the virtual hegemony of networked games and networked
gaming culture in the East Asian context.
The Cultural Politics of East Asian MMORPGs
South Korean-made online games feature prominently in East Asian
games networks. In 2002, South Korean products had a 65 per cent
share of Taiwan's online games market (Lin, 2002). In 2003, South
Korean companies controlled more than 70 per cent of the Chinese
online games market (Embassy, 2004). While East Asian online games
development will continue to evolve and diversify over time, South
Korean games currently act as paradigmatic models for the development
of East Asian MMORPGs. What are the main characteristics and distinguishing
features of South Korean MMORPGs? How are South Korean games influencing
the design, production and marketing of other East Asian MMORPGs?
These questions may be briefly explored with reference to the three
iconic South Korean designed online games within intra-Asian games
networks, namely Lineage (1998), Ragnarok Online (2002),
and Legend of Mir II (2001). The design elements in these
games underscore the common practice of indigenising imported Western
idioms by infusing and hybridising them with East Asian aesthetics,
narratives, and histories.
As part of the early wave of South Korean-designed online games
in the late 1990s, it is perhaps unsurprising that Lineage
relied on the then established gameplay and thematic conventions
for online games. The game was closely modelled after European and
North American paradigms for medieval fantasy role-playing games.
Even then, compared to North American online gaming contemporaries
like Ultima Online (1997), Lineage presented some
cultural variations in terms of gameplay design. First, there is
an emphasis on in-game quests that can only be completed by highly
organised groups of players (teams referred to as blood pledges).
Second, the player avatars are characterised by their allotted places
within strict social hierarchies, where only members of the Prince/Princess
character class can recruit groups of followers and form blood pledges.
These features appear to be especially conducive to the Internet
café gameplay context, so much so that it is not uncommon
for leaders of blood pledges to arrange with members to congregate
in real life and play together as groups in Korean PC baangs
(Levander, 2001). In the words of J.C. Herz (2002):
What makes Lineage a distinctly Korean
experience is that when players assemble to take down a castle,
they do so in person, commandeering a local PC baang for as long
as it takes. In the middle of a battle, these people aren't just
text-chatting. They're yelling across the room. Platoons sit at
adjacent computers, coordinating among themselves and taking orders
from the Blood Pledge leader. Lineage has a fixed hierarchy,
unlike American role-playing games, in which leadership structures
emerge organically. At the outset, you choose to be either royalty
or a commoner. If you are a prince or princess, your job is to
put together an army and lead it. If you're a commoner, your job
is to find a leader. You pledge loyalty and fight to take over
castles, and no matter how great you are at it, you can never
be in charge. This kind of tightly defined clan structure, which
mirrors the Confucian hierarchy of Korean society, would be anathema
to American players, who generally want to be the hero-king Lone
Ranger. (Herz, 2002)
A closer analysis of Lineage reveals an additional
element of local acculturation. The back-story and game-world settings
are derived from Il-Sook Shin's popular manhwa (Korean
comic) with the same title. Ragnarok Online shares a common
point of origin. While the Ragnarok story has its origins in Norse
mythology, the in-game narrative and settings are loosely based
on Myung-Jin Lee's Ragnarok: Into the Abyss, a successful
manhwa adaptation of the Norse legend (e.g., GameDaily,
2004). In Lee's work, the original Norse stories and characters
are altered in order to reflect local South Korean social mores,
particularly in the depiction of male-female relationships and peer
group dynamics. Lee has also taken considerable creative liberties
with the descriptions and roles of Norse gods. Loki, the mythological
trickster figure, for instance, becomes recodified as a heroic young
assassin. The manhwa-MMORPG interface occurs at various
levels. For example, the original manhwa storyline revolves
around competing guilds, thus linking it to generic MMORPG dynamics.
It is also unsurprising to note that Lee retained considerable creative
control in building the game. He professes to being 'heavily involved'
in the back-story and original art design of the game, as well as
its development process, to the point of even creating the in-game
job class system (GameDaily, 2004). Hence, Ragnarok Online
is a persistent world adaptation of a manhwa adaptation
of Norse mythology; and, like Lineage, it is indexical
of the creative inter-cultural and cross-media transformations that
are implicit in many South Korean MMORPGs (e.g., Cosplay Lab, 2004).
Intra-Asian games networks also partly depend on regional
cross-media literacy in the sense that the online games often build
on or cross-reference other popular cultural forms such as comics
and animation. The settings and characters in Ragnarok Online
are very cartoon-like especially when compared to North American
game-worlds - partly to reflect its manhwa origins, but
also partly to cater to the taste for cute graphics with bright
pastel colours that have become synonymous with much East Asian
popular culture, particularly those which are distributed within
regional markets. The successful expansion of Korean online games
networks to North East and South East Asian markets from 2000 onwards
may therefore be, in part, attributed to a perceived sense of cultural
proximity among these territories. This term may also be used to
refer to the use of regional cultural signifiers and themes as markers
of cultural affinity in transnational Asian games networks. Legend
of Mir II provides an example of how cultural proximity is
manifest in MMORPG design, particularly in its use of visual and
narrative elements considered marketable within Asia. Legend
of Mir II was the most popular online game in China in 2002
and 2003, attracting over 700,000 peak concurrent users in 2003
(Actoz Soft, 2003). Legend of Mir II features a fantasy
Oriental game world complete with traditional Asiatic design elements
in architectural and dress styles, as well as a Taoist character
class. The overarching objective of the game is to unify and restore
a once great civilisation, thereby simultaneously mining a core
role-playing game narrative trope as well as referencing a familiar
narrative trope in classical Chinese literature. Given the unqualified
commercial success of this game in China, it would seem that such
generic visual and narrative design elements resonate with the present
generation of Chinese gamers.
This design ethos is replicated even more explicitly in Legend
of Knights Online (2003), touted as the first Chinese-made
online game. The storyline of the game is based on Chinese martial
arts narratives, in particular tales of knightly chivalry known
as wuxia. According to John R. Eperjesi (2004: 30), wuxia
stories, characterised by action featuring armed combat as opposed
to hand-to-hand combat, were 'considered superfluous at best, regressive
at worst' by the Chinese government for the most part of the twentieth
century. Although wuxia stories circulated in the form
of serialised novels and were incorporated into Peking Opera in
the nineteenth century, censorship laws were passed in China in
1931 to prohibit films that promoted a belief in superstition, while
mainland Chinese film-making was directed towards the project of
nation-building. Thus, from the 1930s onwards, popular culture forms
based on wuxia were produced primarily in Taiwan and Hong
Kong. Accordingly, PC games developed in these territories in the
1990s set the precedent for Martial Arts RPGs based on wuxia
narratives (Liu, 2001). Many of these were based on the popular
martial arts novels of Louis Cha (a.k.a. Jin Yong), and with the
present turn to online games in the region, Taiwan in particular
has continued to develop games such as Jin Yong Online
for domestic and regional audiences. According to one report, wuxia-themed
games constitute one third of the online games market in China today
('China busy', 2004). As Jung Ryul Kim (2004b) notes, 'The
emerging strength of Chinese Wuxia-style (martial adventure or chivalry)
online games demonstrates that Chinese gamers are hoping to see
their own traditional values and specific historical artifacts in
the new cyber-realities.' At any rate, what kind of tradition is
being engaged here? Eperjesi (2004: 37) contends that '[a]s economic
reforms in China continue to repress the revolutionary dreams of
Mao and nurture the growth of middle-class Chinese public spheres,
we can expect to see an increased circulation of politically vacant
signifiers of traditional culture that aim to foster smooth cultural
and economic relations'. This scenario is arguably evident in the
reclamation and recirculation of wuxia in China today.
As Liu Shifa, a spokesperson for China's Ministry of Culture asserts,
'[Legend of Knights Online] proves the charm of homemade
online games, which have begun to serve as a catalyst for the rebirth
of the whole information industry' (cited in Xinhua News Agency,
2003). In other words, these narratives are now proactively recuperated
in China as a sign of indigeneity and fashioned into a marketable
aesthetic.
The circulation of marketable versions of traditional culture is
becoming commonplace in East Asian MMORPG design. 1000 Years
(2001), for instance, is described as an Asian Martial Arts MMORPG
by its South Korean developer Actoz Soft (2003). The promotional
blurb for this game, which is simultaneously distributed in South
Korea, Taiwan and China, reads as follows:
Set your clock back to 100 decades ago, when the most notable
historic changes occurred in the Far East. Masters of Martial
Arts spread out rapidly among the three newly born dynasties of
Korea, Japan and China. In this era when Kingdoms fell and new
dynasties were born, players start their own journey to become
a Master and rewrite the history of eastern Martial Arts (Actoz
Soft, 2003).
Such visions of a shared Asian martial arts history (however questionable)
are suggestive of the manifest desire to commodify and market a
depoliticised sense of shared East Asian cultural lineage and regional
identification. This game has consistently ranked among the Top
5 most popular online games in China between 2001 and 2003 (Actoz
Soft, 2003); and it is indexical of the current cultivation of Asian-specific
transnational cultural networks in East Asian MMORPGs. Cultural
proximity is now conscientiously invoked as an essential component
in local and regional game development and marketing. Wang Jinbo,
general manager of the Taiwan-based Soft-World International Corporation,
maintains that Chinese online game makers have their own advantage
against foreigners. As he succinctly puts it: 'Our products have
cultural proximity with customers' (cited in 'China Busy', 2004).
Nevertheless, while the term cultural proximity infers notions of
commoditised cultural affinity, it may also simultaneously invoke
problematic essentialist tropes of cultural convergence, equivalence
and homogeneity. At stake here is the need for a closer examination
of how Asianness or pan-Asian identification is modulated and marketed
in Asian MMORPGs circulating within the East Asian region.
The Constituencies of Intra-Asian Cultural Flows
Contemporary pan-Asian regional discourses stem from a much broader
history. As Kuan-Hsing Chen points out, 'one has to be extremely
careful with the celebratory aspects of regionalism; the [Japanese]
imperialist Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere project, for
example, launched in the 1930s, was able to operate under the name
of regionalism' (1998: 27). Furthermore, 'when questions are asked
- Is Asia one place? What are the Asian values? - then
a universal Asian identity collapses, and differences of tradition,
history and past hatreds resurface' (31). Yet, regionalism continues
to circulate in present discourses on East Asian economies, particularly
in relation to consumerist-driven forms of Asian modernity. The
regional identification of East Asia since the 1990s may be attributed
to the global intensification of transnational capitalism. Consequently,
as Leo Ching argues:
Asianism no longer represents the kind of transcendental otherness
required to produce a practical identity and tension between the
East and West. Today, Asia itself is neither a misrepresentation
of the Orientalist nor the collective representation of the anti-imperialists.
Asia has become a market, and Asianness has become a commodity
circulating globally through late capitalism. (Ching, 2000: 257)
Ching's statement has significant implications for an understanding
of the commodity function of Asianness in newly emergent intra-regional
networked cultures. Asian antiquity (imagined or otherwise) acts
as a common reference point for in-game narratives, characters and
imagery in Asian MMORPGs. Given the kinds of transnational border
crossings enacted in, say, the production of Oriental style South
Korean games for distribution in the Chinese market, what seems
to be happening in intra-Asian games networks is the generation
of 'a sense of temporal (antique) and spatial (exotic) longing for
authenticity' (Iwabuchi, 2002: 567). At the same time, however,
authenticity is used as a means to distinguish locally produced
games without necessarily disavowing the significance of imported
forms and borrowed styles. In this sense, Asian MMORPGs may be regarded
as modern popular cultural forms that are simultaneously marked
as local and international, as specifically Asian but always already
hybridised in orientation. These machinations are underscored in
Actoz Soft's (2003) promotional blurb for Legend of Mir II:
'While most RPGs are focused on North European Fantasies, Legend
of Mir II strongly emphasises…an original story with
oriental background, mixed with western type RPG elements'. Thus,
following Kaori Yoshida (2004), '[r]ather than an essentialized
sameness of Asian culture, what may enable … [the generation
of] a 'regional imagined community' has more to do with the shared
experience of 'Asian modernity' that results from indigenising Western
modernity'. At any rate, the shared experience of Asian modernity
has not resulted in the levelling of differences. Differing registers
of Asianness are taken into account in the regional distribution
of online games, so much so that the same game may be played and
experienced somewhat differently in each territory.
Intra-Asian games networks are sustained by the standard East Asian
online game development practice of providing customisable territory-specific
content and extensive localisation services for products that are
distributed regionally. Jung Ryul Kim (2004a), the Chairman of Gravity
Corporation, the South Korean developer of games such as Ragnarok
Online, describes the formula for successful regional distribution
as follows: '(1) make it [the game] familiar to the target users,
and (2) get someone who knows local users well to deliver it.' In
other words, there is a twinned process involved in intra-Asian
games distribution - namely, localising in-game content and gameplay
mechanics to make the game familiar to target users, as well as
using local hosting partners to assist in the ongoing provision
of game services. Regional localisation processes are thereby also
contingent on the establishment of collaborative transnational ventures
within intra-Asian games networks. For instance, Japanese games
publisher Square Enix entered into partnership with Webstar (an
affiliate company of Softstar Entertainment, Taiwan) for its first
foray into the online games market in China in 2002 with Cross
Gate, a MMORPG developed specifically for the Asian market.
At issue here is the significance of localised cultural knowledge.
As Toby Ragaini (2004), the Online Creative Director at Monolith
Productions, notes: '[T]here's a tendency to oversimplify the significant
regional differences between the various countries. Singapore, Indonesia,
Japan, China and South Korea should all be considered separate marketplaces
with distinct needs, expectations and system specifications.' At
the most basic level, localisation requires both the straightforward
linguistic translation of the game text and the provision of territory-specific
content. For example, Kim (2004a) points out that Gravity utilises
'region-specific updates that allow players to enjoy replicas of
historical buildings, wear traditional indigenous apparel, fight
creatures inspired by local myths, and collect culturally themed
items.' Moreover, in Ragnarok Online, players may visit
and congregate in different cities designed in ancient Korean, Japanese,
Taiwanese, Chinese and Thai styles. It is no coincidence that this
sample is reflective of the main markets for this particular game.
Preferred gameplay styles are also different in each territory.
Terence Tan, CEO of Phoenix Games Studio, provides an account of
the rationale for territory-specific variations in Fung Wan
Online, a martial arts persistent world game based on a popular
Hong Kong comic:
We found important differences between Korean, Malaysian, Singaporean
and Taiwanese players. Developers who lump all Eastern players
together are in for a rude shock. For example, many Taiwanese
hate losing belongings, while Southeast Asians don't mind if the
risk/reward is high enough. So, we had to disable a pick-pocketing
feature in Taiwan, while leaving it for Southeast Asia. Both regions
enjoy PvP [player versus player combat], but the magnitudes of
punishments and rewards were different. (Tan, 2004)
Such localised interventions ensure a degree of cultural familiarity
and relevance in different territories. The processes of regional
localisation therefore provide insights into the intricate modulation
of Asianness within intra-Asian games networks. Asianness is crucially
not mobilised as a singular and unchanging referent. Instead, the
plurality of Asian audiences is tacitly underscored in intra-Asian
games localisation.
At the same time, however, it must be acknowledged that intra-Asian
game networks do not presently operate on a level playing field.
The present hegemony of South Korean MMORPGs raises the question
of whether it constitutes a new type of media imperialism within
the region. The current situation in Mainland China provides a case
in point. According to a report published by China Media Intelligence
(2004), '[t]he problem for Chinese developers with the Korean stranglehold
on the sector is overcoming the inertia of the Chinese industry
on the one-hand and trying to temper the momentum of the Korean
industry on the other.' The South Korean market dominance impacts
on licensing issues, intellectual property, and profit margins for
Chinese developers and games operators. 'The predominance of Korean
games means that Chinese online games operators are constantly faced
with high intellectual property payments which can take away as
much as 50 per cent of online gaming revenue' (China Media Intelligence,
2004). Ian MacInnes and Lily Hu offer a sobering demystification
of the economic success of the Chinese online games market by pointing
out the weak bargaining position of Chinese online game operators
who often have to bear considerable operating risks:
[S]ince the Chinese game operators were so eager
to obtain the licensing right of popular online games from abroad
and operate them in the local market for quick profits, bargaining
power rested almost entirely with Korean developers as they controlled
the scarce resources - popular game titles - in the Chinese market.
As a result, Chinese online game operators usually have to pay
a large upfront licensing fee, which can be as high as $1-2 million
US, plus a large portion, as high as 50%, of later operating profits…The
weak bargaining position of Chinese online game operators also
has meant that bugs have marred the licensed games. The Chinese
game operators are not given access to the source code. Troubleshooting
problems with licensors abroad has been time-consuming and ineffective.
(MacInnes and Hu, 2005)
Comparable scenarios have arisen in Taiwan. Chieh-yu
Lin observes that 'Taiwanese online game companies are still heavily
dependent on the South Korean game development companies and this
has become the main reason why the industry has not been growing
well on its own.' For example, 'Gamania Digital Entertainment Co
Ltd…survived purely on its agent rights and has made the
most revenue (nearly NT$3 billion) among all the local companies
out of Lineage, the most popular online game in Taiwan.
However, the real profit Gamania makes is only around NT$10 million,
due to high royalty fees' (Lin, 2003).
At issue here is the broader question of the degree to which 'increasing
intra-Asian cultural flows newly highlight structural asymmetry
and uneven power relations' (Iwabuchi, 2004: 19). One case study
that deserves closer analysis in this light is the emergence of
Chinese farmers in the regional and global digital game-item trade.
The Case of Chinese Farming
The increasing convergence between persistent world economies and
real world economies is not unique to Asian MMORPGs. A real-world
market has arisen for virtual-world goods. Global transactions in
virtual properties were estimated to be worth about US$880 million
in 2004 alone ('Interview with IGE', 2004). [2]
Suffice to say, there is now an established
global secondary market in virtual commodities, which has in turn
created a situation where gameplay is becoming commodified and instituted
as a form of work. This convergence between play and work has given
rise to what may be termed the gamer-worker. [3]
My discussion focuses on the discursive evolution
and circulation of the gamer-worker phenomenon colloquially known
as Chinese farmers. I analyse the term's present significations
in networked persistent world economies, particularly as an index
of asymmetric power relations both within and without intra-Asian
games networks.
In generic MMORPG contexts, farming (or gold farming)
refers to the acquisition of in-game items or currency (gold) usually
by repeatedly defeating lower level enemies and collecting the resulting
treasure or currency. This term does not always carry negative connotations.
Generally speaking, it is not unusual for the average player in
most persistent worlds games to spend at least a few hours on gold
farming in order to gather sufficient items and currency to facilitate
smooth progress in the game. Chinese farming, by contrast, is a
specific term used within online gaming circles to refer to the
perceived proliferation of Chinese gamer-workers in persistent world
games. It is believed that they are employed for a nominal fee by
game-item traders to play a particular game for several hours a
day, amassing virtual wealth in the form of game-items or in-game
currency, which are then subsequently sold by the traders for real
cash. Once the virtual characters created and used by the gamer-workers
reach a high enough level, they may be sold as well (Tambunan, 2004:
19). In this respect, the issue of grinding or the laborious task
of levelling up a playable character comes partly into play as well;
however, I will focus on aspects of farming in this discussion.
The term Chinese farmers evolved from an earlier term
Adena farmers, which originally referred to the mainly Chinese gamers
employed by South Korean and Chinese in-game item traders to specifically
farm the in-game currency of Lineage known as Adena (e.g.,
Steinkuehler, 2004). As these farmers grew in both reputation and
visibility among international gaming circles, and especially when
they started farming in other game titles and offshore game-worlds,
there was an accompanying shift in the naming of these gamer-workers
as specifically Chinese. Common complaints levelled against Chinese
farmers include the belief that they affect both the social dynamics
and the economy within the game-world. They are generally considered
to be spoiling the game experience for other players because they
tend to strategically position themselves in areas where monsters
are known to re-spawn or re-appear shortly after killing them. In
this manner, gold farming becomes a relatively straightforward procedure
of simply harvesting the gold dropped by the slain monsters. However,
these places subsequently become no-go zones for other players.
As Steinkuehler (2004) alleges, these farmers 'often declare - in
both word and deed - whichever hunting area they currently occupy
as their own property, ostensibly off limits to anyone else on the
game. Should you challenge them on it, they will kill-steal you,
drop-steal you, heal whatever monsters you are hitting, and if necessary
PK [Player Kill]'. Recurrent gripes are encapsulated in this all
too familiar refrain: 'The Chinese farmers have utterly ruined the
economy and unbalanced any sense of fairness in the game. So I am
certain these Chinese farmers are making a pretty decent living
in China' (cited in He, 2005). These presuppositions warrant further
exploration.
Commentators such as James Lee (2005) believe that
Chinese farming is starting to become a highly organised large-scale
commercial activity resulting in the emergence of farming centres
run by local Mainland Chinese and off-shore multinational agencies.
According to him, Chinese farmers are now the main global suppliers
of game-items for online games such as World of Warcraft.
Chinese farming practices are also evolving. Lee reports on the
current use of Chinese farmers to monitor game macros or waigua
software programmes that run automated bots within the game-world
environment. The Chinese farmer therefore acts as a kind of virtual
babysitter who is required to watch over these bots:
The macros for World of Warcraft, for example,
control a high-level hunter and cleric. The hunter kills while
the cleric automatically heals. Once they are fully loaded with
gold and items, the farmer who's monitoring their progress manually
controls them out of the dungeon to go sell their goods. These
automated agents are then returned to the dungeons to do their
thing again (Lee, 2005).
The main role of the farmer is basically 'to fend
off the occasional player itching for a fight or game master who's
hunting for…automated farming programs' (Lee, 2005). In short,
the farmer is a form of low-skilled cheap labour used to monitor
the bots. At issue here is the question of whether the farming centres
described in Lee's account are equivalent to sweatshops, especially
when it is pointed out that a Chinese farmer in Lineage II
earns the equivalent of US$0.56 per hour. One might argue that these
farming centres are functioning more like so-called cottage industries
that are paying their gamer-workers relatively well compared to
average local wages. One might even make the case that the farmers
'aren't exactly working in sweatshop conditions … [and that]
there's a world of difference between making sneakers and watching
bots fight all day' (Lee, 2005). Similar concerns - and justifications
- have been issued in relation to the emergence of these virtual
[but not quite] sweatshops in places such as Romania (Thompson,
2005). At the same time, however, the core question of exploitative
organised labour remains.
Following his pioneering empirical studies conducted
in 2005 and 2006, Ge Jin (2006) confirms the widespread proliferation
of gold farming centres in Mainland China. While he concedes that
the work conditions he has observed at some of these farms might
justify their label as 'gaming sweatshops', it is also 'an oversimplifying
term that obscures the complexity of this phenomenon.' Jin proposes
an alternate reading. He suggests that in the gold farms 'exploitation
is entangled with empowerment and productivity is entangled with
pleasure.' His interpretation foregrounds the relative agency of
the gold farmers:
Most of the gold farmers I talked to love the job.
In the gold farms, you can see they are enthusiastic about their
job and they got a sense of achievement from it, which is rare
in any other sweatshops. Most of the gold farmers I met do not
have better alternatives. All the gold farmers I met are male,
usually in their early 20s. They were either unemployed or had
worse job [sic] before they found this job. Many of them were
already game fans before they became 'professional'. In some sense,
they are making a living off their hobby, which is an unachievable
dream for many people. What's more, the game world can be a space
of empowerment and compensation for them. In contrast to their
impoverished real lives, their virtual lives give them access
to power, status and wealth which they can hardly imagine in real
life.
Jin crucially stops short of romanticising this putative
agency. After all, he is bearing witness to an arguably circumscribed
form of self-actualisation and socio-economic empowerment. As Jin
acknowledges, '[The gold farmers] are proud of their achievement
in the game world but they are also sensitive to the fact that they
are playing to provide a service to some wealthier gamers. In the
game world they are simultaneously the master and the servant. Power
relations do cut across the virtual and the real.' Jin's research
findings are echoed in other recent reports. For instance, New
York Times writer David Barboza cites a Chinese gold farmer
who appears to confirm Jin's initial observations. The farmer states,
'For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, me and my colleagues are killing
monsters…I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good,
compared to the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day'
(cited in Barboza, 2005). Nevertheless, contrasting viewpoints need
to be factored into consideration. Writing in the South China
Morning Post, He Huifeng quotes a Chinese farmer who acerbically
points out, 'You try going back and forth clicking the same thing
for 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, then you will see
whether it's a game or not' (cited in He, 2005). In short, the gamer-worker
remains a worker.
Emergent understandings about the sociology of Chinese
gold farmers need to be highlighted. Attendant questions about class
and economic mobility need to be raised. For whom is gold farming
profitable and at whose expense? What are the local socio-economic
machinations involved in organised farming practices? Barboza offers
an example that affirms the need for such deliberations. In his
words:
The operators are mostly young men, like Luo Gang,
a 28-year-old college graduate who borrowed $25,000 from his father
to start an Internet café that developed into a gold farm
on the outskirts of Chongqing in central China. Luo has 23 workers,
who make about $75 a month. If they didn't work here, Luo said,
they'd probably be working as waiters in hot pot restaurants,
or go back to help their parents farm the land; or more likely,
hang out on the streets with no jobs at all. (Barboza, 2005)
The it's better than nothing rhetoric starts to sound rather hollow,
especially when spouted by entrepreneurial middle classes presuming
to speak and act on behalf of others. He Huifeng provides a corroborating
example:
Wei Xiaoliang, 26, owns the Shenzhen Red Leaf technology company
and focuses his business on wholesaling Warcraft gold
to overseas brokers. We prefer to hire young migrant workers rather
than college students. The pay is not good for students, but it
is quite attractive to the young migrants from the countryside,
Mr Wei said. He is thinking of moving his company to Gansu or
Shanxi provinces, where he could easily find scores of rural migrants
to become farmers at lower costs. (He, 2005)
This intricate national sociology of rural-urban engagement,
economic mobility, and rural migrant labour obviously warrants further
detailed study. At any rate, the symbology of migrant labour has
already been utilised by Ge Jin and Nick Yee to interpret the transnational
social standing of Chinese farmers. For Jin, 'Chinese gold farmers
are in some sense a new kind of immigrant workers, disembodied through
the Internet, then reembodied on a foreign territory as the mythical
warriors, magicians or priests - virtual bodies that are the bread
earners for real bodies' (2006). It is important to emphasise that
these virtual bodies are also specifically marked as racialised
bodies. The Chinese gold farming phenomenon thereby offers a situated
context for examining how racial tropes play out in an online environment.
Nick Yee's essay Yi-Shan-Guan (2006) provides an incisive
account of how present-day discourses on Chinese farmers belie a
range of historical assumptions, generalisations, and judgements
about racial Otherness. Yee mobilises a trenchant critique of the
racist subtexts in descriptions and discussions by online gamers
that centre on, and vilify, the Chineseness of the gold farmers
in question. For him, the overriding 'theme of immigrant worker
being harassed by Westerners who feel they own the land and can
arbitrate what constitutes as acceptable labor is one that is hard
to escape.' For example, in analysing gamer statements about Chinese
farmers and farming practices, Yee discerns that 'it's hard to not
interpret them as the digital variation of go back to your own country.
And beneath all that is the eerie undertone of this land belongs
to us and we prefer to keep it that way - a digital country club
where language fluency is the membership fee.' Humphrey Cheung (2006),
likewise, reports on the use of English language tests among some
players in World of Warcraft as a way of weeding out possible
Asian gold farmers. Broken English arouses suspicion. In short,
collective anxieties about Chinese farmers have seemingly occasioned
acts of boundary policing premised on English language competency
as a marker of racial and ethno-national lines.
In Cyber-Race, Jerry Kang (2000) makes a compelling
case for harnessing the Internet's intrinsic qualities, such as
its capacity for anonymity, pseudonymity and social interaction,
in order to challenge and disrupt dominant racial meanings. His
key propositions are as follows: 'Specifically, we can adopt a strategy
of abolition, which disrupts racial mapping by promoting racial
anonymity; integration, which reforms racial meanings by promoting
social interaction; or transmutation, which disrupts racial categories
by promoting racial pseudonymity' (2000: 1153). The case of Chinese
farming complicates these potentialities if only because it demonstrates
how racial meanings can be insidiously re-mapped in cyberspace.
The affective dimensions of such contemporary power dynamics also
cannot be underestimated. Yee sums up the predicaments generated
by these imbrications of power, class and race in the poignant conclusion
to his essay:
As I recovered and pondered how to exact revenge against these
3 gold farmers [whom I had just encountered in the game], I realized
that in my mind I had instinctively cast them as Chinese gold
farmers. And in return, they had probably instinctively cast me
as the white leisure player. And in this mesh of historical and
contemporary racial narratives where we all suddenly seemed to
be playing out our expected racial roles, I found myself pondering
what it really meant to be Chinese-American… because somehow,
in this land of Elves and Orcs, I suddenly felt more Chinese than
I usually do in the real world. (Yee, 2006)
Conclusions, Projections and Introjections
The varied constituencies of intra-Asian games networks draw attention
to the complexities inherent in transnational East Asian cultural
production, regional cultural flows, and pan-Asian identification.
It is crucial to retain an understanding that the Asianness of Asian
MMORPGs and the Chineseness of Chinese farming are discursively
- and economically - produced. Intra-Asian networks simultaneously
highlight structural asymmetry and uneven power relations within
the region. Attendant concerns include Chinese farming and the current
situation of Chinese and Taiwanese online games operators who have
developed an over-reliance on servicing imported South Korean games.
The Chinese government started enforcing protectionist policies
in 2004 in order to foster the domestic games development industry,
and it is becoming harder for foreign companies to obtain a license
for distributing foreign-made online games in China (Embassy, 2004).
In this respect, intra-Asian games networks offer a rapidly evolving
context for continued study and further critical examination. This
is therefore a timely moment in the evolution of these networks
to evaluate how Asian MMORPGs have contributed to the virtual hegemony
of networked gaming culture in East Asia, and to anticipate the
inevitable next generation of Asian-designed persistent world games
in the very near future. By the same token, the assumptions implicit
in any attempt at analysing online games as a popular cultural form
must also continue to be interrogated. As Koichi Iwabuchi notes,
'emerging transnational connections through popular culture are
predominantly ones among relatively affluent youth…and among
media and cultural industries in urban areas of developed countries'
(2004: 19). This is certainly a point worth taking on board but
at the same time there are other absences and sites of critical
quietism: namely, the poor rural youth who appear to populate gold
farms in China have thus far largely gone unnoticed in many international
reports and commentaries. Such awareness must temper euphoric accounts
of the ascendancy of game networks in East Asia, and their ancillary
industries such as the trade in digital game items and currency.
To this end, contextual studies that are aimed at analysing topical
developments in this dynamic field need to be simultaneously focused
on how these networks might be complicit in 'reproducing cultural
asymmetry and indifference' (20) in the region.
Acknowledgements
The Faculty Small Research Grant that I received in 2005 facilitated
preliminary work on this vast and rapidly evolving East Asian field
of cultural production. I am especially grateful to Ernest Koh for
providing exemplary research assistance on this project.
Author's Biography
Dean Chan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Communications
and Contemporary Arts, Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western
Australia. He is also the cluster convenor of visual arts and new
media in the Asian Australian Studies Research Network. His current
research focuses on East Asian console and multiplayer online games,
diasporic Asian gamers, racialised representational politics in
videogames, and digital game art.
Notes
[1] While MMORPG subscription figures are useful
in providing a snapshot of the estimated number of players on a
comparative worldwide basis, it should be acknowledged that East
Asian MMORPGs usually rely on peak concurrent user (PCU) and average
concurrent user (ACU) statistics because these players typically
pay by the hour, rather than monthly. [back]
[2] The CEO of IGE (a company that deals with the
buying and selling of MMORPG currency and items on the Internet)
provided this estimate at the State of Play conference in October
2004 and in various media interviews. Nevertheless, there is considerable
ongoing debate - and uncertainty - about the actual worldwide volume
of real-money trade (RMT). As Edward Castronova (2006), who specialises
in the study of online game economies, states: Putting the pieces
together, a fair guess as to the size of Asian, US and European
[RMT] markets combined, including growth into 2006, would be at
least $100 million, more likely closer to $200 million, and quite
possibly over $1 billion if industry figures are to be followed.
[back]
[3] Other scholars have coined different terms.
For example, Julian Kücklich (2005) uses the term playbour
to describe this and other forms of conjunctions between play and
work. [back]
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