Nardi, Bonnie A. Value and Identity: Extrusions of a Video game. 25 January 2010
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Nardi, Bonnie A. Value and Identity: Extrusions of a Video game. 25 January 2010.
- From School of Information and Computer Science, UC/Irvine
Contents |
Player created mods
What do the mods do?
- Statistics
- Visualization
- Aggregation, data mining
Who owns the mods?
- Players develop and release for no cost
- Some ask for donations
- Aff value to the game
- Do they use free software licenses?
- Lua code but is the source open?
Ownership, authorship ethics
- No licensing?
- Social regulation
- Mods are "owned" by a single dev
- Mods considered "abandonded" after ~6 months and may be picked up by another dev
Modding demographics
Tend to be American devs
- Chinese not traditionally modding
- Rising numbers of Chinese modders, peer mentorship
Blizzard / modder relationship
- Blizzard offers some support for modders
- Prepared a "sandbox" environment for modders
- Modders supported one another on forums and BlizzCon "UI&Mods session"
- Modders "don't mind" if Blizzard incorporates mod features
- Re-coded by Blizz devs
How best to describe this economic, technological situation?
- Co-production?
- Fan labor?
Blizzard institutes modder policies 2009
New policies
- Add-ons must be free of charge
- Add-ons may not solicit donations (in-game)
Community felt violation
- Some mod devs opted to quit
- Even those who developed mods for free were alienated
Blizzard forum moderators deleted posts from critical devs
- This included both critical content AND dev-related data
- Censorship drove out some of the most active modders
Effects of policy, censorship
- Stymie the development of more complex mods
- e.g. QuestHelper by ZorbaThuT
- weekly builds
- entrepreneurial plans stopped by ban on in-game advertising
Researchers have had little access to Blizzard
Gold Farming and techno-orientalism
Portrayals of Chinese as "low-tech laborers in high-tech world"
- Symptom of Western identity negotiation in global context
Player response
U.S. players generally don't like gold farming
- Upsets in-world economic balance
- Some responses rely on racist, stereotypical portrayals of Chinese people
- e.g. "Ni hao" machinima
- Why don't players create mods to counter farmer/bot activities?
Imagined farmer figure
- Low wage, tech, culture, ubiquitous
- (These characteristics reflected in MSM/Aca coverage)
- Disruptive, unwelcome
- "They keep coming back / cuz you're giving them dough"
Player anxiety
- Resentment
- Hostility
- Re: off-line demographic position of players?
Chinese players appear less upset about farming
- American players don't value items that were not earned through gameplay
- Same stigma does not operate among Chinese players
- Generally under-studied
Why do players vilify farmers rather than consumers of farmed gold?
Origin of the imaginary?
Heeks survey of across sources
- Found blogs, and other peer sources
- Little evidence from MSM, academic, peer-reviewed sources
- Dibbell's work on "virtual sweatshops" (2003)
- See: NYT site
- Doctorow's fictional account
"Playbourer" (Heeks, 2008)
- "Play an online game for the purposes of making real money"
- Video documentary show players smoking, sleeping, laughing, interspersed with games images
- Dormitory living, "poor food quality"
- "Rough and ready" statistics, lacking methods for measuring
What is obscured in the imaginary?
Automation
- Single worker might oversee several PCs at once
- Constant development of bots to circumvent Blizzard regulation
- (Though "American gold farmer", Mithra, believes that cheap brute-force approach can undercut more sophisticated automation)
- Does not fit the imagined sweatshops narrative
- Is this activity connected to other hacker/cracker activities?
Value chain
- Customer service, account mgmt, advertising, labor management
- Obscured by sweatshop mythology
Consulting
- Consulting operations support gold farmers
