National stereotypes find life in fantasy worlds

"I don't think China should keep helping North Korea," my friend boldly declared the other day, "You can't trust Koreans."

"Why?" I asked. "Simple," he said, "I was playing online with three North Koreans on the same team as me the other day, and they only talked among themselves and kept leaving me to die."

My friend's extension of online games to international politics might be absurd, but virtual worlds are starting to play powerful role in how people see each other.

This is especially the case in Asia, where online games eat up the attention of millions of young people. When I was at university four years ago, it was normal for me and my friends to spend the entire weekend in Internet cafes. Some of us even fell asleep there.
 
It may sound weird, but the legions of Chinese in online games have an effect on how the world perceives us.

Think about physical sports. The Italian reputation for being cheats and sneaks may be undeserved, but it persists in part because of the dirty way Italian soccer teams play. Equally, the Brazilian reputation for style and grace comes about, in part, because of their dedication to playing a beautiful game. 

Sportsmanship matters, and, while online games aren't watched by millions of people, they are played by millions of people. For small-town Americans or isolated countryside Chinese, they're often the first real contact they have with foreigners. And reputation matters there.

For instance, as my friend discovered, Koreans are known for being obsessive and clannish online gamers.

I first realized this when I went to the US. I wanted to keep playing my own favorite game, World of Warcraft, while I was there.

World of Warcraft is the most popular online game in the world and has numerous servers in different parts of the real world, which are also, to some extent, separate virtual worlds. But I found that logging onto the Chinese servers that I was used to playing on was too slow and difficult, so I created new characters on a US server.

Much to my surprise, however, I found other players on the servers hostile and unwelcoming. They often ignored my attempts to trade or form groups with them. It was a kind orc, controlled by a housewife from Connecticut, who pointed the problem out to me: I had a distinctively Chinese user name.

I wasn't being rejected because of real-world racism, though. Instead, the problem was that at the time World of Warcraft was overrun by gold farmers, young Chinese men who would work for companies online to earn gold, the game's fictional currency, and then attempt to sell it to Americans for real-world money. In a weird echo of real life, lazy Americans would often pay to have Chinese do the boring "grind" of building up gold in the game for them, so that they could be more powerful. 

But ordinary players were sick and tired of being constantly spammed by messages from Chinese gold farmers, so they automatically ignored me.

I even got killed a couple of times for no reason other than being mistaken for a gold farmer. When I created a new account with a generic fantasy name, I found no problems in making friends online and joining guilds.

These stereotypes cut both ways. I have friends who are convinced that every American is a racist, sexist homophobe because of the frequency with which they hear racial and homophobic slurs when playing with Americans. After all, many players are teenage boys, and they often take advantage of online anonymity to be idiots. 

There's little that can be done about this other than encouraging people to remember that, while they may be effectively anonymous, they're still affecting the name of their country.

So whether I'm playing an elf, a general, or a futuristic killing machine, I try to be civil, friendly, and spread a good image of China.

The author is a programmer now working for a gaming company in China. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

Quick Shopping