Session 6.2: Gamers Rights in China
Virtual-World Unrest and the Gamer Rights Protection Movement in China
This essay documents and analyzes the activism of online gamers in the PRC. In contrast to gamers elsewhere, Chinese gamers have since 2003 been carrying out numerous forms of real-world and online protests, litigations, petitions, and insurgencies in large scale and with high frequency. This activism may be seen as an incipient ‘gamer rights protection’ (wanjia weiquan) movement of China. Based on online data of major virtual-world unrests in the past five years, I explore: 1) what is causing Chinese gamers to protest so vigorously and frequently? 2) what are the tactics, frames, resources, organizational basis, and political background that have enabled gamers to carry out activism? I find that game corporations’ profit imperatives have led them to rule virtual-worlds in authoritarian, ruthless, and corrupt ways that strangely parallel the worst excesses of local governments, and that gamers utilize online resources as well as ally with the game media, sympathetic government bureaus, and legal professionals to fight for their cause.
Matthew Chew is a sociologist, and most sociologists think the Internet is the most important force in the world these days. He shows us a chronology of some major gamer activism events, such as protests over the loss of virtual property. In 2004 some gamers went to the office of The9 and it resulted in a violent confrontation with security guards. Sit-in protests are common, as well as lying down pretending to be dead in a straight line along a road. The Moliyo Incident in 2007 involved hundreds of gamers ransacking the publishers office, spraying graffiti and destroying furniture. Grievances include rent seeking activities, mistreatment of virtual property theft, duping problems, termination of individuals gaming accounts, and technical instability (lag, frequent crashes). The first one, rent seeking activities, refers to low level game staff who can create valuable virtual property and they can use it to make actual money and occasional even ask for sex. Game corporations have a corrupt, authoritarian rule over their virtual worlds complete with petty corrupt officials.
The protests are typically NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) – they are rarely collective across different platforms, but there is movement in that direction, called 玩家维权, or players rights. Consumer rights is a part of this, and CCTV’s 315 television show has become a channel for complaints. A second component is rights protection, as rights discourse is used, and people speak of “rightful resistance”. Both companies and gamers have dual identities, in the real world and virtual. Companies are media businesses in the real world, but authoritarian states online, while gamers are middle class cultural consumers offline who become grassroots, powerless active virtual citizens within the game. Chew uses the term “Virtual-World-Oriented Social Movements” or VSMs to describe these incidents and says there are other kinds that you might not notice at first, such as debates over ICANN.
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