Tara Fickle
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479868551
- eISBN:
- 9781479805686
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter examines recent controversies over internet addiction and Chinese gold farmers, players of World of Warcraft who make a living acquiring in-game virtual currency and selling it for real ...
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This chapter examines recent controversies over internet addiction and Chinese gold farmers, players of World of Warcraft who make a living acquiring in-game virtual currency and selling it for real money to (mostly Western) players looking to accelerate the tedious “grind” of the leveling-up process. The chapter shows how “cheap play” has been revived as a tool for condemning Chinese “cheap labor,” powerfully informing how internet game addiction is itself culturally and spatially represented in popular and psychiatric discourse. Using Cory Doctorow’s story “Anda’s Game” as a case study, it considers how twenty-first-century American anxieties about ludic immersion, compounded by the nation’s own destabilized position in the global economy, have led American game developers as well as medical professionals to pathologize gold farming as exclusionists had Chinese gambling: as symptomatic of an “Asian” psychosis that fails to respect normative boundaries between play and work, virtual and real world.Less
This chapter examines recent controversies over internet addiction and Chinese gold farmers, players of World of Warcraft who make a living acquiring in-game virtual currency and selling it for real money to (mostly Western) players looking to accelerate the tedious “grind” of the leveling-up process. The chapter shows how “cheap play” has been revived as a tool for condemning Chinese “cheap labor,” powerfully informing how internet game addiction is itself culturally and spatially represented in popular and psychiatric discourse. Using Cory Doctorow’s story “Anda’s Game” as a case study, it considers how twenty-first-century American anxieties about ludic immersion, compounded by the nation’s own destabilized position in the global economy, have led American game developers as well as medical professionals to pathologize gold farming as exclusionists had Chinese gambling: as symptomatic of an “Asian” psychosis that fails to respect normative boundaries between play and work, virtual and real world.
Anna McFarlane
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198846666
- eISBN:
- 9780191881817
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198846666.003.0013
- Subject:
- Physics, Theoretical, Computational, and Statistical Physics
Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized ...
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Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized metaphor for data creates an environment that can be inhabited by AIs, rather than an idea of the AI being located in one ‘body’, or in one static place. This chapter explores the possibilities opened by this innovation and by cyberpunk’s continued interrogation of AI as a phenomenon that is dispersed throughout networks, particularly focusing on William Gibson, in the Afrofuturist movement through a reading of Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and on the work of writers who have been characterized as ‘post-cyberpunk’, such as Cory Doctorow, who shows how algorithms and artificial intelligences can have unexpected, international, and economic consequences.Less
Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized metaphor for data creates an environment that can be inhabited by AIs, rather than an idea of the AI being located in one ‘body’, or in one static place. This chapter explores the possibilities opened by this innovation and by cyberpunk’s continued interrogation of AI as a phenomenon that is dispersed throughout networks, particularly focusing on William Gibson, in the Afrofuturist movement through a reading of Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and on the work of writers who have been characterized as ‘post-cyberpunk’, such as Cory Doctorow, who shows how algorithms and artificial intelligences can have unexpected, international, and economic consequences.
