Race and gender. Surely such offline social constructions are absent in the virtual world? Academics and other students of the Internet have known for decades that even typed communication can reveal such non-verbal aspects of an online user, but it still comes as a surprise when discrimination emerges in an online game.
According to a press release which appears to be blatant self-promotion beyond the pale, non-English speaking users of the mega World of Warcraft are claiming that they are excluded from group activity because of the world's reliance upon English as the lingua franca. Perhaps racial discrimination is an incorrect term. Linguistic discrimination?
The release, which comes from a WoW gold seller based in Ontario, Canada suggests that players who do not use appropriate grammar in their sentences are shunted out of groups because it's assumed that any non-English speaker is a gold farmer. Now, that is a load of poppycock. I've been through these worlds and my incorrect grammar radar goes into melt-down. Furthermore, my hair follicles cringe at the racial, sexist and homophobic epithets. I'd argue that the best way to eek out a non-English speaker in a virtual world is to seek out correct grammar. Hell, even the press release has grammatical flaws.
However, it is well-observed that offline race and gender do come through in virtual interaction. Professor Jerry Kang, at UCLA's law school, published a paper in 2000 that examined the race issue in the anonymous medium. TL Taylor, author of the forthcoming Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture, has studied (and has played alongside) the legions of women who enjoy virtual worlds. My own research also suggests that it's pretty easy to tell whether a woman onscreen is played by a woman offscreen (first clue: the proportions of the avatar).
The Internet was once upon a time heralded as a giant levelling ground, a place where you could be anyone you wanted to be, without anyone ever really knowing who you actually were. We now know that's not the case, but what are the implications for the future? The gamesblog has already looked at one sort of discrimination, a potential doomsday scenario based upon in-world class. What other kinds of discrimination occur in-game?
Furthermore, has anyone actually experienced discrimination in a virtual world based upon an offline identity?
