I think you may be my long lost brother. Or my adversary from an alternate universe.

I went to Xiamen in 1995 and lived there for 5 months. Gulangyu is great! No cars, old French buildings with peasants living in them, good food (not on the island though), quite walks along the sea…

I am also a WOW player. In China, on Chinese servers. I’ll admit it…knowing that my friends and family are not going to read this. I’m actually in a guild (but that was because they sent me a random guild invite and at the time my reading comprehension was even worse than it is today). My guildmates think I am a large breast, blond American girl who likes to use her credit card at Starbucks, have lots of casual sex, and kill Iraqis.

And…I used to dream of being a video game producer or own a video game company. Sadly it will never will happen because I’m not a programmer and have no “in” in that industry besides my efforts. But I used to read Gamasutra so that I can talk the talk.

Question/Comment #1 Why do you read Gamasutra? Lets hear it!

Question / Comment #2 Although Salon readership may be somewhat more enlightened, most probably will not know what WOW is. The PC game community in the US maybe has a 6 million player base. The intersection with Salon’s readership is not guaranteed. And they may not know about its popularity in China.

Question / Comment #3 Someone is going to ask what this has to do with globalization. Not me. But someone will ask it.

Question / Comment #4 I’m pretty sure Shanda is publicly traded on a market somewhere. And I’m pretty sure that even several years ago some analyst were pointing out that this company is all hype.

Question / Comment #5 The too biggest games in China (Lineage 2 and WOW) were only localized in China. Not only the design and artwork, but importantly, the server-side implementation, were developed and fire-tested in Korea and the US. The infrastructure that The9City (Blizzard’s Chinese localization partner for WOW) uses is not as good as what Blizzard manages in the US. At least that’s what Chinese players say anyway.

Question / Comment # 6 That being said, I think China is probably a good place to develop MMOs because they are popular and explicit development costs are less than in the US. Investing in cell-phone manufacturers here is stupid and everyone knows that now…there has to be consolidation there.

Question / Comment #7 And finally…there was this plan to place restrictions on MMOs so that after playing for 2 hours straight, people would have to log off or else they would get only ½ experience. This has not been implemented yet. It was funny how all the game companies said publicly this would be a good idea, even though they and everyone else thinks it’s a horrible idea. Actually, I think it would be good to implement. Gamers of the World Unite!

If I think an interesting topic to research and write about would be trade unions in China. If only seperate villages in GuangDong could organize...

Hey Jesse,

Welcome to the conversation. Great post on WOW. Myself, I used to be a big fan of Blizzard games but had to give them up to, uh, have a life.

As for trade unions in China -- it has to be one of the most painful ironies of recent Chinese history that Chinese workers are now among the most ruthlessly exploited in the world, as a result of "communist" leadership. But with 200 million or so as yet unemployed rural workers, its going to be tough for labor to apply pressure.

You didn't answer the question...why interested in Gamasutra?

I'm not sure I would say that Chinese workers are the most ruthlessly exploited. The exploitation tends to happen in Guangdong... at least, Chinese people think that's where it happens. Its probably a very small proportion of the workforce and in absolute terms, probably not more than in, say, Mexico (I guess this depends on how you define "ruthlessly exploited".

I would say, however, that workers in the Guangdong region have far less allies and legal resources to help them, so their road to improvement is less clear.

And one more thing...these riots happenning now (in the NY Times article) are not about workers...they are about peasants. In Guangdong there is worker unrest. But it seems throughout much of China there is peasant unrest due to land seizures and perceived extreme environmental exploitation. These issues are less WTO/globalization issues, and more about China's development and modernizaton process.

And peasant unrest is much acarrier to Beijing

You mentioned at the end of your article that it's only a matter of time before the Chinese government starts restricting gaming. In fact, it already has. I read recently that they have passed a law that limits online gaming to a couple of hours per day. The short article I read didn't mention how they are able to do this, but it did say that the government is worried about the addictive nature of online games, particularly MMOs.