Showing posts with label Korea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Korea. Show all posts

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Racism in Virtual Worlds

The reading for today's class got me thinking about racism in game communities more. We've already mentioned the racism against Koreans due to gold farming behaviors, but I don't know if many people know much about the attitudes towards Brazilians in many mmorpgs.

Brazilians are frequently depicted as stupid beggars with a pack mentality, and that despite their perceived stupidity, I have heard or read a lot of anecdotes about how they've cunningly cheated other players out of items or in-game money, etc..

Here's a comic that floats around the internet a lot with a lot of the depictions that show up frequently. ("BR?" standing for "Brazilian?" and "huehuehue" is considered to be a distinctively Brazilian way of writing laughing; ie: "hahaha" though I've never actually seen it used myself)



What do you think of in-game racism? Have you encountered it? What do you think the logic of it is? I think it's very interesting that real-world prejudices can carry over to situations that are in theory unrelated, as in "Bow, nigger," and I am also fascinated that new prejudices can be created based solely on in-game behavior, as with gold farmers and Brazilians.