Non English speaking gamers are claiming racial discrimination in the hugely popular World of Warcraft video game. World of Warcraft is classified as a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game and is an online computer role-playing game in which a large number of players from around the world can interact together or against one another in the same game at the same time. At last count Blizzard the developers of World of Warcraft stated they had 5 million active monthly subscribers.
The problem starts when players try to join groups. As part of the game play for World of Warcraft players are required to form groups of 5 or more to be able to finish certain levels of the game. Now if you have a number of friends who also play World of Warcraft you can make arrangements to meet up in the game to complete these required group tasks. For all others players they will need to build groups by using the games message system where they can send a request out to fellow players to form or join a group of players for a certain task.
There is a common belief among English speaking players in World of Warcraft that most non English speaking players are gold farmers. This is a type of player who is only playing the game to profit, not for the love of the game. Gold Farmers are largely despised by players who feel they take away a certain purity of the game.
To combat gold farmers, players are requesting anybody who wants to join a group to type one or two lines of English. If the sentences or grammar are not proper English these players are rejected from joining this group. This has recently been creating a lot of backlash among non-English speaking players with feel they are being discriminated against based on their language.
Other players in WOW claim that the English test has nothing to do with discrimination, but more to do with being able to communicate effectively with your fellow team members. They say you would never build a real life arm with people who do not speak a common language.
One player cites that over 1.5 million WOW players are from China alone, with the majority of these players being non-English. While their has been recent publicity about the gold farm factories in china, it by no means justifies thinking that every Chinese or non-English speaking player is a gold farmer.
This WOW player states that he does not know how to stop this racial discrimination, but believes if people could just try to keep a more open mind and trust people a little more; this would go along way to bring some racial harmony to WOW and the World in general. |
