Discrimination in the game world

Professor Nakamura's article "Race and Identity in Digital Media" talks about the racism that exists in the game world. Although it is claimed that the issue of racism has become better in the real world, many people still hold discriminated discussion in private (p1). Part of the private racism includes online racist microaggression. According to Nakamura, "online racist microagression is disembodied and occurs in an easily-escaped form, on a computer that can be turned off or walked away from" (p1). It is powerful because since people cannot see each others' faces, it is so easy to insult others without any consequence.

Neoliberalism is often used to justify racist acts since it claims that "social disadvantage is a result of an individual's failure to "make themselves" correctly, and that inequality is due to this poor personal choice rather than other people's prejudices against particular races, genders, sexualities, or class positions" (p3). The idea of Neoliberalism is similar to the concept in the modern world that the reason why minorities cannot get good jobs is because they don't try hard. It totally discounts the existence of white privilege. Although Neoliberalism claims that inequality is due to poor personal choices not the prejudices, it is clearly not the case in the game. According to Nakamura, girls often experience prejudices that "many female players adopt male avatars to avoid sexual harassment" ,and that they are often "unable to convince others that they are "real girls" (p3,4). Similar to girls, minorities often experience prejudice by the underrepresented of their images in the game. According to Nakamura, users of color and women are often forced to choose dominant images since their identities are underrepresented (p5).

In a more severe form of discrimination, minority players often receive insulting commends from other players based on their race. In Michael Kane's case, he is often insulted by the words "Mexican" and fucking Spic" since he is a famous Mexican player in the game Counter Strike(p5). In another example, Chinese people are being discriminated in World of Warcraft because of the gold farmers. Without taking into account of those Chinese who simply just want to play the game, people insult the ethnicity as a whole. This problem can even lead to real-life discrimination against Chinese people.

According to my experience, I have only experienced two major discrimination in real life. However, I realized there are a lot more racist commends when I watch Youtube videos that consist images of Asians. So my question for you all: have you seen any racist commends on Youtube and what are the videos about?