This Right Way to Play. Western Players’ Appropriation and Reevaluation of Gold Farming in the Chinese Video Game Genshin Impact

Abstract

The recent success of Chinese video games in the global market has drawn different businesses into the game industry, namely via game boosting. As a service to help new players in a game gain advantages against other players, game boosting, with its recent surge, contributes to the long-standing debate about game labor. Specifically, since Chinese workers and games are an inseparable part of the game boosting, in this paper I ask how this service adds to and complicates the racial discrimination demonstrated by the Chinese game labor in Chinese gold farming in the past. I offer a research design to first conduct a discourse analysis of the advertisements from three boosting platforms: Skycoach  and LegionFarm Carry (LFCarry) from the West, and Taobao from China. These platforms offer services for the Chinese video game Genshin Impact (2020). Then, I analyze customer reviews of these boosting services. I compare how power is distributed among companies, game boosters, and customers in both Western and Chinese contexts to reevaluate game labor under a critical racial lens. I argue that Western companies, game boosters, and customers increasingly frame game boosting as a form of skill-based advancement rather than as repetitive, low-skill labor. This reframing produces a colorblind discourse that overlooks the racialized history of digital labor, promoting narratives of equal opportunity while avoiding confronting the violence and discrimination historically faced by Chinese gold farmers.