2025/12/19 by Liu, Jieyu
#Chinese Video Games #Discourse Analysis #Game Boosting #Game Labor #Game Representation #Gold Farming #gamevironments
paper · doi:10.48783/gameviron.v23i23.285
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.