This Right Way to Play: Western Players' Appropriation and Reevaluation of Gold Farming in Genshin Impact

This paper examines how Western players, boosting platforms, and customers have reframed game boosting, a paid service that helps players advance in video games, within the context of Genshin Impact, a Chinese open-world action role-playing game released worldwide by miHoYo (later HoYoverse) in 2020. Its central argument is that Western companies, boosters, and customers increasingly present boosting as skill-based professional advancement rather than repetitive, low-skill labor. The author contends that this framing produces a colorblind discourse that obscures the racialized history of Chinese gold farming in World of Warcraft, where Chinese players were discriminated against and sometimes subjected to violence for similar paid services.

The study uses discourse analysis of advertisements from three boosting platforms, Skycoach and LegionFarm Carry (LFCarry) from the West and Taobao from China, alongside customer reviews drawn largely from Trustpilot. The comparison focuses on how power is distributed among companies, boosters, and customers in Western and Chinese contexts. Western platforms emphasize metrics such as skill level and efficiency, and reviewers adopt the same vocabulary, while Taobao listings describe Chinese "dailian" workers in plainer terms as manual, no-tricks grinding. The contrast highlights how language shapes whether the same labor is judged as cheating, play, or work.

The paper also situates these discourses within broader debates about game labor, drawing on scholars such as Lisa Nakamura, Tara Fickle, and Johan Huizinga, along with Chinese media research on how video games are framed as both social harm and national achievement. The author argues that Western boosting platforms, by redefining the activity, effectively determine who may be considered a legitimate professional and which playing practices count as acceptable. The study's findings are preliminary, and the analysis is limited to one game and three platforms.