“Ready worker two”: Gendered labor regime of platform-based game work in China

Abstract

This study delves into the gendered labor regime of platform game work in China, a burgeoning remote platform economy connecting customers with workers for entertainment or gameplay assistance. It reveals that offline gender divisions persistently seep into and solidify the logic of gender discipline in online gaming, channeling women into service-centric roles that face devaluation. Beyond the overt obstacles hindering women from lucrative gaming tasks, their marginalized position is intertwined with diminished gaming capital in team-based competitive gameplay, a factor frequently misinterpreted as “gaming skill.” Even ostensibly neutral policy moves have pronounced gendered implications, as gaming platforms, wary of governmental repercussions, strategically diminish the prominence of feminine-presenting workers. By elucidating the multifaceted ways women are culturally, socially, and algorithmically marginalized within the gaming service supply chain, this study enriches the growing body of literature on the intersectionality within the platform workforce.

“Why would someone hire a guy for that?” This is an immediate response by a game worker, Ryan, when asked why he never tried game companionship, an emerging video game cloudwork through which gig workers get paid for playing team-based online games with clients. Even as female gamers become a growing force in the global video game landscape—particularly in China, where online competitive games are a mainstay—the last decade has witnessed the crystallization of a new gendered regime of precarious labor. This not only accentuates the gender divide in the global platform workforce but also challenges the queering potential of video gaming.

This study derives from a multi-year ethnography of platform game work in China (Zhao, 2023), which encompasses a wide spectrum of online gaming services, from live game streaming and paid boosting to game companionship, aligning customers’ needs with workers who provide entertainment or assist play. Over the past decade, these platform-mediated game services have engaged over seven million Chinese workers, a significant portion of whom are working-class women facing discriminatory hiring in the labor market. Far from being a niche in the gaming world, platform game work has become a hallmark of China’s video game industry, steadily gaining traction in a planetary market.

The commodification of this burgeoning gaming field has put forth a set of empirical conundrums and contradictions not sufficiently addressed by game studies, feminist studies, or platform economy research. Notably, the increasing presence of female gamers in competitive arenas coincides with the intensification of gender-based divisions and the consolidation of women’s work in platform gaming jobs. This article thus chronicles the mechanism through which women platform workers are culturally, socially, and algorithmically disadvantaged in the whole service supply chain of platform game work. Ultimately, women in this industry become more informal, invisible, and vulnerable.

This research enriches the growing body of literature on the intersectionality within the platform workforce (Christin and Lu, 2023; Kneese et al., 2022; Milkman et al., 2021), with a particular focus on remote workers. While research on the platform economy tends to gravitate toward securing legal protections for platform workers that are equivalent to those of formal employees (Adams et al., 2018; Xiao, 2019), this study cautions against such a singular path of legality, which might alienate the large number of gig workers who are excluded from mainstream platforms and whom the public may not even recognize as genuine workers deserving of serious consideration.

Gendered labor beyond game development and conventional platform cloudwork

Gender is an unavoidable issue in the game industry, with sexism and heteronormativity baked into the processes of rare material extraction, game development, and commodification, as evidenced by a string of cases ranging from Gamergate to the Activision Blizzard scandal (Mortensen, 2018). Such gender dynamics also manifest in the gamer community’s structure. Although the number of female gamers worldwide has experienced explosive growth, women are less likely to identify as the prototypical hardcore “gamer” (Chess, 2017; Stone, 2019), have less and more fragmented gaming time (Shen et al., 2016), and tend to self-select into genres perceived as less competitive and more aligned with feminine traits (Cummings, 2018).

While much research has been dedicated to female gamers or developers, there’s a noticeable oversight of the rapidly growing intersection where gaming skills and relationships are aggressively commodified and platformized. Past dialogues about the uncompensated work of “playbors” have shattered the dichotomy between game consumers and game-makers (Dyer-Witheford and Peuter, 2009; Zhang and Fung, 2014), but still, they lack a systematic and intersectional investigation of the labor conditions of workers involved in productive gameplay. Playbors, such as those involved in game modifications, primarily identify as hobbyists who willingly contribute their labor of love. Only recently have a select few begun to monetize their expertise (Walsdorff, 2022). However, a significant segment of game service workers has a pronounced sense of their worker identity. For many, gaming-related earnings aren’t just supplementary but have evolved into a crucial financial backbone.

The limited theoretical and empirical exploration of video game service work finds a counterpoint in the study of gender and sexuality within game live streaming. Here, scholars have shed light on gendered performances, gender-based harassment, and behind-the-camera labor of live streamers (Ruberg, 2021; Ruberg and Brewer, 2022; Ruberg et al., 2019; Tran, 2022). The rise of live streaming work testifies to the myriad ways feminized emotional and communicative labor was embedded into game entertainment.

This research endeavors to deepen these discussions via three novel approaches. First, it enriches the category of platformed gaming labor through a deep investigation of the Chinese video game market, currently the world’s most mature and versatile platform gaming field. The plethora of gaming service labor and the different levels of femininity and masculinity associated with each activity, such as character leveling, map unlocking, weapon trading, and account renting, serve as fertile grounds for examining the solidification or deconstruction of gendered labor divisions. Second, rather than analyzing gender minorities within a specific gaming segment, it scrutinizes the production and valorization of women’s gaming work across diverse gaming areas, necessitating a more expansive lens than earlier research. Most crucially, it uncovers multiple intertwined mechanisms through which the feminization of specific gameplay labor translates into pronounced labor market disadvantages. It effectively ties the marginalization of female workers to social factors typically not considered in game studies.

Meanwhile, uncovering the gendered labor regime of platform game work contributes to the emerging critical studies of remote platform work or cloudwork (Graham and Ferrari, 2022). Globally, it was estimated that as many as 70 million workers have joined labor platforms that provide remote platform work (Wood et al., 2019). A cross-national study indicates that compared with geographically tethered or onsite gigs, remote gig workers tend to overwork and experience more sleep deprivation and exhaustion resulting from their weak structural power versus clients (Wood et al., 2019). The high demand for artificial intelligence, under the paradox of “the last mile of automation,” could possibly give rise to more types of remote gigs to supplement the machine in the future (Posada, 2022; Shestakofsky, 2017).

Global cloudwork is another gendered terrain. Compared with onsite platform work such as ride-hailing and food delivery, platform cloudwork attracts a significantly higher proportion of women workers due to its lower entry barrier and alignment with their domestic caregiving responsibilities (Gray and Suri, 2019; Kneese et al., 2022). For instance, online tutoring is a giant magnet for many suburban women seeking a safer career option (Lin, 2021). Current studies on remote platform work often view it through the prism of digital freelancing (Demirel et al., 2021) or MTurk-like microwork (Irani, 2015). Platform gaming work lies somewhat between the two polar, melding the flexible entrepreneurial dimension and the on-demand piece rate system. Therefore, incorporating platform gaming into the discussion enriches our understanding of how the proliferation of diverse forms of platform cloudwork might shift the gender politics of the platform economy.

Data and method

This study draws upon a large project to analyze the social implications of platform-based gaming work in the global Sinophone space. It combines longitudinal interviews, participatory observation, and archival research from 2019 to 2022. The project is certified as exempt by the university Institutional Review Board.

Despite the travel and economic challenges posed by coronavirus disease (COVID)-19, I was able to conduct what cultural anthropologists term “patchwork ethnography” (Fratini et al., 2022) both across various regions in China and virtually. My onsite fieldwork spanned seven cities in the summer of 2019 and from late 2020 to early 2022. I lived in a working-class neighborhood in Shanghai densely populated by gig workers and used it as a base to travel to other sites. Another crucial field site for this study was a large cybercafe in Kunshan, an adjacent county-level city, known for its substantial migrant worker community. Overall, I conducted in-depth interviews with 92 respondents situated in different positions in the game service industry. They include 53 game service workers, 13 veteran gamers, 11 game developers and marketers, eight employees from gaming platforms, studios, and guilds, three game journalists, two cybercafe administrators, and two policymakers. Beyond securing their consent, I ensured that all game service workers were compensated at their regular hourly rate to offset any potential loss of income during the interview process.

My analysis also hinges upon the virtual ethnography of dozens of digital gaming platforms, video games, and hundreds of gaming-related chat groups. A Chinese Android phone was purchased to download approximately 100 local gaming applications, many of them not available in the Apple Store, enhancing the breadth of this research. For 3 years, I immersed myself in these digital environments as a veteran gamer, a vlogger, and a client seeking gaming services, closely observing the ever-evolving platform architecture and regulatory landscape.

This study employs the grounded theory approach to develop theoretical frameworks and new rounds of empirical investigation, a method increasingly adopted by game studies (Cote, 2017). The coding process was conducted using the MAXQDA software, which revealed gender as a particularly prominent element across all aspects of the data. The subsequent analysis is thus derived from an extensive compilation of interview transcripts, fieldnotes, photographs, and screenshots from the fieldwork.

Cross-sector division: “companion women” and “boosting men”

The gendered labor regime of China’s platform game work is blatantly manifested in gender division across different gaming categories. Among the three gaming services analyzed, live streaming boasts the most gender-equitable participation, whereas boosting and companionship display a pronounced gender imbalance. This disparity can be attributed to the emotional demands associated with each task. Boosting, where a worker elevates a client’s gaming account on their behalf, requires minimal emotional interaction. Conversely, companionship, which involves playing games alongside clients, necessitates significant non-gaming commitments, while live streaming occupies a middle ground. As the need for non-gaming interactions increases, there’s a distinct uptick in female participation and a corresponding decrease in male participation.

Anyone with even a passing observation of the Chinese game industry can encounter numerous discussions of gender and sexuality on various social media. A post on Zhihu, the biggest Q&A website in China, reveals the dominant logic of gender division of platform game work. Of the 13 responses to a question about whether it is more profitable for women to engage in game boosting or companion, nine persuaded the questioner to engage in “low-skilled” companion, which is profitable “as long as you can chat.” One of the answers even summarized the gendered labor division with a Chinese limerick: “Female companion, male booster, earning money without a say; female booster, male companion, going bankrupt in a day” (Fieldnotes, March 2021).

Of the 53 platform game workers I reached out to, only two were competitive female boosters, named May and Xiaoci, both working independently without any support from co-workers. More revealing episodes happened during two online interviews with male workers; when I had just started talking to the respondents, they both interrupted to ask me if I planned to work as a companion, as if this is the default position of people with a feminine voice.

Almost all female workers I met, especially the full-time ones, could be considered long-time gamers; only one started playing games exclusively for income, and all the others were exposed to video games as late as adolescence. But even women with good gaming skills tend to engage in live streaming and game companionship under social pressure. In the course of their work, they are also expected by male clients to provide entertainment performances, psychological support, or sexual services outside of playing games. Those who refuse to conform to gender norms receive a penalty of getting less attention. JS tried live streaming for a while after losing her media job during the early days of the pandemic, but the earnings were not satisfactory:

I tried live game streaming last year, opening the microphone without showing my face, but the attention and online traffic were very limited, probably because I did not know how to market myself. My male friends would advise me: you must dress up a little, wear makeup, and speak in a softer and girly voice so that more men will enjoy watching . . . I also observed some Honor of Kings streamers. If a male streamer receives many gifts, they will generally thank the audience by saying, “I can coach you to level up in games,” but if the streamer is female, they will basically say, “You can add my private WeChat,” and some gamers will even ask the streamer to send personal photos. (Interview, October 2021)

Sake has been playing competitive multiplayer games and first-person shooters since elementary school. Even though she is skilled enough to handle complex in-game tasks, male customers still treat her like a waitress and sometimes even as a “therapist.” Since the price of counseling is much higher than that of game companionship, Sake felt she was taken advantage of by these clients (Interview, May 2020).

The intensive emotional labor of female companions is also reflected in the fact that they must learn how to construct interaction rituals with men of diverse backgrounds, a phenomenon repeatedly depicted by research on interactive service industries (Hanser, 2008; Hoang, 2015). Due to the difficulty of reclaiming loss from underpaid orders, the ability to identify different customer types and single out unscrupulous clients is directly linked to income. My interviewees would complain about male clients who pretend to be rich but do not pay. In their opinion, the more clients show off how rich they are as a marker of masculinity, the more likely it is that they are indebted and would eventually refuse to pay:

I am very annoyed with male customers pretending to be rich in front of me. I once had a client who claimed to do multi-million dollar business and ended up asking me at the end of the order if I could give him a discount next time. These people just think, “Aren’t you also having fun playing games with me? We are so familiar with each other; why do you need to be so calculating about money?” It was me providing the service, and I couldn’t throw a tantrum, so I had to pretend to be happy. (Interview, August 2020)

Xiaoci, one of the two female competitive boosters and also a companion, has almost given up on male clients for their repeated non-payment.

Most of my customers are women, mainly because men like to “run” orders (non-payment). I met many people who did not pay, and when I asked for payment, they just blacklisted me. There is no channel to defend the rights in this situation, and at most, I can warn others. For example, if a client contacted me via Xiaohongshu and failed to pay, I would expose their information on the platform as a cautionary note for my peers. (Interview, April 2022)

To the other competitive booster May, even though blatant sexist behavior was uncommon in her daily work, many people expressed their inability to understand her engaging in boosting and tried to discourage it. To reduce direct interaction with clients, May prefers to sell high-level accounts that she levels up directly rather than providing customized account services, which makes less money than regular boosting (Interview, October 2021).

Within sector division: masculinized compassion and feminized boosting

From entertainment to technical companionship

Even women end up in the same game sector as men, they get sorted into particular types of labor associated with women’s work. The divergence between entertainment and technical companion, or companion and coaching over the past 5 years, reflects the continuous production of women’s gaming work. Although both belong to companionship, the priorities of entertainment and technical companions are very different. The primary duty of the entertainment companion is to spice up the atmosphere during the gameplay; the technical companion’s task is mainly to help the client get a better ranking in the game through group combat, which generally requires a higher level of gaming skills.

This binary division between entertainment and technical companionship has been inherited from the much more mature field of live game streaming, where entertainment streamers generally chat while playing games, while technical counterparts provide technical explanations alongside gameplay. Although the former is predominantly female and the latter is predominantly male, this division is constantly challenged; for example, I met a female technical streamer and was presented with a successful case of a male entertainment streamer by a user experience researcher of a leading game studio. Searching for Chinese news, one could also find much positive coverage of the rise of skilled female streamers, which applauded them for breaking the gender stereotype.

However, when the division of entertainment and technique migrates to gaming companionship, its binary gender presuppositions are significantly enhanced. Entertainment companion is considered purely female labor by most gamers, and because of this, I have not met any males who claim to be entertainment workers. Of the 14 women I know who have worked as game companions, only three have taken competitive orders.

Entertainment and technical companions are also strictly separated in the recruitment ads of game studios. For instance, on a game studio listing on Baidu, the hourly pay for entertainment companions ranges from 35 to 50 yuan, whereas technical roles command 60–120 yuan—roughly double. Even though both roles are theoretically open to all genders, the studio explicitly mentions not hiring male entertainment companions. An informant, Xiaoke, who ran a game studio, implemented an even more gender-specific division of labor: for a single entertainment order, a male employee handles the gameplay while a female colleague manages all communication. Together, they collaborate to masquerade as a singular female worker.

This gender division of labor is also a testament to the stringent work standards of entertainment companions, who must be able to communicate and play games well. Female companions often still need to help clients complete coaching tasks. Otherwise, they are prone to non-payment and bad reviews. To sustain their performance, most companions, including entertainment ones, spend extra time practicing their gaming skills.

You have to make your account look good. After all, many people play the game to improve their performance. You have to analyze the game to improve your skills and excel at it after thousands of game rounds. I sometimes play by myself, sometimes with other companions to play in a team . . . But for the companion sector, I personally feel that men are more popular, and I feel that my male fellows earn more than I do when compared. They receive more orders, as many bosses think men’s gaming skills are better. (Interview with Chixiao, December 2020)

Kiara, a female companion, once angrily described the intense, unrewarding and unpleasant work experience on her WeChat account:

To be a female game companion, you are expected to sing well, speak well, chat well, and play well, with a nice-looking face and a sweet voice. You’d better get used to sexual harassment, male bosses asking for personal photos, and sending vulgar comments. You should always compliment your bosses’ gaming skills, make them feel good, and never hurt their self-esteem. You should not ask your bosses for unpaid money cos they will countersue you on the platform. You are expected to set a cheap hourly rate and offer some discounts. Otherwise, they’ll block you! These are all the assholes I have met online! (Kiara’s post, November 2019)

Yet, the demanding nature of entertainment companionship is largely shunned by male respondents. In my fieldwork, only one worker explicitly acknowledged the presence of highly skilled women in this domain. Most male participants seemed to hold the belief that female companions, even with limited gaming skills, can still profit as long as they can “chat.”

Just think about it, if a woman takes the order, she doesn’t need much gaming skills because, after all, if a man places an order for a woman, it’s certainly not to win the game. If this is the case, why didn’t he order male companions, right? (Interview with Dafeng, May 2021)

Some interviewees accuse the platform of favoring women and being unfair to men. For example, Max argues that women companions are at a natural advantage as they are unlikely to receive mistreatment from clients (Interview, August 2020). Jiaoyi, a part-time companion who is studying eSports management, believes in most companion platforms:

. . . female companions without good gaming skills can set a very expensive rate for themselves . . . The circle of companions is very chaotic because it is mainly dominated by female companions. They have a messy circle, so we have our own social circle of all-men companions. (Interview, May 2020)

Male companions overwhelmingly identify themselves as skilled workers, a subjectivity that legitimizes the hierarchy of companion labor. For example, Awen, who works as a companion and booster, downplayed the significance of background labor, asserting that his role as a technical companion does not necessitate extra effort in nurturing client relationships (Interview, March 2021). Hunter, a full-time technical companion, when informed about some men’s hesitance toward companionship, contended that he merely needs to excel in the game without the added pressure to appease clients (Interview, September 2021). Similarly, Wenjun stated, “As long as you play well, you don’t even need to open your microphone during the order” (Interview, April 2021). For game coaches, not having to do the feminized emotional labor of catering to clients is a solid affirmation of their hardcore gaming expertise.

In addition, prices for a technical companion are generally standardized and less cyclical. As emotional interactions are difficult to quantify, entertainment companions have seen their revenues dramatically shrink when COVID-19 hit China. KS, for example, mentioned that since 2020, there have been more and more bargaining bosses. The unit price she receives has been discounted, while the client requests have not decreased, so she still “has to sing and play games at the same time” (Interview, November 2020).

Daigan: the feminization of boosting

Since the emergence of more mixed-genre games in the Chinese market in 2020, with the open-world game Genshin Impact as the most salient example, there has been a trend of feminization within classic boosting, mainly manifested in the burgeoning popularity of a variant of boosting labor called Daigan. Contrary to the skill-intensive nature of traditional boosting, Daigan emphasizes the arduous and repetitive tasks such as gathering in-game materials, unlocking maps, or daily quest completions, requiring extended play durations. The term “Daigan” is a play on words, suggesting the use of one’s “liver (gan)” in the boosting process. This implies that the worker is investing intense bodily effort, potentially detrimental to their liver health, to accomplish in-game objectives.

In the context of Genshin Impact, although the developer offers in-app purchases for premium content, the game requires much effort to unlock maps and upgrade characters and weapons. The absence of an in-game trading system means traditional gold farming methods, such as buying and selling in-game gear, are unfeasible. Consequently, many players eager to engage with the game but lacking the time for account upgrades seek out individuals on major social media platforms to access and enhance their accounts on their behalf.

Sociological studies done on multiple occupational sectors, notably the healthcare industry, have found that workplace feminization measured by the increase in the proportion of female workers in an industry, is one of the most crucial predictors of wage devaluation (Levanon et al., 2009; Mandel, 2013; Winant, 2021). Daigan as the feminization of boosting is no exception. There is no uniform price for daigan, and the average price varies from time to time and from platform to platform, but the major commonality is the extremely meager, almost self-exploitative pay. In 2021, 10 yuan per hour was already a good income regardless of platforms, the worker’s gender, and gaming experience, and 5 yuan per hour is the most common hourly rate. Some clients even looked for “free boosters” on social media based on the shaky grounds that workers would naturally get a mental “reward” from playing the game and need no extra monetary compensation. This reasoning could date back to the practice of free playbors who voluntarily participate in game companies’ product modification and testing (Kücklich, 2005; Scholz, 2012).

Ironically, none of the daigan boosters said they got pure playful fun from such labor. Pikachu, a nursing student in a Shanghai vocational school, complained that he initially wanted to earn pocket money through boosting, yet after taking up the job for a while, he realized it had eaten up all his free time and deeply regretted it. He even canceled some of the orders clients had already placed (Interview, October 2021).

The feminization of daigan is also reflected in the segregation of laboring platforms. Compared with major boosting platforms, daigan workers are more likely to gather on Idle Fish, Douban, and Xiaohongshu, non-gaming sites with a high percentage of women. And the more platforms with a large proportion of women, the lower the average price of daigan. Among the platforms I observed, Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like platform with 90% of female users (Zhang, 2022), has the lowest price. For instance, for the same task of unlocking the game map, the average unit price of Xiaohongshu is 5–6 yuan lower than that of Sina Weibo, a gender-balanced platform. Mushroom, a female booster for the game Sky: Children of the Light, told me:

The higher daigan price on Weibo is due to the fact that from the very beginning, it was a platform for the purpose of pure trading. The unit price of the order is calculated according to the cost of time and energy, and then we refer to each other’s prices to set our pricing structure. In the case of Xiaohongshu, however, it may be that everyone wants to earn some extra money and there is no uniform standard, so the price is lower. There are also more student clients in Xiaohongshu who couldn’t afford a high daigan price. In addition, when the Sky game was first launched, there were few workers, and then the ratio of workers and customers became higher and higher, so the price experienced a downward trend. (Interview, April 2022)

Mushroom’s observations highlight another key dimension: the rapid temporal depreciation of daigan labor. Like the ebb and flow of seasonal labor, summer breaks typically spell a downturn for platform game orders. With student workers entering the gig economy, they vie with full-time workers for a finite customer base, leading to drastic price cuts for daigan services (Figure 1). Once the holiday season concludes, previously slashed prices rarely return to their former rates, given that clients have grown accustomed to these reduced rates.

Figure 1.

Search results for Daigan at Xiaohongshu yielded mostly Genshin Impact orders.

A booster for Genshin Impact named Fish shared an illustrative example. When she initially started offering daigan services for a rare weapon—a task that required continuous online presence over several days—her listed rate on Idle Fish was 80 yuan. However, the influx of lower-priced competitors soon drove the average rate down to 50 yuan. In-game items like wood saw an even steeper price decline, with values dropping by over two-thirds. When I revisited Idle Fish in early 2022 to check the rate for that same weapon, the median offer had further decreased to a mere 40 yuan.

Gaming skill or capital? The devaluation of feminized game labor

In addition to entrenched stereotypes about women’s roles in platform gaming, the marginalization of female workers is also linked to the often misunderstood concept of gaming skills. Contrary to the widespread belief that superior gaming skills inevitably lead to enhanced in-game performance, this doesn’t necessarily hold true for team-based competitive games. Especially for games popular in the Chinese market, as a player’s win rate climbs, the game’s rebalancing algorithm often pits them against increasingly skilled opponents while pairing them with less proficient teammates. This can lead to situations where, despite an individual’s high skill level, they are set up for failure.

Both workers I spoke to, and discussions on social media consistently pointed out that solo players, or those who “single-rank” using gaming terminology, often find it challenging to progress in the higher stages of the game. Some even report being matched with “ghost” accounts—players who log in but don’t actively participate in the game—for various reasons, effectively setting up a skewed match of 4 versus 5 or even 3 versus 5. Consequently, the frustrating scenario of “earning the MVP title while enduring a decisive loss” becomes a frequent ordeal for a lone worker. Therefore, most technical boosters and companions need a reliable “fleet,” that is, skilled friends or coworkers who can play together to circumvent the algorithmic matching and improve the winning rate.

The ability to successfully secure a fleet has emerged as a pivotal factor in differentiating the gaming capital between workers of different genders. Men who engage in competitive boosting often have access to online fleets through various chat groups made up of fellow coworkers. When they secure an order, they’ll rally teammates from these groups, and those with concurrent orders will collaborate to earn their wages. As SC shared, he never faces a challenge when it comes to finding a fleet:

No team to complete the order affects your efficiency. It is impossible for a person to play with four bosses. Did you ask me how to find teammates? Well, I certainly have lots of group chats and software. For example, you can use TT Voice software to find your teammates. Publish the room inside the software, and whoever meets my requirements can be teamed up. I will let them send screenshots of their in-game level plus a time stamp to confirm their identity; if they cannot be verified, I will kick them out and locate newer ones. (Interview, December 2021)

In stark contrast, female workers often express their challenges in securing a reliable fleet. This impediment in accessing gaming capital directly influences their choice of gaming services. Mushroom told me she has a good record of the Honor of Kings, but after witnessing too many male gamers harassing and cursing teammates, she decided not to be a competitive booster. Instead, she preferred to focus on daigan tasks that she could tackle solo, catering to student clientele who have limited time for in-game resource gathering:

For me personally, in a competitive game like the Kings, getting on the scoreboard is not entirely up to you, and there is also the factor of teammates. It is insanely difficult to get on the top of the high tier if you are boosting by yourself and there is no fleet. To be fully responsible to my clients, I would not choose such a game to boost. (Interview, April 2022)

The nature of social networks within the gaming community highlights pronounced gender disparities. This is supported by my interview recruitment process, where 12 male gig game workers were introduced to me by my gamer friends or other gig workers. For example, I first met Xuejun, a booster in Changzhou, Jiangsu, who quickly invited Junyi, another booster, and Justin, a live streamer and a guild entrepreneur, to the same coffee shop in which we had a whole afternoon conversation. The three of them often hang out in the city and visit each other’s workplaces. However, connections among female workers were sparse; only five were introduced through mutual contacts, and they were unfamiliar with each other.

Online networking among male workers also tends to be more robust, facilitating a faster reputation-building process that often translates to increased earnings. Hunter, for instance, is well-acquainted with several game streamers who promote his services at no charge. This exposure has kept his order books full. Similarly, another part-time competitive booster and boxing coach Ryan, despite lacking offline connections, has nurtured an expansive online network through his years in the industry, enough to secure him a stable income.

Tien’s perspective, rooted in her experiences as a long-standing Dota player, illuminates another facet of this gendered disparity. She suggests that women’s limited exposure to gaming discussions in everyday social interactions impacts their gaming capital. Conversations revolving around gaming topics like “Do you play Dota?” rarely transpire among women unless in specific settings, such as eSports clubs. Tien’s participation in her university’s eSports club was one such exception, where she interacted predominantly with male members. Yet, upon her graduation, these discussions dwindled. In my interactions, a mere three female respondents reported having gaming enthusiasts in their immediate social circles. Among them, only one had the luxury of leveraging a male friend’s assistance with boosting tasks during her travels.

In several male-dominated environments I encountered, competitive gaming frequently became the topic of conversation, subtly affirming the gaming identity of many working-class men engaged in platform game work. For instance, at Ryan’s boxing gym, where he was surrounded by fellow male coaches in their early 20s, online gaming was a recurring theme. I witnessed Ryan frequently discussing his gaming pursuits and the orders he juggled. On one occasion, a fellow coach humorously offered to help Ryan with an order before he was scheduled to lead a boxing session.

In addition to workplace interactions, the freedom of taking orders in Internet cafes is also highly gendered. Among my interviewees, seven male workers have taken orders or streamed games regularly in cybercafes. In contrast, all female participants restricted their gaming to private spaces like homes or dormitories. Several women expressed feelings of isolation stemming from their remote working conditions. For instance, Ann found herself caught in a loop of working from home, facing dwindling offline interactions, and feeling constrained in her professional options. Xunzi’s experience resonated similarly; despite living in Nanjing’s bustling center, she couldn’t remember the last time she went dining or shopping. However, her male partner M, also a game companion, often visited the Internet cafe downstairs to surf and take orders.

At a 24/7 Internet café where I did participatory observation, I only encountered five women throughout, two of whom were the receptionist and her underage daughter, two were factory workers who came to print materials, and only one was in the room for gaming. My presence was often met with surprise and intrigue by gamers as I assisted in delivering food and managing payments. The gender disparity extended to restroom usage. The two gendered bathrooms were frequently occupied by men, evident from the cigarette remnants littering the floor. Even the membership group of the cybercafé, which offered discounts, was rife with sexist humor. The female receptionist had protested against inappropriate jokes directed at her, only to be disregarded. The café’s decision to hire a female administrator, ostensibly to attract more male members, further highlighted the gendered dynamics at play (Figure 2). This overarching environment of exclusion effectively hinders women gamers and workers from harnessing physical spaces to enhance their gaming capital (Fieldnotes, September to December 2021).

Figure 2.

Main room of the cyber cafe in Kunshan.

The gendered crackdown on game companionship

In September 2021, Chinese authorities launched the harshest crackdown on game companion in the past 5 years. Seven platforms were taken off major app stores and were not restored until mid-2022. In almost every wave of crackdown on the companion sector, the official explanation was to “fight against pornography and illegality,” a pocket crime to mobilize the masses since the turn of the century.

The sex industry in China is strictly forbidden and therefore has long operated underground, in most places relying upon the payment of protection fees to gain shelter from local authorities. The platform economy has provided some ease for sex workers to diversify income sources in many countries (Rand, 2019; Selena the Stripper, 2021; Swords et al., 2023), and China is no exception. The game service industry can be a cover for the sex industry, as gaming platforms mostly have voice chat features, where workers can engage in private erotic broadcasts after algorithmic matching. According to my observation of online companion chat groups, small agents that organize cam workers would also use codenames such as “non-green order” to solicit business. Since video gaming is often associated with teenage addiction, the government’s crackdown on game companionship also easily won support from the general public. Almost all interviewees, except for members of industry associations, felt that the government crackdown on game companionship was well justified.

The majority of the men I interviewed held the impression that a significant number of female companions were engaged in trading sex, as they commonly used the term “luan,” which translates to “chaotic,” to describe the companion sector, which exacerbated the double stigma against sex work and entertainment companionship. The perception of game companionship as disguised sex work worsens the widespread sexual harassment of feminine-presenting workers. Each female companion I spoke to recounted experiences of verbal abuse from male clients. Yet, platforms, in their bid to attract users, frequently sided with the client. For instance, Dory’s confrontation with a persistently inappropriate client resulted in her account being promptly suspended after he reported her (Interview, September 2020). Sake reported a male customer to the platform who tried to seek “offline service,” at first, it worked. But soon, the perpetrator “paid 50 yuan to unblock his account and came back” (Interview, May 2020). Such incidents bolster the misguided belief, expressed by a male worker, that women in such roles ought to be “mentally prepared” for harassment. This dual stigmatization causes many women to keep their companion work a secret, further isolating them when their rights are infringed upon.

The crackdown on game companionship and the resultant platform responses present pronounced gendered consequences. Even though major platform closures don’t signify the doomsday of the companion industry, it does nudge the sector toward informality. While women have numerous avenues to generate income outside gaming platforms, they are rendered more susceptible within the informal gaming market due to their lower social capital and the relentless threat of harassment. Chichi, for instance, highlighted how Bixin’s pivot significantly affected her earnings, necessitating her search for alternative revenue streams (Interview, September 2021). The day major platforms were taken down, I was in the cyber cafe watching a male worker playing companion orders. Since he never took orders from platforms, he showed a full attitude of nonchalance when I anxiously announced the news.

In addition, Bixin’s strategic shift post the state crackdown underscores its internalized stigma toward feminized companion labor. Around 2020, Bixin began positioning itself as a purveyor of professional eSports services. This transformation was further emphasized when they changed their platform’s title from “Bixin Companion” to “Bixin Coach.” In a bid to solidify this image, Bixin introduced the “eSports parachute” initiative in August 2021. This program, catering to both current and former eSports athletes, was proclaimed as a way to diversify post-retirement opportunities for these professionals.

After 2015, China experienced a surge in women’s eSports events. However, these tournaments were short-lived, enduring merely a couple of years due to inadequate viewer interest and financial backing (Yang, 2021). Until 2021, only one women’s eSports team left in China, and it also went in the direction of entertainment. As a result, the eSports athletes that can be spotted on Bixin are exclusively young men.

Furthermore, these eSports athletes operate in a different realm compared with other workers on Bixin. They benefit from an algorithmic escalator, placing them higher in rankings and essentially overshadowing the predominantly female entertainment companions. Post the crackdown, Bixin seemed to further de-prioritize its entertainment companion section, positioning male eSports players at the forefront (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

A month after the 2021 crackdown, three retired eSports athletes were ranked higher than a female companion profile in Bixin’s game companion search interface.

I had the opportunity to interview Xiaojia, a former eSports athlete, in the aftermath of Bixin’s overhaul. A full-time coach for an eSports team, Xiaojia has been accepting platform orders for over 4 years. He confirmed that the crackdown had a minimal impact on him. Moreover, he candidly admitted that Bixin has been favoring professional players by offering them better promotional opportunities:

The eSports athlete section has been launched for quite a long time, but only recently has the platform emphasized elevating our players’ exposure, so I also recommended my former teammates apply. I feel like Bixin is also using professionalism to deal with the pressure of regulation. With the eSports player title, it became easier to take orders, as I could feel the number of orders going up. (Interview, September 2021)

Xiaojia’s answer also vividly demonstrates how the platform can exploit the divergence of interests within gig game laborers. Amid external regulatory pressures, the platform strategically aligns with those workers possessing greater gaming capital, viewing them as assets to be embraced and showcased. Conversely, entertainment companions, primarily feminine-presenting workers, become the expendable group, marginalized and pushed into less visible and more vulnerable spaces.

Conclusion: from “ready player two” to “ready worker two”

This study reveals multiple circuits of marginalization of women platform gaming workers in China. It is reflected in the division of gaming labor, with women being repeatedly pushed into roles deemed women’s work, such as entertainment-focused game companionship, and low-skilled, repetitive collection tasks that set them apart from high-skilled male laborers.

In lieu of a robust exclusionary discourse, the conditions of female platform game workers are also tied to “gaming skill,” an ostensibly neutral term backed by social capital. Limited training opportunities and a scarcity of a supportive gaming network further hinder women from scaling the competitive ladder. Without the cushion of offline friendships, female gamers often confront online spaces rife with misogyny and harassment. Consequently, even the most skilled female players frequently opt for solo ventures, resulting in diminished earnings, thus cementing the gender disparity in the sector.

Even seemingly neutral policy moves could produce gendered outcomes. In response to the Chinese government’s crackdown on companion platforms in the fall of 2021, gaming platforms have emphasized skill-sharing services tailored for eSports athletes to avoid the risk of being seen as a disguised sex industry, which significantly reduces the visibility of female companions on platforms and further deepens the stigma against female gaming service providers. The tendency for male workers to be less attached to digital platforms also leaves women to endure a higher financial cost amid the state crackdown.

Inspired by the new wave of the Chinese feminist movement, women and gender non-conforming gamers have started carving out their own niches within the digital space. These burgeoning online communities, established since 2020, offer a sanctuary from the cishet-dominated gaming world. In some gender-inclusive environments, women take the initiative to discuss their favorite games, form online battle teams, or write video game guides. However, there is still mountainous social pressure for women to monetize gameplay. One root of this is that a feminine presenting worker is not considered to be able to make money from their “gaming skills” alone, and if they make a decent amount of money from playing games, it must be for reasons other than skill, a contested and relational notion under the veneer of objectivity. Shira Chess (2017) uses Player Two to refer to the designed identity of the female player community, a disciplinary process that encodes casual recreational play as inherently feminine behavior. A similar mechanism is evident in platform game services, where the male gig game worker is seen as a prototypical skilled worker. They are more likely to locate information about game platforms and studios, have a broader network of peers and support, and are also more embedded in offline gaming spaces that are essential for extending social capital.

Women, however, are simply Worker Two, lonely intruders who bring other non-gaming skills into the bustling field. Their labor is more likely to be viewed by male-dominated clients as readily devaluable, or even as something that should be offered for free. Female platform game workers are considered digital sewers and weavers who rely on piecework wages at home, a secondary workforce to complement those factory-based production workers. Similar to those online store owners, rural e-commerce handicraft labor, fashion bloggers, and crowd workers, these digital laborers have collectively revived feminized craft labor practices since the 19th century (Duffy, 2017; Gray and Suri, 2019; Guan, 2020; Kneese et al., 2022; Lukács, 2020; Zhang, 2021).

The gendered discipline I address is not specific to China. My additional observations, including over a dozen gaming platforms in North America and other Asian regions since 2019, indicate this is a widespread phenomenon. For example, in Taiwan, gaming companions are explicitly marketed as “pretty girl companions.” Similarly, platforms in Taiwan and Malaysia, like PlayOne, Nicee, and Seek, not only replicate key features and interfaces of their Chinese counterparts but also predominantly employ young women who offer additional entertainment services, such as singing and chatting. Seek, Malaysia’s pioneering companion platform, candidly solicited female companions on Facebook, prominently listing “attractiveness” as a primary criterion. Since 2021, a clear distinction has emerged on the Silicon Valley-backed platform E-pal between technical and entertainment companions (Figure 4). Predictably, those identifying with coaching skills are predominantly male, and their rates are roughly triple those of standard entertainment companions.

Figure 4.

A masculine presenting game coach profile on E-pal.

The planetary diffusion of this gendered labor regime mirrors and intensifies the already ingrained gender divisions in the platform economy. Meanwhile, the continuous absorption of women workers into particular types of platform game work globally implies broader labor patterns that move past mere productive gameplay. This situation underscores the urgent need for broader interdisciplinary and cross-border approaches to elucidate the metamorphosis of gaming labor.