Gold Farming

Pink Slip is perpetually on the look out for odd jobs, so I was delighted to see a recent NY Times Magazine story by Julian Dibbell about the Chinese workers play online fantasy games for a living. They're able to make a living at it (if the equivalent of 30 cents an hour constitutes a living, even in China) because there are gamers willing to buy "game pieces" - coins of the fantasy world realm, magic weapons, jumps to higher game levels - that they'd find just too tedious to have to earn them on their own.

The Chinese laborers, called gold farmers, are experts at getting their characters (or avatars) to the upper reaches of the games they play. They specialize in games - the workers described in the article play World of Warcraft, which is played by over 8 million people around the world. (And to think that I don't know one of them.) In the World of Warcraft,

...players, in the guise of self-created avatars — night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters — battle their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning points for every monster slain and rising, over many months, from the game’s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the highest (70).

The points that gamers accrue let them buy "virtual gear" so that they can kill more monsters and keep rising to the next level.

In addition to companies that farm and sell gear, there are companies that a novice gamer can hire to play for them. A Chinese wizard logs on to your account and, for a small fee ($300) will play you up to the highest level. What might have taken you a few months will only take a few weeks.

Online retailers "sell" the points harvested by the Chinese gold farmers to American or European players who want to play at the highest levels, but don't want to bother with "the grind" (as it's termed) that lets you get there).

The gaming companies have rules about selling "virtual loot", and they do enforce crackdowns. Not surprisingly, the crackdowns are aimed at the gold farmers (who may get banned if their accounts are identified as farmers) and not the players who buy their produce in the market. That would be biting the hand, since the players - even the cheater-pants ones - are paying the gaming companies a nice fat fee in order to play.

And many/most players themselves oppose it as cheating. (They also oppose it because the game farming wizards are so good at raising the virtual playing field that they make it more difficult for newbie gamers to gain a foothold.) In any case, online gamers sometimes unite to go after the game farmers, killing them off virtually (which takes them out of play for a while, and may mean that they earn even less than $.30 an hour on that shift.)

Yet one more thankless task that gets outsourced. (And this is no small-time business.

Collectively they [the gold farms] employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items.

Gold farming operates under the same shabby labor standards that we all turn a blind eye to in exchange for being able to stuff our even-consuming maws with an endless amount of crap that we don't need. The wages are low, the hours are long, the employee housing (warehousing, maybe, but it's free) is miserable. Still, as for so many, it beats life on the farm or in the even more desperately poor parts of the country. And, as the article points out, unlike laboring in a cheap toy or a plastic American flag factory, the gold farmers do get some enjoyment factor out of their work and may, in fact, go off to play online games in their free time, too.

Still, there's something that seems so whipping-boy about the whole thing. We're rich, you're not, nyah, nyah.

Isn't the purpose of playing an online game to get good at it, to master it for yourself, to have your own fun?

It's one thing to outsource the low-end jobs that nobody wants (other than, of course, the low-end workers who hold them). That's the way of the global economy.

But outsourcing your fun and games? What's the world coming to?