Gold Farmers

followthethings.com
Money & Finance

In China, a new kind of factory hires people to play online games like World of Warcraft and Lineage and produce in-game currency, equipment, high-level characters and other virtual goods. Affluent gamers from Korea, Europe and America pay real money for these virtual goods to quickly raise their status in games. Jin’s research takes a close look at how these factories, commonly known as ‘gold farms’ organize the production and distribution of virtual goods (Source: admin 2011, np link).

[These] gold-farmers … amass virtual resources through MMO game-play for the purposes of re-selling the goods to gamers for real currency (Source: Walsh 2006, np link).

The transactions of virtual commodities are completed in the game world: after the seller receives the payment and the name and location of the avatar (virtual character) of the seller, one of the avatars of the seller will meet the avatar of the buyer and hand over the items ‘in person’ (Source: Jin 2006, np link).

Naked to the waist, lit cigarette dangling from his lips, a young Chinese worker in Zhejiang Province begins a tedious midnight shift at a factory. For the next 10 to 12 hours, he will grind out goods destined for a developed country. Only he is not making toys or shoes or plastic kitchen utensils. He’s playing a computer game. In the same shop, there might be half a dozen to 100 other employees. Across China, perhaps 100,000 more. Known as ‘gold farmers’, they slay pixilated monsters for a living.  They gather virtual currency or ‘gold’ in massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, EverQuest and Lineage, to trade for real money. They are like immigrant workers in the virtual world, says Ge Jin, and they arouse some of the same anxieties (Source: Kiderra 2007, np link).

Ge Jin had heard that people in China play ‘World of Warcraft’ for profit. He heard that they killed monsters for virtual gold that they could then sell to wealthier gamers around the world. He heard that they worked in dreary conditions – sweatshops even, people said. And he heard that many gamers hated these guys (Source: Totilo & Sunbulli 2006, np link).

Jin … is not a gold farmer or even a gamer. A doctoral student in the communication department at UC San Diego, he came across the phenomenon when a friend decided to ditch an engineering major and go back home to Shanghai to open a gold farm. The friend’s venture ultimately failed. But Jin found the subject for his doctoral dissertation and a documentary. Since the summer of 2005, Jin has made three research and filming trips to China (Source: Kiderra 2007 np link).

It is indeed difficult to get into the exclusive ‘gold farming’ circle. But I was lucky to have an old friend in Shanghai who was running gold farms from 2003 to 2005. This friend introduced me to some gold farm owners. But the reason that the gaming workers/gold farmers trusted me was mainly because I treated them with respect. They face discriminations from non-gamers who see them as game addicts who are losers in real life as well as discriminations from gamers who think they care about more about money than gaming itself. I tried to be a good listener for them and they can see I didn’t approach them with many assumptions (Source: Jin in Regine 2008, np link).

The ones that allowed me to film there were … located in cities where local goverments are tolerant of this industry. There is no national policy regulating this new industry yet, so it’s up to the local governments to judge. Most local governments have no motive to shut down these gold farms, as they reduce unemployment and even reduce the crime rate by reducing unemployed male youth on the street. Some gold farms refused my visit because they don’t want to pay tax and choose to operate underground, or they are worried that their labor practice is problematic (Source: Au 2006, np link).

Watching the documentary, you can’t help but feel some compassion for the gold farmers: they have very little free time, they are paid quite poorly to feed the whims of the Western consumer, they have to deal with the ire of a family who doesn’t approve of what they do for a living, they must face the hostility of other players as soon as these realize that gold farmers are on their turf, their english is not good enough to enable them to communicate with other players, and they work hard. Don’t be fooled, they don’t sit there for hours just for the fun, most of their activity is extremely repetitive. In fact they would sometimes end their day at the ‘factory’ by playing a real game in WoW. Just for the fun (Source: Regine 2008 np link).

In watching the video, I am most struck by the intertwined empowerment / disempowerment that is occurring simultaneously for these Chinese workers. Their lives in these virtual worlds are brighter, but yet their interactions with American players (and associated slurs) are a constant reminder of their inferior socio-economic status. The disembodied hypermobility granted by these virtual worlds is, to a certain extent, dispelled when they are labeled as ‘Chinese gold farmers’. For them, it is a double-edged sword (Source: Yee 2006 np link).

It sounds like it could just be a clever depiction of the ‘loser’ sub-set, but Ge Jin manages to use the dislike and distrust of the gold farmer as a way to explore the onset of China as a true world power. The sections of film involving the head of Radio Warcraft and his vehement quest to eradicate gold farmers from the game he loves so much, sounded like a the opening volleys of a hate war. Ge Jin manages to paint the gold farmers as kids with no other options well at the same time highlighting the positive social interactions a world like Warcraft might present (Source: Sanders 2011 np link).

Topics like this, it is important to realize, are going to become increasingly important as the virtual world spills over more and more into our reality. Here we see essentially one of the first instances of these two worlds mixing (Source: Leeper 2010, np link).

Ge Jin’s comments have officially freaked me out. I’m only a gamer, not a designer or student of online / virtual economies, and so my experience with ‘gold farming’ comes purely from my personal encounters with gilfarmers in my gaming hours. The idea of hundreds or thousands of gold farms, providing employment to people, is really creepy. I haven’t read anything on this site yet that has given me the feeling the my ‘gaming’ hours were anything but escapism … my loathing of gilbuyers and -sellers based purely on a sense of fairplay that is would operate the same in monopoly or poker.  I think i need to rethink my perspective on what I’m actually doing playing a MMO, and what the real boundaries are between this game the rest of life. The idea that a chinese peasant would come to a city to labor as a gil farmer blows my mind (Source: Bilodeau 2006, np link).

To my surprise, I was contacted by gold selling websites who want to use my website to advertise themselves, by gold buyers who are looking for a steady supplier, and by market researchers who want to measure the supply and demand of gold trade. I wish I could seize such opportunities to make some money for myself. But unfortunately I was occupied by exploring the social implications of this economy (Source: Jin in Regine 2008 np link).

The empirical reports of … Jin, while useful in drawing attention to the gold farming industry, and faithful to what they observed during short periods of reportage, tell only one part of the story. This small, incomplete part has come to stand for the whole (Source: Nardi & Kow 2010, np link).

I think the big challenge here for researchers – whether ethonographic, survey-based, experimental or whatever–is to tell us the extent of the phenomenon. Stories are immensely powerful and will stick in our minds, but they can also lead us to think something exists disproportionately. I bet this video will prove to people that this exists, and if there are compelling human stories to be told along the way, they’ll stick with us (Source: Williams 2006, np link).