For some people, making a living playing video games sounds like a dream come true. They always say you should do what you love, right? Personally, my video game prowess comprises one ill−fated Halo tournament with high school buddies, when I trapped myself in a corner for most of the round and only managed to shoot at the sun. While I've never understood the appeal myself, I've had enough obsessed friends to realize that there's an entire culture surrounding fantastical worlds. The games are notoriously addictive, spawning urban legends about players dying because they forgot to eat or pee for days on end. But there is something admittedly really cool about interfacing (albeit in a bizarre, fictional way) with 10 million other players worldwide.
Until recently, I was completely ignorant of the practice of "gold farming" — playing multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, Lineage and Final Fantasy, and making money. Gold farming's success stems from the fact that it takes a lot of time to build up credits, so people have taken to buying in−game currency with real−world cash. Basically, it exploits the economic inequity between developing nations and rich gamers who are too busy or too lazy to earn enough points playing themselves. It may have started as a cottage industry between friends playing for each other, but now there are people hired to play video games — all day, every day.
Essentially, even our leisure activities have been outsourced to developing countries, where unskilled labor is cheaper than in the United States. What happened to playing games for fun? Gold farming is continually upping the ante. Now that it's hard to be competitive without pouring in incredible amounts of time and money, there's been a corresponding increase in demand. In 2006, the BBC estimated that the market for selling virtual capital reached $9 million. The New York Times reported over 100,000 full time employees of dragon−slaying sweatshops in China alone. Fundamentally, the landscape of the multiplayer game is different now. Of the ten million teammates and enemies you can discover online, more than half of them are professionals from China.
The New York Times noted that gold farming factories have decent wages compared to a lot of exploitative industries in the developing economy, but imagine being forced to kill monsters for 12−hour shifts, sweating to meet quotas. You'd have a boss breathing down your neck if you weren't pulling in enough virtual capital.
It gets worse. Sometimes the first−world gamers aren't buying gold from willing farmers. Last summer, The Guardian reported that prisoners in China, used for hard physical labor by day, were also forced to play World of Warcraft by night. It turns out that the guards were profiting from this exchange, while the prisoners saw none of the money and were punished severely for falling behind quotas.
Gold farming is not only tantamount to cheating in terms of gaining an unfair advantage in the virtual arena, but it also has moral ramifications in reality. Governments have been struggling to regulate the transactions, and there have been court cases concerning the ownership of fictional goods. While gold farming is technically illegal, its rapid growth makes it hard to stop. And there's always eBay.
So before you decide to become a professional video game player, think about what's at stake. Why are we outsourcing our fun? Why are we spending real money on imaginary goods? Why are we exploiting poor workers in the name of competition? Lest you think it's all fun and games, imagine being forced to play as though your life depended on it. I guarantee you Chinese gold farmers don't play WoW on their days off.
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Alyson Yee is a senior majoring in biology and French. She can be reached at Alyson.Yee@tufts.edu.
