Class Notes 11/28/2012

Belstroff

·      Idea of personhood

·      Embodiment online

o   Mind-body dualism – cognition is grounded in our bodily experiences

§  Virtual worlds challenge this idea

·      Political economy – money labour and property and modes of government

o   Creationalist capitalism à goldfarming

Cybersociality when interacting on Second Life

·      Does this have to do with labour and ownership, sense of self, or placemaking

Personhood (Chapter 5)

·      Avatars – people invest time, money, emotional energy

o   Somewhat embodied physically

o   Visual and tactile stimulatory aspect allows people to get emotionally involved in their avatars

·      “Griefing”

o   abuse another avatar or their home space

o   people respond intensely to this

o   shows how avatars are emotional embodiments of people online

·      People with physical disabilities using avatars to escape from their own bodies

o   Versus people who have minor physical disabilities such as a broken arm that keeps them from moving their avatars online

o   How virtual and physical world affect one another

·      Have more than one avatar – different avatars for different occasions

o   Emotional or utilitarian reasons

o   Can switch between personas online

·      Not what you say but how you look is what represents you online

o   Gives people a more accurate view of themselves and others because it is a more real view of their emotions, “what they are on the inside”

o   Challenge notion of self – virtual body is what really reflects who you are

·      To what degree is there a gap between virtual and actual

o   People are making conscious choices about how they want to represent themselves

§  Does this mean people are being fake because it is not what they actually look like?

§  Or is this the more “real” version of people because they can be what they want to be

·      Discussion on why it is okay for avatars on second life to be not who they truly are in real life, but it is not as okay for people to misrepresent themselves online in other forums

o   Ie spinal cord patients

·      Ethnography – you live in the place that you study

o   How does this work with virtual worlds? To what degree do you have to be involved in the community?

·      Issue with avatar being your “true self”

o   Takes out the aspect that people have imaginations – your imagination is not a representation of you.

·      What does it mean to have a community – does this even makes sense in a virtual world when anyone can join? What is the mark of a true member?

Place and time (Chapter 4)

·      Place, time, and presence à best illustrated when broken

·      Sense of being in a place although it is virtual

·      Place is central to vision – landscape

o   The way in which people understand their relationships to these places

o   Conflicts that arise that show this

§  Other players get upset by some people building ugly buildings for example. They don’t like the disrupt in the landscape

·      What is “mine”

·      Ownership as social standing

·      “lag”

o   dissonance between the way difference players experience time

§  decreases sense of immersion

o   differences in the amount of lag for each individual

o   breaks sense of immersion into virtual world

o   also the idea that people in different time zones will experience the interaction differently

·      “afk”

o   “away from keyboard”

o   online but not with online selves

o   avatar is still in space and “present” but the person is not actually present

·      Immersion

o   Social vs sensory

o   Sensory is not so important in the virtual world

o   Actual world senses are muted and this completes the virtual world sensation by comparison

§  Related to controversy of adding Voicechat – this is so “read world” that people didn’t like it

ú  Dichotomy between social and sensory interaction

ú  Voice adds real world sensory input that breaks this separation

Political economy (Chapter 8)

·      Creationist capitalism

o   New market for capitalism – people in community can create own forms by opening up business etc

o   This is a very real thing within the community and can translate into real money in real life

o   Economy built around making things**

·      Online market – Who makes things?

o   What property rights do people have over the things that they make?

o   What is property in an online world?

·      Companies and selling isn’t as popular as owners might like because the whole idea of Second Life is creating your own things (avatars, clothing)

·      Rules/Social norms about what you cannot do

o   No real regulation system but Second Life as a company can regulate it arbitrarily

o   Social control mechanism

·      How much control Linden labs has over game and what happens in it

o   Quite difficult because it is so large

o   More self-regulated amongst members

o   No real way of penalizing people other than social embarrassment

o   Ie: gambling is something that occurs because it is so easy to create, but it is so hard to regulate because it is difficult to track

·      How is this different from creativity or from capitalism?

o   Ownership of what you make is more closely tied in online community – in real life you have to go to distributers, buyers, etc to reach wider audience, so your ownership is diminished. Second Life allows you to be the creator and the distributor all at once

o   ***Human desire and nature to remake themselves and the world through craft

§  This not a totally new idea!

What happens to the property and ownership if the site were to disappear?

·      If a site goes down, does everyone’s stuff just get lost?

·      Is there an obligation for the company to replace what is lost?

·      People who have sued Second Life because they have been kicked out of the program and claimed that as members, they had rights there.

Chinese Goldfarming

·      Video

·      From the Goldfarmer’s perspective it is not bad

·      It is unfair that people are angry at them because it is just a job for them

·      They do not have much control over it – the money they make is very minimal compared to the profit the company is turning

·      Is this exploitation of these workers?

o   They enjoy their work, but the condition (form the film) seems to be worse. They work long days and do not look very healthy. Companies manipulate these people who are not qualified enough for better jobs.

·      Description of themselves as “professional gamers”

o   Not the same as what we may think of as people who get sponsorships and make a lot of money and have celebrity status. This is not same kind of “Professional gamer”

·      Method of making money in online games involves collecting items. You have to get all the way to the highest level before you can get things that are worth money.

·      Transnational dimensions of this?

o   Racialized dimensions? “gamers” are white men, “goldfarmers” are Chinese

o   It is not an equal playing field

o   There are national stereotypes for gamers

§  Gamers bring own cultural values and norms into the game but because they are not the same as others, this causes stereotypes to arise

o   How does language and different readerships – different groups with different norms – come together in this online space.

Ethnography

·      Quoting/citing – cite specific actual page if it is archived and publically accessible

·      Screenshots

"The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer", Second Life, and Eve Online

I really enjoyed the ending of Julain Dibbell's article "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer" with the 40-player dungeons that provide players with access to high level non-tradable items. It definitely drives home the point that virtual economies and Chinese gold farms are not the same thing as other forms of Chinese labor. I can definitely sympathize with the excitement of these Chinese workers being part of "what might have been the greatest guild on Earth". In such a virtual world where such achievements are considered the pinnacle of gaming, such a role can definitely feel empowering.

While gold farming is something most MMORPG's (MMO role playing games) have to deal with and this article does seem to suggest that they are adapting to this new economy (eg. by providing their own in-game auctions), other virtual worlds like Second Life and EVE Online have very different virtual economies. Recall that Second Life has their own currency, Linden Dollars, that can be exchanged for real-world currency.

EVE Online is an interesting case because the game is very intensely economy based, with it's own markets, industries, corporations, and banks. More interestingly, it condones actions that would be considered crimes in the real-world. I refer to two famous in-game events, the first a bank heist, and the second an investment scam (#7 and #1 in link).

In the first example, the Guiding Hand Social Club spent a year infiltrating the Ubiqua Seraph corporation, rising up the ranks of the corporation. In one fell swoop, they assassinated the CEO, emptied the accounts and all items owned by the corporation, and burned everything else, making away with the equivalent of $16,500 real-world dollars worth of items.

In the second example, a player started and ran the EVE Intergalactic Bank (EIB), and then one day just walked in and took 790 billion ISK, or about $170,000 in real-world dollars. He then "posted a 15-minute video bragging about how he got away with it, mocking his loyal employees at EIB, enemies who failed to stop him and the suckers who basically paid for a second job -- essentially paying for the right to have their money stolen."

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-biggest-dick-moves-in-history-online-gaming/

Personal experiences with gold farmers

       I've personally had a fair amount of experience with the economy and the people that Ge Jin describes in his article about Chinese Gold Farmers in the Game World, and my gut response has always been what I imagine to be the most common viewpoint amongst gamers: annoyance and resentment. In the online games where gold farmers proliferate, virtual items are taken as a measure of social status and in-game dedication. Oftentimes, rare items can take days or even months of hunting to acquire, and carry a hefty in-game price tag as a result. When you see somebody with the best armor and weapons, you have a measure of respect for them - they had the dedication and the smarts to either find these extremely rare artifacts or accumulate enough gold to buy them from the in game market. 

      Introducing gold-sellers into the mix somewhat cheapens the experience - someone can now just buy gold with real money, and then use that to buy the best items in the game, all with no real (in-game) effort invested. I've heard it referred to as "bribing your way to victory" or "paying to win" (though these terms have taken on new meaning in the rise of free-to-play games, which I'll discuss another time). It's analogous to hiring someone to write your school essay for you - technically, you've incurred a cost, but in terms of money instead of honest time and effort like everyone else. 

      But over time, I've come to question why there's such resentment towards gold farmers, and why there's so much value placed on effort and time investment. Aren't games supposed to be for fun? What fun is there in trying to acquire an item that only appears 0.002% of the time every time you kill a particularly difficult monster which requires several minutes to defeat? I personally know and have heard of many gamers who simply don't have the time to invest in games that younger people do. They have day jobs and disposable incomes, and when they come home from work they want to be able to hang out with their friends and kill Diablo on Inferno difficulty level without having to grind for hours upon hours to acquire the necessary equipment. In that case, gold farmers provide a valuable service - they allow you to enjoy your game in a way that you normally couldn't. And it's clear these people are not a small minority - gold farming wouldn't continue to exist if there weren't enough demand to make it sustainable.

Easy Gold Farming - Hacking

So I first learned about gold farming from an interview found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5Yxe6UVv4.  In it, and even in the articles that were listed for today, gold farmers were depicted as engaging in monotonous actions and working for terrible pay.  For most of the gold farms out there, I assume that this is still the case.  However, in recent years, gold farms (or at least the more efficient ones) have become more streamlined and sophisticated.  The criterion for hire is now is no longer anyone who can click a mouse or navigate a virtual world.  Instead, it has shifted to individuals with in-depth knowledge of computer programming and game design.  Why?  Hacking.

Before you starting imagining some futuristic sci-fi movie scene, what I mean by “hacking” is simply bypassing the game’s security protocol (most popular befing nProtect GameGuard) and manipulating in-game features to allow you to fight more efficiently.  This could involve a range of hacks from invincibility (quite easy) to monster vacuum (moderate) to complex macros that automate the killing, picking up loot, and selling process.  The most difficult hacks completely bypass the kill monsters-earn gold dogma.  Instead, you simply duplicate rare items and sell them (accomplished through packet-editing, if you’re curious).

Individuals with these specific sets of skills are a great asset to gold farms.  They allow automated 24/7 gaming and gold harvesting.  They only required human interactions are selling acquired loot for gold and occasional monitoring.  However, with great payouts, there are also great risks.  For one, anti-hacking programs are constantly updating so hackers must revise their code with each version of the game, which could occur as frequently as once or twice a week.  If they are unable to devise a program that bypasses security measures, it is back to manual play.  Also moderators may ban the hackers if they are caught and then it’s back to a level one avatar.  

Virtual Economies: Gold Farmers

This week I would like to comment on Jin Ge's article Chinese Gold Farmers in the Game World, and Julian Dibbell's New York Times article Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer.  As someone who has not dabbled in the world on online gaming (prior to our class's short Second Life venture), I was blown away by the intricate and elaborate gold farming operation taking place internationally on a large scale.  The concept that really struck me was simple: it is troubling to think that there really is such a huge market for an operation like this.  It is one thing to have a multi-million dollar market for an online game- there is always a market for recreational activities.  But the fact that there is an established multi-million dollar market for cheating in these games is a testament to the values of people today.  Isn't half the fun of games supposed to be working through the levels so that one feels a sense of accomplishment when they get to the highest level/win the game?  However, I suppose with the reading that we have been doing this shouldn't be as big of a surprise as I find it to be as we've been shown how incredibly emotionally involved people are within virtual realities.  I wonder how the people who use these gold farming services feel after they've purchased gold that someone else earned, or weapons that another individual had to fight for?  I'll confess that when I played Sim City I used a couple of cheats (though I never paid anyone to build my cities for me).  Even if I only used the cheats to help start my city, I simply didn't feel accomplished, nor did I feel like the city was mine.  I wonder if people who pay for these markets view themselves as players and if they always have a nagging feeling that they didn't do all the work by themselves.  Finally, I was also a disturbed by the easily blurred lines of frustration towards gold farming as a form of 'cheating' in a game and outright racial hostility described in the article.

The Virtual Side of Gold Farming

xcfbfx: “www).wow4s.(net100m$25.99fastdelivery!powerfulpowerlevel1-20=$6.58.”

xcfbfx: “www).wow4s.(net100m$25.99fastdelivery!powerfulpowerlevel1-20=$6.58..”

xcfbfx: “www).wow4s.(net100m$25.99fastdelivery!powerfulpowerlevel1-20=$6.58…”

xcfbfx: “www).wow4s.(net100m$25.99fastdelivery!powerfulpowerlevel1-20=$6.58….”

                I can say from first-hand experience that gold farming is no easy task.  “Grinding,” or the act of completing a task over and over for some reward, is an unduly boring process.  The articles by Jin and Dibbell present pretty accurate pictures of the daily real world aspects of gold farming, but what does it actually entail online?  I thought it might be useful to provide some insight on the virtual tasks involved in gold farming.

                First, you need an account and a character.  But more importantly, you need a strong character that can defeat the strongest monsters which will inevitably drop the best “loot” (defined here as any in-game item that is sellable for gold).  An important remark to make here is that the main method of “gold farming” is not actually collecting the gold that monsters drops after you make a kill.  The standard amount of gold these monsters drop is almost always standardized to a very small amount.  Sure, it can add up over time, but the big bucks are earned from selling rare and powerful items.  These items drop from monster kills very infrequently, some with drop rates of <0.0001%, which produces incredible demand in the free trading market, and thus, high prices in gold.  In any case, depending on the game, leveling up your character to be able to kill monsters that drop substantial loot in-of-itself requires a tremendous amount of time, sometimes requiring months of real time. 

Next, you need cooperation between multiple accounts if you hope to fight bosses as briefly described by Dibbell.  This aspect restricts the gold income of many small gold farming groups and forces them to sell to middle men who have large assets, namely large gold websites, and can fund to the needs of a large populations of online games.  Of course, this leads to low wages for the gold farmers, and large profits for the website owners who don’t actually do any farming. 

You could, however, attempt to sell your gold separately, which is what the user “xcfbfx” is attempting to do above.  In this game, MapleStory, there are several spam filters which block certain phrases like “www.” or “power level” as well as repetitive sentences (which is why the endings are slightly different).  In his chat, he attempts to bypass these restrictions, but still list relevant information such as website, price, and special services.  However, these methods are often unreliable as the only potential customers you are reaching out to are those who are currently online on the same map as you.  Additionally, the account will most likely be banned by mods and while you can create a new account for free, the process of finishing the early level tutorials takes time. 

So, why would people go through all this trouble to farm gold?  Simple: People will buy.  I’ve told you how annoying it is to do it yourself.  I, for one, have bought gold from online sources.  Grinding is boring, and when that one item looks too difficult to get, why waste time?  After all, we are Gen Z – we want things now.  

http://mmohuts.com/wp-content/gallery/maplestory/maplestory-free-market-2.jpg?ec9f9b

The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer

Although we had discussed in class that people sell items in Second Life for real money, I had not considered the real life implications of a virtual economy until reading Dibbell’s article, “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer.” This is not the first that I’ve heard of people buying gold in World of Warcraft, but I had no idea of the controversy surrounding it or who exactly was involved in the sale of this “gold.” I was surprised that WoW gold is yet another example of an industry that exploits the cheap wages of Chinese workers to produce products for Western consumers. I also was unaware that this was a sort of underground market that is prohibited by game makers. I had imagined that WoW had a similar system to that in Second Life where people could trade items for real money in game. I also envisioned that the people selling goods would be individual gamers who saw it as a dream come true to make money playing videogames all day.

None of my assumptions hold true in the case of WoW, and issues that I had never considered, such as the integrity of the game, complicate the lives of these Chinese gold farmers. I can certainly understand the prospective of a serious gamer that it would be cheating for a newbie to come along and buy all of the gold that she/he had spent days, weeks, or months collecting. Doing so seems to be the equivalent of someone using a cheat code in a videogame that grants them access to unearned items and gives them unusual powers. While this is no problem in a one-player game, such actions would be considered unfair if playing against someone. Yet, even with this in mind, should people lose their actual real life jobs for providing someone with an advantage in a virtual world? I think this question is even further complicated by the working conditions of the gold farmers, which make it seem that this business is unfair all around. 

Trading off your game avatars with real money?

       In the article "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer” by Julian Dibbell, the author talks about the emergence of factories hiring online gamers in China. These companies hire gamers whose main goals are to raise the level of their avatars, to get useful items in the game, and to earn as much game money as possible so that they can actually trade these avatars, items, and game money with real money.
      Actually hearing the news about people trading off their game characters and items with real money is not new to me. South Korea has been famous for its online game industry and I know that there are many professional Korean gamers who are internationally famous. Playing online games is also one of the most common way to spend time for most boy teenagers. When I was in middle school, I saw some of my guy classmates talking about trading their characters off with real money several times. Their conversation would go like this: “hey, do you wanna buy my Maple (the online game that was popular about 10 years ago in Korea) avatar? it’s the highest level. It has all the great items that you can use to kill the monsters,” “that’s so cool! How much though?” “I don’t know. You can give me 10 bucks then I will give you my Maple username and password so that you can take my avatar.”
      Even now, I see this kind of exchange more as something that young kids would do with their friends occasionally. It seems to me that normal kids sometimes do this kind of thing, maybe to show off their ability to raise the level of their online avatars.
     But when people trade off their game items with real money with clear purpose of getting profits, things get serious. I sometimes read news about people illegally earning a tremendous amount of money by selling their game items and avatars. Even now as the article demonstrates, there are factories that aim to get profits by trading off game items and stuff. Now it is not something about young kids showing off their online gaming ability anymore, but it became a problem of legal/illegal money trade and people’s blurring sense of value negatively affected by materialistic culture.
     I think this trade well demonstrates people’s changing mindset and value; changing from “you have to do your best to achieve something” to “you can just get it with money.” Usually, to make your avatar’s level high and to collect useful items in an online game, it requires you to devote your time and effort into playing the game. Although it varies, it usually takes more than months and years to be really good at a certain online game and making your avatar invincible. Years ago, people did this on themselves. They tried hard to do well, but nowadays, it seems that increasing number of people just want to buy pre-made invincible avatars. Maybe this kind of idea has been there for a long time- it is just that where it takes place has been expanding, including virtual worlds.

Anger about online exploitation

After reading about the hatred of gold farmers (see my below post), I thought it would be interesting to see what kinds of statements other players make about these currency brokers.  I have found several good examples, one of which I have posted here.  Be warned, however, there is some rather strong emotions expressed through some rather colorful language.  What is amazing is that this movement has garnered massive amounts of success.  For example, the below blog post was commented on 221 times, for the most part favorably.  It ads further credence to Boellstorff's thinking that people become emotionally involved in virtual worlds.

I hate gold sellers/spammers. No, that’s not strong enough, let me try again. I HATE GOLD SELLERS WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING. Ah, that’s better. Now, why do I hate them you may ask? I hate them for a number of reasons, most of which have been detailed in various interviews I’ve done over the years. And now that they have taken their obnoxiousness to new levels with gold service spamming, I HATE GOLD SPAMMERS EVEN MORE NOW THAN EVER BEFORE. For years, lowlifes like IGE have told us, in defense of their behavior, that they a) are just providing a service; b) don’t interfere with players enjoyment of the game. Well, I can’t argue with (a), they are providing a service, just like maggots I suppose but I’ve always argued that (b) is totally and complete BS. Now, those old arguments aside, I can’t see how this new generation of pond scum (new and improved, with 25% more scummy action!) can argue that their constant spamming of chat channels doesn’t interfere with players enjoyment of the game (I’m waiting for the whole “Oh, you can always just turn off chat” argument). I hated seeing their messages when I played WoW or any other MMO and I’ve been waiting for the day that WAR launched so I could have the absolute pleasure of instituting policies to make their lives more difficult so we could drive them out of WAR.

Since WAR launched we have been banning these jerks like crazy. As of Saturday Night, we had banned about 400 of them. My CSRs have a zero tolerance policy. We don’t wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message. Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when a gold seller/spammer is banned. I’ve given them a wide leash to come up with creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep it within the Warhammer universe. Messages like “Tchar’zanek has ordered the slaughter of [Spammer] and all others of his kind who weaken the Raven Host by providing wealth and power to the unworthy” have been seen all weekend. We will continue this policy and expand it to the other servers. We are in for a real fight against these bottom feeders and it will be a long and costly battle but it’s one we are going to take to them and this is only the first step. After all, this is WAR…

BTW, for those who might be tempted to think that we are doing this so we could offer our own service or because we do make money off their boxes (traditionally, gold sellers will quickly shift to buddy disks and free trials though to lower their costs) let me tell you this. I’ve been offered “a piece of the action” both personally and corporately in the past if I will either turn a blind eye or help them in their actions. This would have netted me and/or Mythic a very, very tidy sum, far more than we would see from box sales. My answer was and always will remain the same:

Go to hell. 

-Mark Jacobs at http://onlinegamesareanichemarket.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/a-banning-we-will-go-a-banning-we-will-go-heave-ho-off-the-servers-yo-a-banning-we-will-go/

Criminal Minds: The Wheels on the Bus

This Thanksgiving break I was able to catch up on several TV shows I'd been neglecting for some time.  One of the TV shows I saw was Criminal Minds, which is a show that follows the FBIs fictional Behavioral Analysis Unit as they solve crimes.  
Coincidentally, the episode this week's episode, The Wheels on the Bus, presented the scenario of the dangerous merging of boundaries between virtual worlds and reality.  Briefly, the criminals in this episode (two brothers) had been playing a violent video game (Gods of Combat) for fun since their youth but as they grew older, their addiction to this game led to severe competition between the brothers.  They became so involved in the game that they became super users and hacked the game to an extent where they became banned from the online server that ran the game.  This spurred on what the viewers see in this episode where the brothers, angry from being banned and still very much addicted to the game,  re-create the game in real life.  They abducted a school bus of children, divided them into teams for each brother and created twisted, gruesome obstacles similar to those the virtual characters faced in the game, which led to the death of one of the children.  I thoroughly enjoyed the episode for its creativity yet it was a strong reminder of how addictive violent virtual reality games are and (in a drastic example) what they can lead to.

Wikipedia and Changing Epistemology

     Recently I have been thinking about and writing about the epistemology of Wikipedia.  Specifically, I have been looking at how concepts of social epistemology may be changing, a change that is indicated by Wikipedia.  The fact that Wikipedia has become such an amazing success rather than failing as predicted suggests that modern Internet users have different epistemological values than the traditional epistemologist, academic, or pre-online person.

     Wikipedia should not have succeeded.  Wikipedia has potential flaws in reliability and verifiability.  As the former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica, Robert McHenry, so eloquently stated,

“[Somebody who reads Wikipedia] is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom.  It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled in a false sense of security.  What he certainly does not know is who used the facilities before him.”

However, because of Wikipedia has the power of mass collaboration, it has been shown to be quite reliable when compared to other traditional encyclopedias and information sources that people would be likely to use if Wikipedia did not exist.  Furthermore, Wikipedia has many non-traditional epistemic virtues, including power, speed, and fecundity, that have enabled it to defy all odds and change the outlook on mass online information projects. 

     Perhaps most amazingly, Wikipedia has shown that the traditional epistemic roles of experts are being challenged in the modern online world.  People no longer rely on experts for their information, but are willing to trust (to a certain degree) something that is potentially written by people who know nothing about which they speak. Yet, the fast and easy access to information that Wikipedia provides seems to trump this potential flaw. 

Gold Farms and the Online Social Contract

Julian Dibbell’s article “The Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer” and Ge Jin's article "Chinese Gold Farmers in the Game World” discuss the emerging trend of private businesses creating a virtual economy by accumulating online resources and redistributing these to gamers for a profit.  What is amazing about this phenomenon is that the emergence of virtual “gold farms” has led to the emergence of real-world sweatshops.  In these, workers are paid minimal amounts of money (sometimes compensated only by housing and access to video games) to perform tasks within massive online gaming communities to earn gaming currency.  Much like traditional sweatshop workers, these gold farmers are exploited.  However, the fact that these workers seem to enjoy playing games and are attached to their online persona complicates the issue and makes gold farms different than regular sweatshops.

What I find most amazing is how these farms demonstrate the blurring of lines between the real world and the online-world.  These workers are real people who spend most of their lives focusing on online personas and avatars.  Their relationships are online as is their work.  The fact that an entire unintended market has arisen in online games further shows how the virtual world behaves similar to the real one and how people are changing to reflect this. 

Furthermore, the massive amount of animosity towards such gold farmers demonstrates how Internet users and gamers are becoming more and more involved in their online avatars.  Much like the emotional attachments of Second Life users witnessed Tom Boellstorff, the Internet has become a source of socialization.  The rage expressed by gamers towards farmers shows how a social contract is emerging online.  This social contract, however, is not the same as the one that exists in the real world.  Gamers see the use of online-worlds for profit and exploitation as sacrilege and abhor it.  They then take steps to combat it.  This is similar to feeling in the real world (for example, complaints how the business of sports ruins the purity of them), but is even more extreme.  Perhaps the disinhibition noted by Boellstorff resulting for Internet use leads to more extreme emotions or more extreme expressions of emotion online than in the real world.  These extreme reactions seem to be part of the online social contract rather than prohibited by it.

Why a "Virtual" Economy?

The New York Times article "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer" by Julian Dibbell, outlines a virtual economy in which "Chinese Gold Farmers" play games like World of Warcraft in order to gain virtual money that can eventually be sold for real money to other European or American consumers. After reading this article, I was surprised by my relatively simplistic opinion on the issue of the "virtual economy" that was created. The article states that" the romance of this imaginary life stands in sharp contrast to the plodding, mathematical precision with which it proceeds," implying that the "real world" is real and the "virtual world" is less real. The way I see it, people conceive of value in different ways. To some people, paying $80 to go to a professional football game would be a complete waste of money. To me, paying that money to go to a football game gives me far more utility than I would get by buying a pair of new jeans for the same price, for instance. In the end, by being at the game, all I'm getting is an experience, and that experience means more to me than it would to some other people. In a similar vein, people who pay real money in exchange for virtual money are paying for an experience. They are paying for the opportunity to have a better World of Warcraft experience, or gain respect among peers, or whatever other goals a player might have. I would never pay real money for virtual money like the article describes, but that is because I would not get very much utility out of that transaction. For someone that gets utility by having that virtual money, this transaction makes more sense.

Everything I have learned about economics is that a market price is driven by the consumers' willingness to pay for that good. A consumer's willingness to pay for a good is determined by the utility that that person gains by obtaining that good. Just because someone pays for an experience in a virtual world doesn't make that person an irrational consumer. In fact, I would challenge the idea and term of "virtual economy." The market of paying for virtual money seems just as real as any other market to me.

Virtual Power

As JinGe (GeJin?) and Dibbell both explain, gold farming, on a macro scale appears to be a case of exploitation, in terms of cheap supply for demand, and wage disparity between the workers and the sellers of the workers' labor.  But in speaking with the workers, a more complex picture emerges.  As JinGe explains:

"In contrast to their impoverished real lives, their virtual lives give them access to power, status and wealth which they can hardly imagine in real life. This is a reason why they are so addicted to their job. This is a paradox that the term "sweatshop" cannot convey: in the gold farms exploitation is entangled with empowerment and productivity is entangled with pleasure."

How then, do we understand the role of the virtual world in the life of a Chinese gold farmer?  Is it a sense of power despite external powerlessness, or does it translate into "real" power in any way? 

Dibbell describes the power leveling activities, where gold farmers amassed a raiding party of 40 to take paying players into the highest level of WoW to get special weapons drops as a sort of collective empowerment, teamwork, creativity.  Once it proved to be less profitable and was disbanded, the spirit of the work force seemed to diminish in kind.  Profits are constraining factors here as in any other free-market business.  It seems that assembly-line repetitiveness (to obtain maximum amounts of currency) is rewarded in this industry as in many others on this basis.

"The King of Chinese Gold Farmers"

Here is an interview with one of the middle men who is making bank on Chinese Gold Farming using his Chinese language skills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvHcoqru7I&feature=related

Chinese Gold Farmers and the Future of Gaming Workshops

 

Julian Dibbell’s “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer,” Ge Jin’s “Chinese Gold Farmers in the Game World” and Jin’s YouTube video, “Chinese Gold Farmers Preview” provide interesting details on Chinese gold farmers. In Donghua Gaming Workshop in Jinhua, China, the slogan on the wall reads, “Unity” and “Collaboration.” I find it very surprising that a workshop owner is a proponent of these slogans since the owner employs ‘farmers’ who develop their own characters. I understand that the farmers can be supportive of each other and can help one another with parts of the game. However, unity and collaboration are not at all the main goals of these companies. They are to act as sweatshops for cheap labor, so that an online retailer can make money off of formerly homeless Chinese people.

While I may seem to be against these Chinese gaming workshops, I really am not because it seems that the young farmers are happy to be a part of these workshops. They say that they are being paid for their hobby, so they enjoy their job even though it is a 12-hour shift for very little money. Still, it is a step up from their previous occupation, if they even had one. What I find intriguing is the future of the competition among gaming workshops. As the supply of the farmers’ products increase, the prices drop. The articles we read are from 2006 and 2007, so I think it would be important to see the development of these workshops today. Are they not performing as well because the number of workers has increased by a large amount over the last five years? Are the companies like ‘NoGold organization’ doing anything more today to prevent the farmers from selling their products?