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.