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.