Gold Farming - Jonah

In the first Gold Farming excerpt by Ge Jin, he depicts the ethnography of real money involved in online gaming.  He portrays  a dichotomy between the gold farmers, people who mine coins and get cool objects in these virtual worlds and sell them to other players for real money.  The lives of the workers seem to hinge between the real and the virtual, many gold farms requiring their players, with the exception of a few days off a month, to play 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.  There seems at least in part, an aura of contention against these players.  Some argue the entanglement of real world money with the previously pure virtual world of gaming.  He concludes with 3 big questions he attempts to answer in further study: How to view real money in the gaming world; how to understand labor practices, especially stemming from a perfectly transferred global commodity in a world of play; and how to analyze a farmer' intersection between the real and the virtual, work and play, corporate enslavement and empowered creation as skilled players.
In the New York Times article, another author depicts more in-depth this dichotomy, drawing on real people's experiences as gold farmers, power levelers - people only working for an individual leveling up his character, a more restrictive but less risky endevour; and as members of guilds.  Depicted was shitty working conditions, a huge profit margin by the time items/coinage is bought by American/European gamers, and "the grind" associated with mind-numbingly collecting coins 12 hours straight even in the face of persecution and disbandment by other players, and even on occassion, by World of Warcraft and other games siding on the gamer's side.  However, this is contrasted with quotes like the experience as "not a big difference between work and play," from Zhou Xiaoguang, a gold farmer.  Guilds, unlike gold farming and power leveling, offered a cohesive environment, calling on many employees to work together, mastering the game essentially, leveling up fully and participating in what is called the endgame.  Fascinating to me is the enjoyment this part of the business received and how many people, like Min Qinghai, described this form of participation, where paid guilds kill powerful monsters for customers to pick up fallen items and coinage.  Unfortunately, the market was not there for guilds and they quickly disbanded.  Min remarks that he loved being the tank, essentially the main offensive threat, for his potentially-best-in-the-world guild; he was understandably equally as said returning to being a power leveler where you are working as someone else's character and playing for him or her.  For this reason, he quit and returned to being a low-level gold farmer, where he expressed having more freedom to play as he wished, more autonomy to play and collect valuables as he wished.

I found interesting the dichotomy of the stereotyped gold farmer.  While working for poor wages in a factory in a virtual world that discriminates against them regardless of the market, typically American and European, the same body of complainers that root for their deaths and actively pursue them out, these same workers can describe their job as "both work and play," evidenced by continuing to stay logged on and play the game even after 12 hour shifts.  Stressed in Ge Jin's article, what seems to lie as an undercurrent in the Times article is the idea that, in light of other possible careers for this typically male 20-year-olds, this job offers a sense of security, an interesting mix of work and play, and a sense of pride and community contributing in their own small, yet autonomous manners to a virtual community of players and their quests to better themselves.