The Ge Jin piece about Chinese Gold Farmers caught my attention. It explains the practice of online "gold farming," which is earning high valued goods, characters, weapons, etc in a massively-multiplayer game and then selling them for real profit. When I heard about people being subjected to 12-hour long shifts, I began to think, "this is starting to sound a bit like a virtual sweat shop more than anything." To this end, I found two things interesting. First, the sheer degree of satisfaction and empowerment that the farmers got out of doing their job. I was surprised to hear how many of them purported to have loved their job -- what ever happened to too much of a good thing? However, I hadn't considered the fact that gold farming might make the gaming lives of the farmers suspected to be Chinese even harder. I was interested, really more disheartened, to see that an attempt to gain wealth through online community had engendered a unique form of discrimination even with linguistic epithets included. The NYT article goes on to describe how other forms of harassment include repeatedly killing the character of a suspected farmer or blocking them from parts of the game that would allow access to high valued goods and weapons, and how even the last one was subverted into a profit-making process (with enough training). I do understand the frustration which might arise when everybody is just trying to play the game and people are really into it for economic purposes- I guess I see the conflict, one side just enjoys the integrity of the game and wants a fun time for everybody while the other is simply in it to make money.
The New York Times article was an expository peace about the grey market of gold farming. Here, the idea of a sweatshop was a bit more apparent, due to the extremely low wages paid out to the farmers, with the value of what they collected being sold at 15 times the price, and penalties accrued if the farmer stayed dead for too long. We were also introduced to "power leveling" as a "get strong fast" kind of scheme, an equally lucrative scheme going on in China. According to the article, the industry is getting a closer look, and that some of these have the potential to be shut down, if they haven't already. The problem exists with the multi-million dollar online shops and how to intervene with them. I was also particularly interested at the part where the workers' free time is discussed, and the writer relays that much of that time is spent on the same game. I was a little perturbed at how learning the game to become better at it, and so on, become an immovable feature of one's day, or their day entirely, so that the farmers can increase their yields and get better faster. The fact is that people are literally spending their entire days and nights on this thing, and the sad part is that this is not at all unusual. I wondered if the guy who claimed to love working/playing so much was actually just lying for the paper or not.
Chapter 8 out of Boellstorff also elicited some surprise and interest. Boellstorff introduces this idea of the "creationist capital," wherein labor is viewed as creativity, and production, the making of new stuff in Second Life. It seems that people can also pay (capital) to be more creative and buy new things (creative). Within this space, creative practice is lauded and it seems that participants achieve a high degree of satisfaction when creationist capital is carried out to fruition. It drew my attention that building something required you to actually own land, once more pushing the idea that SL and virtual worlds are in fact places where real things happen. Boellstorff also mentions the fact that various virtual worlds can be owned by corporations, often resulting in pretty extensive control, of which participants are acutely aware. In similar vein to the gold farming, this chapter also brings up the idea of production through consumption, namely the selling of virtual goods for real-life money. This means that SL is now a place where virtual people can engage in exchanges of real-wealth with each other, just how WoW is a place where real-world money can buy advantages in terms of level strengthening.
The New York Times article was an expository peace about the grey market of gold farming. Here, the idea of a sweatshop was a bit more apparent, due to the extremely low wages paid out to the farmers, with the value of what they collected being sold at 15 times the price, and penalties accrued if the farmer stayed dead for too long. We were also introduced to "power leveling" as a "get strong fast" kind of scheme, an equally lucrative scheme going on in China. According to the article, the industry is getting a closer look, and that some of these have the potential to be shut down, if they haven't already. The problem exists with the multi-million dollar online shops and how to intervene with them. I was also particularly interested at the part where the workers' free time is discussed, and the writer relays that much of that time is spent on the same game. I was a little perturbed at how learning the game to become better at it, and so on, become an immovable feature of one's day, or their day entirely, so that the farmers can increase their yields and get better faster. The fact is that people are literally spending their entire days and nights on this thing, and the sad part is that this is not at all unusual. I wondered if the guy who claimed to love working/playing so much was actually just lying for the paper or not.
Chapter 8 out of Boellstorff also elicited some surprise and interest. Boellstorff introduces this idea of the "creationist capital," wherein labor is viewed as creativity, and production, the making of new stuff in Second Life. It seems that people can also pay (capital) to be more creative and buy new things (creative). Within this space, creative practice is lauded and it seems that participants achieve a high degree of satisfaction when creationist capital is carried out to fruition. It drew my attention that building something required you to actually own land, once more pushing the idea that SL and virtual worlds are in fact places where real things happen. Boellstorff also mentions the fact that various virtual worlds can be owned by corporations, often resulting in pretty extensive control, of which participants are acutely aware. In similar vein to the gold farming, this chapter also brings up the idea of production through consumption, namely the selling of virtual goods for real-life money. This means that SL is now a place where virtual people can engage in exchanges of real-wealth with each other, just how WoW is a place where real-world money can buy advantages in terms of level strengthening.
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