Virtual World and Real Money

This week's readings focused on the ways in which virtual activity can yield real, sovereign currency. The documentary, Gold Farmers, and short article, "Chinese Gold Farmers in the Game World," by Ge Jin, examined the lives of a new type of Chinese laborer: professional gaming gold farmers. The New York Times Article, "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer" written by Julian Dibbell, was similarly interested in these gaming workshops, or Gold Farms, which seem to be a manifestation of transnational commerce.

Gold Farming is an economic activity in which people collect items and game currency and sell them to other players for real-world currency. They talk about how gaming is a job for Chinese men, and the gaming workshops adopt many standard protocols of other types of manufacturing workshops. They experience pressure to be the best, must repeat the same tasks over and over again, and are not supposed to engage the community in a social capacity - only a business one. There are many players who do not like Gold Farming because they think of it as a fairness issue - to both other players and the rights of the corporation that owns the game. This has resulted in some extremely racist animosity against Chinese Gold Farmers, that Dibbell points out resembles rhetoric from the early 19th century regarding Chinese migrant laborers in the US. One of Jin's interviewees says that this is a problem of communication, that if only they could get the players to understand the nature of their work, that they could all get along in this online world of play and commerce.

Tom Boellstorff, in his chapter on Political Economy in Second Life, introduces a few new concepts. Namely, he states that the virtual economy is a type of "creationist capital" in which labor is creativity. The game further enables "prosumption" in which consumption becomes a form of production. Essentially, by using SL as a platform, users can make real-life money through virtual modes of creation - namely through property transactions.

I am still confused with what bitcoins actually are and how they are able to translate into real money. What does it mean when people say a new tech start up will take bitcoins as payment instead of USD? Also, where are the women? Why is this transnational market so gendered - specifically in China? Is this really a violation of the intellectual property rights of the game corporation as one of the anti-gold mining interviewees in Jin's documentary stated? Is this a sustainable form of work? How does this form of transnational commerce affect domestic economies - is it similar or different and how?