Chinese Gold Farmers

With the deepening of RMT, even globalized labor market has been established in the fantasy world. Maybe it would be even shocking to hear that somewhere in the Third World, there are professional game players employed in accumulating online game money, playing MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, or Lineage. Originally, the basic economic activities in online games were designed only to sustain the gamers’ desire for virtual life, which would keep the gaming going. But, as one of unexpected situations, in some real countries, the in-game activities are not for gamers themselves but for their employers, who will sell the game characters and virtual goods on eBay or other online retailers.

One of the most sensational – even “surreal” – scenes, which are attracting many game theorists today, might be the story about Chinese gaming factory, first appeared on the New York Times front page on December 9, 2005. In this kind of factory, “every day, in 12-hours shift, they [game players] ‘play’ computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards… that can be transformed into real cash.”1 Those game-workers are called “gold farmers” and most of the gold farmers in China earn less than a quarter an hour. According to Dibbell, there are more than 100,000 Chinese gold farmers “earning a living in gold farms, the factory itself just one of hundreds like it throughout China, maybe thousands even.”2

Virtual Sweatshops in Global South

But this surreal economy is prevailing all over the low-income countries. The Observer shed light on a “virtual sweatshop” in Romania on March 13, 2005. An interest thing in this case is that, although the player works in Romania, “the computers and the internet connection he uses are paid for by a company in northern California.”3 And, in his book, Dibbell describes his visit to a Tijuana office where “three shifts of unskilled Mexican workers paid to do what most employers would have fired them for.”4 They are also employed by a California-based company, but they earn about $19 a day – much more than Chinese gold farmers. According to Ge Jin, who is making a documentary film about Chinese gold farmers, the existence of gold farmers reflects “China’s current role in global economy, which is mainly a source of cheap labor” and this fact means that “the gold farmers are being exploited by farm owners and international brokers.”5

alt : goldfarmers.mov

Ge Jin's Chinese Gold Farmers Documentary Trailer from http://www.chinesegoldfarmers.com

What kind of work is done in those “virtual sweatshops” in the countries of the Third World such as Romania, Mexico, and China? In other words, what kind of gaming is being played in those work spaces? The workers or the gold farmers in sweatshops play online games and earn real money as wages. By the employers or the game item brokers, what gold farmers produced through the game playing is sold for real cash to the players in rich countries (Europe and the US), who want to enjoy the game in the more advantageous position. It is interesting, nonetheless, that the gold farmers earn more money than other lower skilled laborers. If they are only enjoying online games, how do they earn money without working? Is this a real economy? Or rather, are they working or playing? How are the online games changing the mode of production and consumption as well as the mode of action and of thinking in the real world?

1David Barboza, “Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese,” The New York Times 9 Dec. 2005.

2Dibbell, Play Money, 293.

3Tony Thomson, “They Play Games for 10 Hours and Earn Pounds 2.80 in a ‘Virtual Sewatshop,’” Observer 12 Mar. 2005.

4Dibbell, ibid., 19.

5Ge Jin, “Chinese Gold Farmers in the Game World,” Consumer, Commodities, and Consumption: A Newsletter of the Consumer Studies Research Network, 7.2 (2006).