I was struck by a few of the class reading this week. I found the article ‘ Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer’ to be really interesting. It made me really realize how important/ obsessive people are with these online games. Of course, I might think the right word to use so obsessive but to these people it is their lives and to some a living. There are some cafes in China that hire online gamers that work a full day! These gamers generate real money. The guy from the article makes over $80,000 a year just from these online gamers. Talk about a way to make a living! This idea of having these online gamers play for money really made me think about something I was learning about in another class. In my Organizational Communication class we learned a term called ‘lwisure’. Weisure is the blur between work and play. To me the idea of hiring online gamers to make money is leisure, but is it really weisure? This is a question I cannot seem to answer. The article placed a focus on knowing the difference between work and play. In today’s society the difference between real and virtual is almost miniscule. Take a look at the SL online gaming world. Anything you can do in real life you can do on Second Life.
I found an article that related to these hired gamers in China. However, this article focuses on how Chinese prisoners were used for ‘gold farming’. They call these ‘employees’ gold farmers. This article showed me how using an online game could really be a good judge of character. For example, by day these prisoners would sit in their cells and have to be good, by night they would get to sleigh dragons and demons online. They would choose to slay things online (judging they are bad because they were imprisoned). This is how prison bosses in China make their money. They are paid solely based on what the online gamers bring in. Some of these prisoners look at the games as a job and not an obsession.
“The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.” – quote from one prisoner
China is known to be the ‘factory of virtual goods’ I wonder what is soon to come for the US and ‘gold farming’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam
