“While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.”
For our readings this week, the article that I found to be most interesting was “The Life Of The Chinese Gold Farmer” from The New York Times. This immediately stood out as a questionable practice of labor, even one that brings ethical issues into question. Have our virtual realities become so interwoven within our physical realities that we have literally created digital sweat shops? It seems as though Socialist China has taken advantage of this evident change in society through their gaming workshops that harbor “Chinese Gold Farmers”.
According to the reading, gaming workers play at least twelve hours a day to produce in-game currency, equipment, items, and characters which are sold to American players for actual currency. The selling of “virtual goods for real money is called real-money trading, or R.M.T.” and has been in effect since the 90s. I thought about the topics we have discussed this semester, I have to wonder if this is considered exploitation within these virtual worlds. The motives for the workers, and those who manage them, are to exploit the game for their own financial gain. I would imagine that this would hinder the change of earning gold the way it was intended by the game’s developers. Technically, we could go as far as saying that these gold farmers are serving as griefers — the only logical option is for gamers to buy from their “service”. However, this has altered the level of play in the game and could be viewed as a virus to those that wish to participate on these platforms in an honest manner. ”This development has not been universally welcomed” and their practices have affected the gaming economy for the platforms they choose to exploit. Like anything else, it is an industry and a business. People will always be tempted to reach out to an opportunity if profit is involved.
After I researched the topic further, I found that as this phenomenon continues, the farmers have used other methods to obtain gold such as hacking into gaming accounts in order to steal the information they wish to have. Obviously, this practice is ethically, morally, and legally unacceptable yet it has continued to worsen over the years because the US cannot enforce its copyright laws in China.
Here is a video clip I found on YouTube.com of Ge Jin, a PhD student from the University Of California at San Diego. This is a segment of a documentary based on the phenomenon of Chinese gold farmers and their gaming workshops. While players note that they are having “fun” and feel empowered by their gaming skills, some feel inferior in this workplace because western gamers look down on them.
