I knew that M.M.O players could make virtual currency and transfer it over to real life money as I’ve learned from Second Life, but I’ve never heard of anything like “gold farming,” “power-leveling,” and “the end game,” until I read Julian Dibbel’s article, “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer.” When I first read the title, I didn’t understand what it was going to be about; honestly, I thought it was about another virtual game like Farmville but after reading this article it has given me a whole new perspective on virtual gamers or more appropriately virtual workers. I knew that WoW is one of the most profitable and popular games known to players and non-players, “earning close to $1 billion a year in monthly subscriptions and other revenue” (Dibbel). It’s pretty interesting that I read this article now because I just came back from break and watched my sister, who is 26 years old, playing WoW; when she told me about some of her tasks and showed me her pets and avatar and her friend’s avatars, I was thinking to myself…”who cares?!” When she told me that she needed to pay monthly subscriptions to play this game, I was immediately baffled that there’s an entire population of religiously devoted WoW users. That people would continue to pay fees to play, but after reading this article, I am in shock that there is a full-time working career out of M.M.O.R.P.Gs.
If I was a gamer, I would probably prefer to be a power-leveler because you get to use other people’s accounts to basically do all the work for them which allows for more range of quests making it seem like you’re playing rather than working so intensely like gold farmers. But if we’re talking about making a profit, I think that being a gold farmer is the most effective way to make some real money compared to power-leveling and raiding the most difficult dungeons as the article explains about the “end game.”
“If you bust the buyers, you’re busting the guys who are paying to play your game, who you want to keep as customers and who will then go on the forums and say really nasty things about your company and your game…the cost to farmers of being expelled from WoW can be steep.” Even though R.M.T and gold farming can make real money for people, I find it sort of unethical about the whole thing. I think people should just kill the monsters and earn coins that way rather than have a whole different strategy to get ahead. Even though Min has said, “they are playing. And we are making a living,” he still feels a little embarrassed around regular players who are anti-farmers. I think it brings about ethical issues within the game. These anti-gold-farmers clips on Youtube “Chinese Gold Farmers Must Die,” and “Chinese Farmer Extermination,” and killing of gold farmers from other players are essentially griefers.
Even though there are different perspectives about virtual games serving as other purposes other than for “play,” whether people agree or disagree with this blurring line of work and play, I think this is the future of virtual life. Even in Second Life we see that many companies are developing a virtual office space in these M.M.O.R.P.G.s. Earning a living via virtual “games” will become more of a norm than something we’re curious and researching and reading about online.
