After reading this week’s articles, it raises questions in my head on where the future of ecommerce is heading. “The Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer” article discussed the merging of work and play with with the MMO World of Warcraft. Workers made their living from traveling through this virtual world 12 hours a day, for 7 days a week. At the end of it all, they only recieved 30 cents an hour (sorry, i could never do that). We have touched on the topic of the intergration of work in play within virtual worlds and it have both pros and cons to the idea. In this article I believe it depicted more of a con. It explained that within WoW, workers would be killed in battle by people who are within the virtual world for “play”. Since others are playing, the workers are not seen in a professonial setting causing setbacks and lost of revenue. I would not deem these people to be griefers per se, only because killing is a part of the game in WoW. In the article “How Meeting in Second Life Transformed IBM’s Technology Elite Into Virtual World Believers” showed more of the pros for merging work into virtual worlds. We saw that doing this it saved people time, money and travel expenses. Meetings in Second Life saved IBM 1/5 of the cost of conducting a meeting in real time. Since workers were able to be in the luxury of their homes and did not have to travel, it allowed them to be able to jump back into their work once done with the meetings. These are all things that are seen to be very positive and productive to a business. I do however believe that there is a counterproductivity to having meetings and work in a virtual setting. The intergration of work and play can lead to distractions and setbacks, as seen in the Dibbell article. Virutal settings for the work place are becoming more prevelant as we continue on and technology continues to develop. But where will it lead the future of ecommerce and economy?
