 "Photo: David Hong")
MONTREAL (CUP) - Gold farming is a type of digital labour. Put simply, in massively multi-player online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, players will pay real-world currency for characters, weapons, and gold coins, or to reach higher levels. Professional gamers, or "gold farmers," will spend time attaining these digital goods and then sell them to the gamers willing to pay. Due to the tens of millions of players worldwide, the demand for gold-farming services is quite high, and over the past decade, this sort of virtual trading has developed into an industry - one that touches on issues of global trade, regulation, and the sociology of cyberspace because gold farming usually exists outside the law, it is largely undocumented, making it difficult to grasp the size and scale of the industry. In Current Analysis and Future Research Analysis on "Gold Farming,'" Cambridge professor Richard Heeks explains that annual revenue could range from US$200 million to US$20 billion. He also estimates there at least 400,000 gold farmers and 5 to 10 million buyers. The vast majority of gold farming takes place in China, but it's also been documented in other East Asian countries, and to some degree, in Mexico and Russia. Business models vary, but most reports describe micro-enterprises typically run out of a one- or two-room apartment or office spaces with 10 or 20 employees and computers. Remko Tanis, a Dutch freelance correspondent living and working in Shanghai, explains that gold-farming firms crop up on the outskirts of cities where rent is cheap. Often, there are colleges nearby where potential employees can be found - most gold-farmers are males in their late teens or early twenties who are already familiar with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs).
Myth-busting
Though few know about gold farming, those who do usually associate it with words like "sweatshop" - just look at the Wikipedia page. This image of an exploitative industry is grossly distorted. Heeks affirms this viewpoint, writing that "most (gold farmers) enjoy their work and that the oft-applied 'virtual sweatshop' label is at best partial and at worst inappropriate."
Tanis explains that the gold farmers in Shanghai with whom he spoke "all said they were playing these games anyway, so why not try to make money out of it." Tanis finds that many continued to play the same games in their free time. He adds that "The problem is more that they are addicted to the computer than that they are being exploited as computer slaves." Heeks and Tanis both place a gold farmers' monthly pay at about US$200 to US$250 - slightly higher than the average in China. "Pay and conditions are poor by Western standards, but are good or better than the alternatives that gold farmers face," Heeks notes.
Victimizing narratives are often unsubstantiated and reveal the West's penchant for imposing its opinions on acceptable employment onto others. Ulises Majias, an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, explains, "There is a tendency for us in the 'First World' to look at an image of, say, a bunch of shirtless guys in a room somewhere in Asia and immediately think 'sweatshop' and 'oppression.'"
Along with pay and conditions, the nature of gold farmers' work is often criticized. Killing the same monsters and retracing the same game-space for gold coins is boring and repetitive. One gold farmer cited in Heeks's paper is quoted: "You try going back and forth clicking the same thing for 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, then you will see if it's a game or not."
However, accusations lodged against the automated nature of gold farmers' virtual tasks deserve reassessment. Heeks's research finds that many gold farmers gain a sense of achievement from their work and see little difference between play and work.
The measures many gaming companies have taken against gold farming threaten the livelihood of these digital labourers, but they also diversify and enhance the complexity of their work. Gold farmers have to outwit gaming companies so that their clients can continue to buy characters, weapons, capital, and access to levels without being noticed. "It challenges the people here to get smarter," explains Tanis.
Heeks also writes that gold farming may provide valuable IT skills and could be a step toward more highly skilled work as a programmer.
Gold farming is typically thought of in terms of a simple dichotomy: the rich Westerners buy the virtual products, and the poor Easterners slave away acquiring them. But this narrative only vaguely fits a small portion of the industry. Since the late '90s, Asian countries have developed and launched their own MMORPGs, and Heeks notes that although the global gold-farming trade garners the most attention, it is likely smaller than national, regional, and local trade.
Heeks and Tanis both point out that the market for gold farming is actually much bigger in Asia than in Europe or North America. Tanis says that gold-farming firms in cities in the southeast of China, like Shanghai, "tend to specialize in the domestic market, and some other Asian countries."
In 2009, students from Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York worked with Majias and Tanis, as well as other academics, to research gold farming. Their blog, though titled stopgoldfarming.wordpress.com, shows a movement away from their initial, unequivocally negative stance toward gold farming and the assumption that workers were being exploited.
Their final posts from last April acknowledge that their primary assumptions were called into question and that gold farmers are not necessarily victims of the industry.
Cheating fantasy
Although the demand for virtual trading comes from gamers, the biggest opposition to gold farming is also from individuals in gaming communities. Nicholas Yee, a research scientist from Palo Alto Research Center, estimates that 22% of the players of the online game EverQuest participate in trading. Although this means there is a huge market for gold farmers in EverQuest and potentially other games, it also suggests that most gamers object to the idea of buying wealth and status in the games: to them, it's cheating.
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