Project 2: Gold Farming and Beyond

I came across this article from the June ‘07 New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago, and when this project was assigned I thought this would could be an interesting topic. Although the focus so far is specifically on gold farming, I wanted to find some things that expanded on this topic further.

First things first: the article is basically shedding light on an industry that has been existent for years now, growing in prominence, and a source of frequently polarized opinions. Wealthy (i.e. Western) video game players are now dishing out real money for virtual wealth in video games (most popularly World of Warcraft), and regardless of whether people love it or hate it, the real money being paid is fueling a ‘grey-market’ industry most commonly associated with half a million Chinese professional gamers/worker. They spend 12 hours a night, seven days a week filling ‘[virtual] gold farming’ quotas at real ‘gold farms’, where the computers and newest lucrative games are provided to these professional gamers. At the end of the work day they play some more, as enjoyment, to learn more tricks and shortcuts.

The article makes a point of how the line between work and play easily get blurred in this industry. To a degree the play becomes an income-generating career, but then what you do in the game is driven by what other players are willing to buy. The article points out how one player found 40-man raids in the most difficult dungeons truly exhilarating and fun, but his bosses eventually tell him to go back to very monotonous single-spot gold farming because the large raids got no customers. Not to mention the players that get fed up with gold farmers that aren’t really ‘playing’ … and they end up virtually killing these gold farmers, which can cost them their real-life jobs.

More attention is drawn to the blurred/non-existent line dividing work and play in video games when you factor in the GRIEFERS, players that go out of their way to make others’ online gaming experience miserable. Basically, it’s ‘willfully antisocial behaviour’. Griefing is obvious if the online game allows players to kill other players, like World of Warcraft, but it extends to even purely social games, like The Sims Online. Link here.

On that note, I went out and bought this month’s WIRED magazine. It had an article discussing the redefinition of reality and online games. Titled ‘Griefer Madness’, it outlines the paradox that “the Internet is serious business“. The article talks about how increasingly realistic simulation/fantasy games is equated with increasingly stronger emotional ties between the online character and the real-life player; when you factor in griefers that go out of their way to ruin the gaming experience for others, it puts into question what is real and what isn’t anymore. The negative emotions certainly are real, in any case.

Tie in the real money that’s being paid by Westerners for the gaming gold Chinese farmers are collecting, and I think the larger question at hand is basically asking what is real anymore!

When you pay to play games and others play games to get paid, when griefers (perhaps with some enlightenment) realize “the ability to inflict that huge amount of actual, real-life damage on someone is amazingly satisfying” by destroying the virtual creations of hundreds of hours spent by other players, when playing games is clearly an economy in itself, I think the world is asking where to draw the line between reality and fantasy.