Paying for Fun

Grepppo posted a link in a comment which pointed (eventually) to this article on China’s “gold farming” industry.

Li Hua makes a living playing computer games. Working from a cramped office in the heart of Changsha, China, he slays dragons and loots virtual gold in 10-hour shifts. Next to him, rows of other young workers do the same. “It is just like working in a factory, the only difference is that this is the virtual world,” says Li. “The working conditions are hard. We don’t get weekends off and I only have one day free a month. But compared to other jobs it is good. I have no other skills and I enjoy playing sometimes.”

Li is just one of more than 100 workers employed by Wow7gold, an internet-based company that makes more than £1m a year selling in-game advantages to World of Warcraft (WoW) players. Customers may ask for their avatar’s skill level to be increased (“power levelling”), or for a virtual magic sword or precious ore to be obtained. As one player put it: “Where there’s a demand, China will supply it.”

For thousands of Chinese workers such as Li, “gold farming” is a way of life. Workers can expect to earn between £80-£120 a month which, given the long hours and night shifts, can amount to as little as 30p an hour. After completing his shift, Li is given a basic meal of rice, meat and vegetables and falls into a bunk bed in a room that eight other gold farmers share. His wages may be low, but food and accommodation are included.

There are an estimated 400,000 folks in Asia working in the “playbour” industry.

Thousands of miles away, western consumers are driving these industries, pumping hard-earned cash into products and services that exist only in fantasy lands. I ask Jamie el-Banna, a 24-year-old gamer from the UK, what makes him spend his money on these sites. “The reason people buy gold is the same reason they pay people to wash their car – they would rather spend money than do it themselves” he says.

“You could spend time farming gold, say, 20 real-life hours. Or you could go to work for two hours and earn the money to buy the gold. If I’m playing I want to play, not do boring tasks. Go back some years, and a job involving a computer was a skilled job. Nowadays, keyboards and mice are the new ploughs and shears.”

But does he ever consider the conditions of the workers supplying these services? “I don’t think about the workers. I think about the product. I’m sure the wage that gold farmers are paid is low. Manual labourers in third-world countries probably earn a similar amount, but I doubt you would ask someone this kind of question if you saw them drinking a cup of coffee.”

It’s an interesting concept — disturbing in many ways, as any sort of cheap foreign labor is. EULA conditions aside, is it “ethical” play?

Part of the blame has to come from the games themselves, I should think. If you have a game that relies too much on drudgery and grinding to get to the points where the player can have “fun,” then, yes, that’s going to encourage this sort of cheating. I hear a lot more about this sort of thing in WoW than in CoX or LotRO, and I don’t think it’s just because of the relative player base. 

But it does exist, even in those latter games — though I suspect it’s more in the form of PLing than buying gold (or Influence). If I could magically change some of my low-level characters in to their 20s or 30s, that would be kind of cool. But somehow paying someone to do it for me seems wrong — a harkening back to the Indulgence trade, perhaps (which originally arose when remission of sins awarded by the Church for particular holy acts — a pilgrimage, going on a crusade — evolved into paying to equip someone to do it, thence to simply … paying). 

For myself, it’s just not something I’d actually do. But is it really something I can condemn someone else for doing? Yeah, I can point to the ill effects it causes — inflation in the auction houses (if a sufficient number of people did it), and a bunch of PLed n00bs running around who don’t know how to use their powers on a PUG. But, really, those are relatively trivial. It seems that the “offense” is primarily against the social contract of the game and the ethical concerns over the working conditions of the “playbourers.”

I just wish they’d stop spamming my in-box.