{"id":1082,"date":"2009-03-05T09:15:24","date_gmt":"2009-03-05T15:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp\/2009\/03\/paying-for-fun\/"},"modified":"2009-03-05T09:15:24","modified_gmt":"2009-03-05T15:15:24","slug":"paying-for-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/2009\/03\/paying-for-fun.html","title":{"rendered":"Paying for Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\n

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.”<\/p>\n

Li is just one of more than 100 workers employed by Wow7gold, an internet-based company that makes more than \u00a31m 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.”<\/p>\n

For thousands of Chinese workers such as Li, “gold farming” is a way of life. Workers can expect to earn between \u00a380-\u00a3120 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There are an estimated 400,000 folks in Asia working in the “playbour” industry.<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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

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. <\/p>\n

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 <\/em>someone to do it for me <\/em>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). <\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

I just wish they’d stop spamming my in-box.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Paying for Fun”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-true-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/352"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}