Maybe get a blister on your little finger,
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
That ain’t workin’, that’s the way to do it 
For some time I’ve been keeping an eye on gold farming, the business of paying kids to build up loot in online games and then selling it for real money to Western marks. Although some entrepreneurs use automated scripts, most use humans: 100,000 kids in China, South Korea and Indonesia supposedly work in the industry. In a recent crossover into real life, someone in Shanghai murdered his buddy for selling a virtual sword he wasn’t supposed to sell.
Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these “virtual sweatshops…” “They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers.” [Link]
The economist Edward Castranova has calculated that if you took the real dollars spent within EverQuest as an index, its game world… would be the 77th richest nation on the planet, while annual player earnings [per capita] surpass those of citizens of Bulgaria, India or China. [Link]
Most stories I’ve read treat gold farming as a curiosity, which is a bit of a paradox. One, journalists think of valuable property in games as an oxymoron, even though they earn their own living from intellectual property. Two, many journalists are non-technical, even though their work is often published online:
The idea that sums of money are being paid for what appears to be an unproductive economic activity will cheese off traditionalists who believe that unless a job is located in an industrial factory, it serves no good purpose. [Link]
As long as gold farming doesn’t violate a game’s terms of service, I’m all for it. Even gaming sweatshops, 24/7 Internet cafés where kids sleep and work in shifts, are easier work than your average rug or shoe factory and no more repetitive:
“For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters,” said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. “I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I’ve had. And I can play games all day.” [Link]
Some players complain that being able to buy your way to the top violates the spirit of a game, but if you want to bypass 100 hours of online drudgery by paying some kid thirty bucks, that’s your business:
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Please go read… about the Air Force jocks piloting arned Predator unmanned planes over Iraq from comfy armchairs at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada… then consider the possibilities for future techno-mercenaries. [Link]
But in all the stories I’ve read on this industry, I’ve never seen a mention of gold farmers in India. This is a country which has managed to get paid every time a parking ticket is issued in New York City. So why isn’t gold farming big in India? You’d think geek sweatshops would be right up their alley. As Russell Peters once joked, ‘My people were not built for physical labor… Accounting, yes.’
An obvious factor is the lack of broadband relative to East Asia:
“… the number of Internet users in India remains relatively low, but it has soared 54 percent over the past year to 38.5 million, and will jump to 100 million in two years… The number of cybercafes in cities and towns across India jumped from 18,000 in 2001 to 105,350 this year… In comparison, China already has 100 million Internet users… [Link]
And because more Indians speak passable English, call centers pay better than gaming. But these aren’t satisfying answers. Here’s a silly rhetorical question: are the Chinese intrinsically geekier than Indians?
