Preview of movie on Chinese gold farmers
I think this little preview movie might provide a more complex and nuanced perspective on the phenomenon of gold farming in China. It’s interesting to see the presentation of it as little more than another example of globalization:
When I was in America, I found a meal, a haircut, and many other things are 8 times more expensive than in China just as one American dollar equals eight Chinese yuan. But currently it’s impossible to transmit a meal made in China or Chinese labor to America, otherwise it would be easy to make money. But I suddenly realized that exporting virtual items thorugh the Internet is the same as transmitting Chinese labor to America.
Clearly, one person’s labor is another person’s hobby; we see this in gardening, in woodworking, and many other areas.
If virtual worlds can serve as a channel for moving labor transparently in a manner akin to outsourcing, what other opportunities for labor transmission do virtual worlds provide?
15 Responses to “Preview of movie on Chinese gold farmers”
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I don’t know, I guess you’d have to look at what has value in the real world, within MMO worlds. Real money, by selling game items, which are generally earned by time invested.
So far I see item farming, and time invested.
Taking a look at an MMO that has all things balanced, even a, eh hem…. farmer… raising crops to sell food would be equally profitable to the virtual land owner as any other profession. So, I can picture landowners in a game world hiring labor to grow crops 24/7, and that labor force selling their game cash for real money.
Taking this idea a step forwards, if a game were built that required guards on a 24/7 basis, here again I can see such labor forces developing for the same goal of turning game cash into real.
But I don’t think any of us want to see this in our games, just sayin’.
Now, lets immagine that a game is made where territorial conquests are an open part, and basically the biggest army wins. Now we have 24/7eners as mercanaries, and might even be working directly for real life money.
It’s sort of sickening to think that Bill Gates might conquer our virtual worlds.
Your never going to stop it, might aswel give up.
Know what sucks. I had several pages typed out and I hit backspace and it went to another page….. So Ill summarize it fast.
I own a few swords in real life as a hobby. I dont hold a specific amount of pride in them however. Same goes for if a gardener or wood worker made me something. Unless its my own design by my own hands, I dont find it very pleasing. I tend to think that my house in UO holds more pride for me then my entire sword collection.
I somewhat understand why they do it but I do not like the fact that most are run by someone in the states taking a big chunk of the profit to live quite nicely. That or the ones that completely dominate areas in a game and refuse to leave. There are exceptions but not many. What Im curious on is how Chinas internet laws effect these companies or if they respect them or not. Im guessing not due to the fact that most farming groups tend to use any means necessary to maximize production such as bot usage or bugs.
Several other pages of good/bad points on farmers I wont bother retyping ;p. Just amuse yourself with this idea. What if you bought a maxed out character with a ton of gold. Now you want to go do something and farmers completely dominate the area. What now? You lose because you just paid them to takeover. Its almost the same as getting paid to put toxic waste in your house. Sure you got cash but what use is it if the world your living in is trashed.
The real question for developers, in my opinion, is how we can get this to work for us instead of against us.
Anything you can get people to put a great deal of effort into in-game is an opportunity. If you can design the game so that that effort makes the game more fun for others, you’ve got a much stronger, more self-sustaining game.
The whole farming deal could be approached by an argument that players of VW’s pay with time, not with money.
Or:
The average “value” of our wetsern nation citizen is far less than 8 times greater than that of the chineze.
The truth is probably neither, or lies in the middle. But you cant do much about the politics here, unless you make games which drain the western economies. 😛 You could increase the cost of play by a factor 8, I would guess that cost would be more in synch with the actual value of playing the game, but people wouldnt understand that so it wont work either.
I think Jim has the best idea, but not really one that easy to solve.
Its almost impossible to work with the farmers. You would have to design your game with that mindset from the start and considering the mindset is “Do everything for cash regardless of how it is as long as other people dont want to do it” then your at a losing end. Basicly how can over inflating a economy prove to be useful? The world would have to be designed that only creativity gives rewards. Such as Second Life. Although I wouldnt count it out that there are farmers in that game… probably running casinos. Hmm actually that would be interesting but it would still prove to be a bad move in the end. You cant build a game expecting farmers to cooperate. If they leave then the world would crumble due to imbalance. Its basicly a no win situation.
What will be interesting to see is how gamers react to the people behind the avatars. It’s probably safe to say that many Westerners who spend considerable time in MMOGs – and react with real emotion regarding the pharming issue – would be doing the same thing if they were Chinese. It’s easy to denigrate people about whom one knows little or nothing living in circumstances beyond comprehension.
Curious to me is that the medium which will now best present this social issue is essentially a hundred years old … and detached from the immersion experience. Imagine what will happen when three-dimensional virtual spaces rival the visual “reality” of a two-dimensional plane with nothing but a moving image projected onto it; when voice communication is standard and people can explore differences and similarities in what is effectively neutral ground. When considered from a global social perspective, videogames may turn out to be one of the most important developments in human history.
Remember, these Chinese guys are people who can afford computers and play games in the first place. These aren’t the immage of poor dirt farmers walking around with bare feet and empty bellies. If any are promoted that way, and I have seen one case of it somewhere recently, I think it’s more public relations than anything else.
I need to post some pictures of Shanghai.
“It feels like a college dorm.”
Raph, these guys are not the humbled masses. I don’t want to come off as cold here. I know life is very different there than here. But these individuals are familiar with keyboards, they know “dorm life”, some(if not all) speak English, and I just don’t picture a shop like that recruiting people who aren’t from a more affluent part of their society. Yeah, I know I could be wrong. I just don’t think so right now.
Whoa, where did I say they were? Certainly not the ones in Shanghai. The reason I want to post the pics is to show how much of a modern city Shanghai is.
Now, inland may be another story; I hear there can be a 10x differential in earning power between Shanghai and rural areas inland.
As far as speaking English — abroad, everyone speaks English or understands it to some degree. 🙂 In Europe and Asia anyway. Been years since I was in Latin America, but I recall it being more monolingual in that way.
csven-
I’m not sure additional levels of interactivity and verisimilitude — people’s real-world voices, people’s real-world faces in an online world — will improve how people relate to each other online, or make it any more neutral. Pretty much the opposite, in fact. Give people more details, they’ll find more unimportant details to be irrationally judgemental about.
One thing I like about online interaction — written interaction of all types, really — is the way it filters out most everything but the words. When people aren’t facile with words, you run into problems. My words convey hostility a lot more often than I mean them to, for example, and a lot of people (including myself) discriminate on the basis of capitalization and punctuation. Still, that beats being judgemental on the basis of whether someone looks like you or not.
You misunderstood me, Jim. I didn’t say it would “improve how people relate”, nor did I say that their relations would be “more neutral”. I’m saying that a different medium – one that likely will some day provide a significantly more immersive experience than just watching a video – will affect how they relate. It may turn out that differences so outweigh similarities that relations worsen. I don’t know.
When I said “explore differences and similarities in what is effectively neutral ground”, I’m referring to the fact that people from different cultures and environments are interacting in an “effectively neutral” – and in this case, virtual – environment (unless the Westerner is living his real life in a recreation of WoW or something). Having spent some time in China (and Asia in general), and having hosted people from both China and Japan, from my experience it can be difficult to shut out the impact of an environment and focus on just a person. Inside a virtual space, I would expect environmental influences could be negated.
“It feels like a college dorm.”
That was Mr. Li. I would expect Mr. Li to be the company owner and as the owner have both money and a college education. I doubt Mr. Li is a pharmer himself. It’s common practice for companies to provide dormitories; the one’s I’ve seen are pretty bad.
“Now, inland may be another story…”
I’ve spent time inland at factories. It’s pretty nasty by Western standards. But just because these people are blue collar workers doesn’t make them computer illiterate. And just because they’re familiar with computers doesn’t make them college educated any more than half the kids on MySpace. I expect quite a few of them love hanging out at internet cafe’s. And even the poorest of them seems to have a nice cell phone.
Many of the one’s I’ve seen reminded me of American sailors: earning money for the first time, no expenses (rent, utilities, food, insurance, aso), and lots of disposable income; only not enough to buy a home or move up in the world. Enough to buy nice clothes, a cool cell phone, jewelry, motorcycles (lots of them last I was there), and … pool tables (nothing like watching some young worker riding a rusty old bike down a highway with a full-sized pool table strapped to the back).
I’m not suggesting anyone feel sorry for them. Just don’t blame them for taking advantage of a situation. That’s just capitalism, imo.
Thanks for filling in some blanks, csven. Yeah, they’re just taking advantage of a situation. But I do cast blame on them. They’re sharing characters, using scripts, and maximizing game play for profit. They’re screwing up game economies while also setting the bar so high that other players can’t compete. So I blame them for messing up games. And I, of course, see no reason to have any sympathy for them, nor any excuses.
It’s capitalism with no reguard for what one is doing. That’s my take on it, anyways.