Naked to the waist, lit cigarette dangling from his lips, a young
Chinese worker in Zhejiang Province begins a tedious midnight shift
at a factory. For the next 10 to 12 hours, he will grind out goods
destined for a developed country. Only he is not making toys or shoes
or plastic kitchen utensils. He’s playing a computer game.
In the same shop, there might be half a dozen to 100 other employees.
Across China, perhaps 100,000 more. Known as “gold farmers,” they
slay pixilated monsters for a living. They gather virtual currency
or “gold” in massively multiplayer online role-playing
games, or MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, EverQuest and Lineage,
to trade for real money.
They are like immigrant workers in the virtual world, says Ge
Jin, and they arouse some of the same anxieties. A Ph.D. student
in the communication department at UCSD, Jin has made three research
and filming trips to China since the summer of 2005 to research
the phenomenon for his doctoral dissertation and a documentary.
The farmers Jin found are typically male and aged 18 to 25. They
earn between $40 and $200 per month, averaging $100—or about
what they would make in a blue-collar job. Though conditions vary,
food and housing are usually provided. Some farms are indistinguishable
from sweatshops, while others resemble nothing so much as a college
dorm, rowdy camaraderie included. Most farmers— even those
who complain of boredom, alienation and hostile in-game encounters
with “amateur” players— absolutely love what
they do. After hours, they can be found in Internet cafes playing
the
same games for fun.
The bosses, many of whom are former farmers and are barely older
than their employees, sell the virtual assets their group collects—gold,
epic weapons, armor, potions and even whole characters with stats
that have been “leveled-up”—to online brokers
abroad. The brokers, in turn, mark up the goods and pass them on
to cash-flush players in the U.S., Europe and Korea, who prefer
paying to spending the time themselves.
With at least 100 million players worldwide logging in to online
games each month, all of this translates into big business. The
online game market was valued, by game industry researcher DFC
Intelligence, at $3.4 billion in 2005 and forecasted to grow to
$13 billion by 2011. Estimates of the shadow “real-money
trade” market in MMORPG items, meanwhile, begin at $200 million
and go up to $1 billion a year.
The “real-money trade” is reviled by the majority
of game publishers. Blizzard Entertainment, creator of the hugely
popular World of Warcraft, for example, maintains it is illegal,
that all game content is the company’s property, and so regularly
patrols for and shuts down suspicious accounts. (To avoid detection,
Chinese farmers will often use off-shore proxy servers.) Online
auction giant eBay recently decided to steer clear and disallow
the sale of game items on its site. Sony, on the other hand, operates
its own exchange for EverQuest and takes a 10 percent cut.
Gamers’ reactions are mixed. Clearly, many are buying the
booty. But some form gangs or war parties to hunt down and harm
suspected farmers. It’s getting dangerous out there in cyberspace.
To see Jin’s work in progress go to: http://www.chinesegoldfarmers.com.
— Inga Kiderra
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