Gold Farming Research Part Six – the last one
This the latest part of the series of the gold farming research. In this section, we are going to disscuss the development of gold farming!
Developmental Analysis for Gold Farming
Much gold farming takes place in developing countries. How, then, can we analyse this phenomenon in development terms? In many ways, we already have – the general mapping and the analysis from the perspectives of economics, industrial sociology and enterprise – all thesecould easily fit under a “developmental perspective”.
We could extend these into various fractions of development studies; for example:
- Economic analysis: from the field evidence of farmers and firms, this activity does not merely substitute one form of employment for another, it has also in places reduced the number of unemployed (e.g. Thompson 2005, Jin 2006). It is therefore increasing national income. Those earning money from foreign players are also undertaking the equivalent of exports, thus impacting the country’s balance of trade. The nature of those employed is mixed but, by channelling income to the unemployed and to rural migrants, gold-farming may have some income equity, even poverty reduction, impacts.
- Social analysis: alongside negative characterisations about addiction, there are also positive anecdotes about the wider impact of gold farming. Jin (2006f), for example, reports gold farming providing work for unemployed gang members, as a result of which crime is perceived to have fallen. This chimes with Bilich’s (2006) description of a project that uses gamesplaying to entice youngsters off the streets in Argentina.
- ICT4D analysis: a key issue in the information-and-communication-technologies-for-development (ICT4D) sub-sector of development studies has been the sustainability of telecentres: Internet-connected PCs set up in small towns and villages. Often telecentres face problems of financial sustainability because they adopt a consumption model focused on helping citizens to consume Internet-based information, rather than a production model focused on helping citizens create new ICT-based employment (Heeks 2008b). Gold farming presents two things. First, a current model for earning money via an Internet-connected PC. Second,
an example of a possible future model in which Internet-connected workers in developing countries produce a wide range of virtual goods and services. For both these reasons, the ICT4D field should be taking a keen interest in gold farming.
These and other fractions of development studies provide avenues for future research on gold farming. In the remainder of this section, though, the particular focus will be at the micro-level of individual gold farmers’ lives.
Working Lives and Livelihoods of Gold Farmers
Labels can be powerful, and Julian Dibbell’s (2003) early foray into this field with the term “virtual sweatshop” probably helped to cement or at least crystallise the view that gold farming was an exploitative and oppressive activity. The work was characterised as repetitive and very badly paid with long working hours. This view has then been reproduced in many subsequent writings, though almost always in the absence of data. To find the testimony of gold farmers themselves and actual field evidence, one must shovel aside a mound of opinionation.
When one does that, the picture is more positive, though still mixed. We can look at a set of issues:
- Wages. As noted in Section A3, wages are, unsurprisingly, low by Northern standards. The average wage in China calculated above – US$145 per month ¨works out at something like 50 cents per hour; less than one-tenth the US federal minimum wage. On the other hand, the salary comparator column in Table 2 indicates that gold farming pay is as good, and often better, than alternative
sources of local employment. And, reflecting the unusual nature of the sub-sector, some farmers are reported playing for no wages in exchange for free game time, suggesting compensation for some gold farmers may be made up from more than just money (Jin 2006). - Work content. Some workers find their work boring and repetitive. One is quoted, “You try going back and forth clicking the same thing for 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, then you will see if it’s a game or not” (He 2005). Others find it “torturing having to ‘camp’ the same spots for long periods of time” (Yee 2006). But Jin (2006) – who field-srveyed a number of farmers – reported
“Most of the gold farmers I talked to love the job. In the gold farms, you can see they are enthusiastic about their job and they got a sense of achievement from1it”. Similarly some of those interviewed by Dibbell (2007) were positive: 2 “there’s not a big difference between play and work”. Hence, the terminology “playbourer” to describe this job; a categorisation reinforced by the finding that some workers relax after work by playing on their own game account (ibid.). - In-game exclusion. Where Asian gold farmers share game worlds with Western gamers, they can feel a sense of exclusion: “Many Chinese gold farmers are troubled by their conflicts with foreign gamers. They cannot really fit in the gamer communities on foreign servers where they work/play because of language, cultural and social barriers.” (Jin 2006). One is quoted as saying that name-calling by US players gives him a “sense of inferiority” (Jin 2006c). Another describes interactions with US players: “they treat me bad !- Tey keep calling me farmer, China dog and such. I do not have any problems with other players except American players, they non-stop racist me.” (Bell 2006).
- Empowerment. Jin (2006) reports, “the game world can be a space of empowerment and compensation for them. In contrast to their impoverished real lives, their virtual lives give them access to power, status and wealth which they can hardly imagine in real life.” What real-world impacts this perceived empowerment has are uncertain although we know that top gamers do achieve
respect and admiration of their real-world peers, so there may be some spillover. Equally, we do not know if virtual-world empowerment has real-world effects on the individuals; e.g. making them better able to address real-world challenges. - Alternatives. Jin (2006) reports, “Most of the gold farmers I met do not have better alternatives. !- They were eitherunemployed or had worse job before they found this job.” In terms of the three key groups identified, the main alternatives are: manual labour (rural migrants), unemployment (urban unemployed youth), and their studies! (students). We have already seen wages can be as good or better than the alternative. And work content? Even for those who feel they have boring, repetitive tasks the alternative might be the perceived ennui of unemployment or the monotony of factory work.
The bottom line here seems to be the reference point. By and large, when Westerners compare the working lives of gold farmers to their own, they come up negative. By and large, when gold farmers compare their working lives to the immediate alternatives, they come up positive or neutral. Jin (2006) sums it up:
“This is a paradox that the term “sweatshop” cannot convey: in the gold farms exploitation is entangled with empowerment and productivity is entangled with pleasure.”
As in other parts of this paper, the available data has driven a rather eclectic coverage of issues above. However this is starting to make feasible the analysis of the development impact of gold farming in terms of the livelihoods framework; widely used in development. A relatively easy entry point would be measurement of impacts of employment in gold farming on the five elements of the livelihoods assets pentagon (see Figure 8; Heeks 2006). Even here, there are many gaps – we know something about physical capital, financial capital, political capital and human capital; but there are still blanks in all of these and there appears nothing written about gold farmers’ social capital: their networks and relations.
It is not clear why they shift and whether they see gold farming as a journey to some other destination. It is certainly conceivable that they do: those involved in basic IT work in developing countries sometimes hold the belief that it will be an entry point to more highly-skilled work such as programming (Heeks 2008c). Wang (2008) gives some small credence to this in reporting a gold farmer who sees his work giving him not only valuable work experience but, in particular, valuable IT skills.
Other Sociological Analysis of Gold Farming
Having already investigated gold farming from the perspective of industrial sociology, this penultimate section brings together a couple of different perspectives that might loosely be herded under the sociology label.
Perception and Discourse
Given the virtuality of the environment and, hence, the fact that almost the entire games-playing population – at least in industialised countries – will never have met agold farmer, then perception tends to outrank reality in framing the discourse on gold
farming. We already saw indications of this in Section D4, and saw that Western perceptions of gold farmers have been largely negative. Aspects of those perceptions include (developed from Chan 2006):
- Homogenisation: a generalised assumption that all gold farmers are from China; that all players with poor English are gold farmers
- Alienisation: the assumption that gold farmers are different from and “other than” regular players.
- Moralisation: defining gold farming as morally wrong for the game (unfair allowing players to take shortcuts), and as morally wrong for the gold farmers (they are oppressed and exploited).
- Criminalisation: associating gold farmers with criminal activity. Examples include stories of theft (Lastowka 2006), potential links to money-laundering (Symantec 2007), potential links to organised crime (Neff 2007), and accusations that gold farmers are being forced to work against their will by “down-and-dirty bands”! (ARD-TV 2006).
Some writers and some game companies appear to be deliberately seeking to conflate the notion of gold farmers (as defined in this paper) and gold frauders (those seeking to defraud players or companies) (Davis 2008). For example: “Real-money trading companies hack into and steal legitimate accounts, often by distributing keystroke-logging malware to steal passwords. In fact, simply purchasing gold from these companie may open you up to a later hacking attempt. These hacked accounts are then stripped clean of any valuable in-game items and/or used for botting.” (ArenaNet 2008)
As Davis (2008) points out, there is limited evidence for this conflation. Five conclusions appear likely:
- Online gaming generally is a target for fraudsters (e.g. Leyden 2008, McMillan 2008).
- Some real-money trading web sites are fraudulent. Brown (2008), for example, identifies some that had targeted her company.
- Some real-money trading web sites are not fraudulent. One player who spent US$100 per week on in-game currency reported buying from various gold-farming sites, and never having been defrauded (Aiken 2007).
- Game companies have problems with fraud that they associate with gold farming, e.g. the use of charge-backs. Those involved will take out an account for some time, then claim a refund from the credit card company. On top of the lost account income, game companies may also lose out when the credit card firm fines them for excessive charge-back levels: Sony Online Entertainment stated it had suffered nearly US$1m in such fines in a six-month period in 2007 (Zenke 2008; see also Seiler 2007). The actual association with gold farming is undetermined.
- Gold-farming firm web sites themselves suffer from fraud. See Box 12 for further details.
- At most, then, the evidence points to only a very uncertain and very partial connection between gold-farming firms and fraud. As elsewhere, the (sometimes-engineered) perception very likely runs well ahead of the reality.
- Homogenisation: gold farmers have been reported from at least five other developing countries, some transitional economies, and from industrialised countries (see Sections A3 and C1). The issue of language quality might call to mind a saying about pots andkettles given the illiterate, ungrammatical in-game chat of many Western gamers.
- Alienisation: at least in virtual terms, everyone in-game is “other”; everyone is a foreigner in a strange land. Some players report playing alongside gold farmers and including them in their chat and activities once they get to know them (Yee 2006).
- Moralisation: what about the morality of providing income, employment and 3 Failing that, how about a bit more livelihoods for some of world’s poorest? attention to the morality of purchasers as opposed to the morality of producers?
- Criminalisation: field studies of gold farmers suggest no criminal links (Jin 2006), and – as described in Box 12 – gold-farming firms themselves have been the target for fraudsters.
The stereotype of gold farming as a battle between Western game companies/players vs. Chinese gold farmers is undermined by the presence of Western gold farmers. It is also undermined by the problem Asian game firms report with local gold farmers. Korean NCSoft’s Lineage was the origin of much gold farming, and NCSoft has banned hundreds of thousands of accounts for gold farming
(Steinkuelher 2006). China-based Giant Interactive was the subject of a law suit from investors who claim statistics in its IPO (initial public offering) prospectus were exaggerated by inclusion of thousands of gold farmer accounts in its ZT Online game (Scheidt 2007)
“Wider society” also has a view. In South Korea, thanks to the promotion of e-sports, the view of gaming generally seems positive but, as reflected in the 2007 anti-RMT legislation, the view of gold farming seems less positive. In China, newspaper articles on gold farming “usually condemn it as another example of youth corrupted by bad hobby.” (Jin 2006b).
So why do the negative perceptions appear to dominate? Chan (2006) feels this4demonstrates “how racial meanings can be insidiously re-mapped in cyberspace” and Jin (2006) sees this as triggered by a sense of virtual immigration: “Chinese gold farmers are in some sense a new kind of immigrant workers, disembodied through the Internet, then reembodied on a foreign territory as the mythical warriors, magicians or priests – virtual bodies that are te bread earners for real bodies.”Yee (2006) then draws these two ideas together by insightfully demonstrating parallels between reactions to gold farmers, and the treatment of Chinese immigrant the labour working laundry shops during the California gold rush of the mid-to-late 19 century: the same repetitive work in front of a machine; the same association with gold. And similar tropes of associating East Asians with disease and pestilence that5justified the need for their extermination – ethnic-cleansing either from realAmerican soil or from the virtual American soil of game servers:
“The contemporary narrative starts to feel too much like the historical one – Chinese immigrant workers being harassed and murdered by Westerners who feel they alone can arbitrate whatconstitutes acceptable labor.” (ibid.: 6)
More generally, one can revisit the list of threats described above in Section D4 and see parallels with treatment of legal and illegal immigrants in the real-world: being sworn at (abuse); being reported to the police (reporting); having their places of work
raided or attacked (disruption); having rules and systems changed in order to6
disfavour them (patching/redesign); removal of right of abode, removal of citizenship rights, and deportation (account banning); prosecution (legal action); violent attack and murder (character attacks and killing).
A further parallel that might also be investigated comes from the view that immigrants are subject to attack from those groups in a local society that are themselves exploited, partly because they compete for the same resources (Boeri et al 2002). The point of similar competition is clear in the problems of spawn-camping: gold farmers are thereby seen to deny regular players access to in-game resources. It is for future research to ask whether those latter players are themselves being exploited e.g. by the game companies or, more accurately, whether they feel exploited or otherwise feel some anger (perhaps due to perceptions of addiction or time-wasting or the “do it now!” mentality that is reinforced by frequent use of ICTs) that is then redirected towards gold farmers.
The addictive potential of MMOGs is reflected in the morphed names that players give them, such as “Evercrack” (e.g. Frankel 2002) and “World of Warcrack” (e.g. Batchelder 2005). Can we then make the jump from this to see parallels between drugs trading and real-money trading? The virtuality of the latter, and the more limited necessity for repeat purchases do create differences. However, there are equally a number of similarities:
- Supply chains and profits. The main supply chains of both drugs trade and gold farming start with poor producers in developing countries, and product that is sold via intermediaries to “users”. These are urban consumers in developing countries (often ignored in the Western media), and consumers throughout industrialised countries. Intermediaries take the lion’s share of profits in both sectors (though they can be disintermediated in gold farming in a way they cannot in the drugs trade). Distribution of income is probably not as skewed. Figures from Chossudovsky (2004), for example, suggest heroin farmers in Asia receive about 1% of the final selling price.
Figures in Section B1 suggest gold farmers in Asia receive a minimum of 14% of the final selling price. Other parallels include the competition between industrialised country operations working their way upstream, and developing country operations working their way downstream in the value chain. - Unequal treatment of buyers and sellers. As in the drugs trade, the “bad guys” in gold farming are seen to be the producers; yet little thought is given to the “hundreds of thousands of players in wealthier quarters of the globe [who] are actually the ones fueling the market.” (Anderson 2007). This is reflected in implementation of threats. For example, on GuildWars, ArenaNet bans the accounts of gold sellers but only temporarily suspends the accounts of buyers (ArenaNet 2008). More generally, Dibbell (2007) reports game companies tend to act against the producers not the buyers. As with the drugs trade, both parties are held in opprobrium by others, and buyers may not publicise their purchases for fear of the social stigma attached (is “Goldaholics Anonymous” just around the corner?).
- Money laundering. Real-money traders launder in-game currency through different gaming accounts in order to make the trail harder for game companies to follow (Lee 2005). Some brokers are claimed to help launder in-game currency developed by macroing or duping; again to muddy the trail and make the currency appear at the end as if it has been produced in-game in a normal manner. And, buyers are often paid in small amounts, possibly to reduce the risks of detection, just as drug dealers pay lots of small amounts into legitimate bank accounts to avoid detection (Bell 2006).
- Informational characteristics. Just like RMT, the drugs trade involves information uncertainties (e.g. about the true identity of trading partners (are they police informants or under-cover?); about surveillance of the trade; about the true intentions of trading partners (are they here to trade or to rob?); about the purity and content of what is being traded) and information asymmetries (those upstream in a trade typically know more than those downstream). As a result drugs trading is very risky. In this case, issues of trust and reputation (plus issues of transportation logistics, cost and risk) have led to the emergence of intermediaries; to buyers repeat trading with a seller they come to trust; and to interchange of reputational information. As noted in Section B4, RMT has imitated only some of this pattern.
- Addiction. As reflected in the morphed names above, there is a lot of analysis about the addictive behaviour of some games players (Yee 2002, Orzack & Orzack 2006, Golub & Lingley 2008). Whether players could become addicted to buying in-game currency and items looks unresearched.But there is a possibility: as noted above, Aiken (2007) reports a player spending US$100 per week on currency purchase in World of Warcraft. Yunwu (2007) reports a ZhengTu Online player drawn into repeated purchases of in-game items through the addictive nature of the outcome. And Jin (2006) raises the intriguing point that gold farmers may get addicted to their work.
- Methadone. We could argue the introduction of daily-repeatable, currency-earning quests into World of Warcraft in 2007 represented the equivalent of methadone for those addicted to buying gold: an in-game source that was less dangerous and could be more readily controlled by the authorities.
- Trade-related violence. There are claims that denial of service attacks on the main Korean RMT web sites were undertaken by Chinese gamers seeking to extort virtual items from those sites (Davis 2007e). However, no hard evidence is provided on this speculation nor about any other violence in relation to gold farming. There is the much-quoted story of the murder of Zhu Caoyuan in a dispute with another player over the real-money sale of a jointly-won sword in Legend of Mir 3 (Li 2005), but that relates to the superset element of RMT that excludes gold farming.
- Arguments for legalisation. There are arguments for the legalisation of the drugs trade (e.g. Mowlam 2002, Kallen 2005). One can make the same arguments for gold farming and note that game companies have themselves done this. As often-mentioned in this paper, Sony Online Entertainment did it in creating the Station Exchange for Everquest 2, and it is central to Second Life.
Given these parallels, and given the much greater body of academic work undertaken on the drugs trade, that body could provide the basis for frameworks and comparisons with wow gold farming.
The Real and The Virtual
We can draw out a plane of opinions about the virtual world and the extent and cause of differences between it and the real world (Figure 9, developed from Rowe (1990) and Miles (1996)). Focusing on the latter dimension, one can chart two extremes on the continuum:
- Transformism: takes a mainly technologically-deterministic perspective to argue that features of the technology will create a transformed environment online in which the “old rules” do not apply (e.g. Benkler 2006:1 who talks of a technology-enabled “radical transformation”). In general, this is associated with the optimistic perspective that sees the virtual world will not only be different from the real world, it will be better.
- Structuralism: takes a mainly socially-deterministic perspective to argue that social structures will ensure replication of the real world within the virtual world (e.g. Wang 2006:1 who states “virtual gaming economies embody and reproduce real patterns of capitalist structures of labor”). In general, this is associated with the pessimistic perspective that sees the virtual world will be the same as the real world in its negative aspects such as inequity and exploitation.
In terms of evidence for difference and change, we can find some evidence in favour of transformism. For instance, playbouring represents an entirely new set of income-generating occupations that did not previously exist. The anonymity or morphing of
identity possible in gameplay and trading are new. And the impacts of information failures and value-chain intermediation are different from those likely to be observed in a non-virtual environment.
Yet there is also evidence pushing the other way. Many features of economic, enterprise and sociological analysis identified patterns in gold farming found in other sectors. More persuasively, and as noted above, Yee (2006) describes how institutional structures of racism found in the real world have been “re-mapped” into the virtual world. As also analysed above, the whole activity of gold farming replicates real-world patterns of capitalist development: the commoditisation and division of labour seen for thousands of years, and the globalisation and offshoring7 seen for tens if not hundreds of years.
Overall, then, the stronger weight of current evidence perhaps leans towards the notion that gold farming – while it certainy represents a new sector and a new income and employment opportunity for developing countries with new features – largely
serves to reproduce existing real-world institutional forces and social relations.We can understand this a bit more fully using Orlikowski’s (1992) formulation of the relation between technology, social structure (the institutional context), and human agency as summarised in Figure 11.
We can read this as a self-reproducing cycle. For example, the institutions of most societies involved with games are such that they support the search for profit. In creating the technology of the game worlds, game designers are influenced by this institutional context to create an imitative in-game context. These two contexts, in turn, influence the agency of (at least some) players to use the technology in a profit-seeking manner.
However, we could also read the interrelations – quoting Steinkueher (2006) – as the”mangle of play”: a unpredictable mixer of technology, agency and context into which players, playbourers and other stakeholders are thrown. Hence, the need for continuing research as the field evolves and keeps throwing up unanticipated outcomes.
Summary and Conclusions: The Gold-Farming Research Agenda
So !- what has been learned from this salmagundi of a paper? We begin with a summary, followed by discussion about future gold-farming research.
Summary
In basic terms, gold-farming is a sizeable phenomenon. The rather wobbly-legged best guesses for 2008 are that 400,000 gold farmers earning an average US$145 per month produced a global market worth US$500m; but we could easily more than double the latter to over US$1bn. There are probably 5-10m consumers of gold farming services. The main uncertainty of estimation relates to the gold-farming market in East Asia, which appears much larger than that in the US/EU. That uncertainty in part arises because gold farming operates at four levels – local,national, regional and global. We should encompass all four but, to date, the focus has been almost entirely on the global trade.
The “pre-history” of gold farming dates from the 1980s, and we can structure it in terms of capitalist development, starting with “subsistence” production and moving through barter, commoditisation and monetisation until we reach the type of petty 21st commodity production found at the turn of the 21 century. Gold farming proper then started in earnest in 2001-2002, really took off in 2003-2004, and entered something of a black hole phase in data terms during 2007-2008. We can likewise structure this as a move from petty to capitalist commodity production involving wage labour, automation, and globalisation/offshoring, particularly to Asia.
A guesstimated 80-85% of gold farming takes place in China, probably mainly in the urban areas of coastal provinces due to the presence of local gamers, ICT infrastructure, and overseas connections. It probably helps reduce unemployment and poverty, and improve national balance of trade and income equity. It may help reduce crime and provide a model for telecentre and cybercaf¨| financial sustainability.
Gold farming seems to represent an efficient use of capital in job-creation terms (estimated at less than US$800 per job), with wages representing at most 50% of revenue. The main jobs created are those of in-game “playbourers” who are predominantly male and 18-25 years old, pushed into the sector by the lack of alternative employment. Most are paid on a piecework or quota basis but with food and accommodation thrown in. Most work 12-hour shifts, 7 days per week and can be considered semi-skilled or skilled labour.
How we view this depends on the benchmark. Pay and conditions are poor by Western standards but as good or better than the alternatives that gold farmers face: in wage, in work content, and in other ways. We may not know how gold farmers’ careers progress but we can say that most enjoy their work and that the oft-applied “virtual sweatshop” label is at best partial and at worst inappropriate.
The entrepreneurs (almost all men) who start up gold farms are pulled into the sub-sector by some mix of existing game- and/or gold-farming-knowledge plus the lure oprofits. They have created tens of thousands of enterprises that are, in many ways, typical of developing countries – they ae principally micro-enterprises employing less than 10 staff, and they are informally-financed. However, they are likely more entrepreneurial than the norm – more likely to grow, less likely to require governm intervention, and more likely to survive. They might even build their internal technological capabilities and develop into higher-level game industry or IT sector enterprises.
In all but the smallest firms, gold farmers work alongside managers, researchers, technical support and customer relations staff. The presence of such staff and web sales portals creates fixed and/or indivisible costs that provide some basis for scale economies. The apparent lack of domination by medium- and large-scale firms means, though, there must also be scale diseconomies, such as the costs of “being noticed” by government and game companies. These two stakeholders – alongside ICT suppliers, fansites and regular players – sit outside the main value chain, which consists of gold farmers, gold-farming firms, brokers/exchanges (not present for all
sales), and the player-buyers.
The sub-sector has taken off because a demand with more money than time met a supply with more time than money. Until roughly 2006, a lot of this took place via brokers and there was both the potential and reality of super-profits. From mid-2005 to mid-2008, however, in-game currencies devalued an average of 75% against the US dollar. The continuing survival of the sub-sector probably relies on a disappearance of those super-profits, increased productivity, and disintermediation so that many firms now sell direct to consumers. As a result of these plus new entrants and the anti-gold-farming actions of game companies, power within the gold-farming value chain has in recent years become more dispersed, and has shifted somewhat away from brokers and somewhat towards game companies.
Continuing survival of the sub-sector also relies on overcoming some severe information failures – absence, uncetainty, asymmetry, and communication problems. These have produced many examples of both opportunism and adverse selection, with trading bringing uncertainty, risk and negative consequences. As expected, these seem likely to have suppressed real-money trading well below its
“natural” level, and to have induced sellers into (potentially-hollow) assertions about their trustworthiness. Because of its virtuality, though, real-money trading has seen only a little of the localisation and intermediation one might otherwise expect in the presence of such information failures.
Thirdly, continuing survival of gold farming relies on dealing with the many threats it faces. Some of these are business-generic such as ease of entry intensifying competition, or rising labour costs. Others are business-specific but just a low-level nuisance such as character killing or account and IP banning or fraud. Others still patching, game redesign and marketing channel blocks requie constant innovation to stay one step ahead. And a final category is much more serious such as game company substitution or legal action by governments or game companies. Game companies probably take such action through a mix of economic, moral and personal in-game experience rationales. But one must recognise that gold farming brings benefits to these companies, while action against gold farming brings both anticipated and perhaps unanticipated costs.
Perception outranks reality in the discourse on gold farming, and at least in the Westthose perceptions have been largely ngative, serving to homogenise, alienise, criminalise and moralise about gold farmers. That this has happened despite counter-evidence supports the idea that racial stereotypes and views about immigrant labour are remapped into cyberspace. It also supports the structuralist argument that institutional forces in the real world are reproduced in new, virtual fields like gold farming. There is some contra-flow, suggesting the sub-sector’s virtuality has produced new outcomes; for example in relation to intermediaries. While this falls short of an argument that technology has transformed social structures and behaviours, it means the mix of technology,structure and agency is unpredictable, and one we must keep researching: a topic to which this paper now turns.
Gold-Farming Research
Above all, from the paper, one can see the many, many blank spaces on the gold-farming data map. These all demonstrate the potential for a research agenda on gold farming. But what might that research agenda be? The priorities will, of course, depend on the researcher – varied angles wre deliberately selected for this paper since every researcher takes their own route through a field. So the following list of research priorities will have a personal flavour:
- What is happening here? First, never mind the high-concept work, some basic, reliable facts and figures would help – pay, working conditions, worker demographics, locations, ownership, and all the hundred other fundamental elements found in Section A and throughout the paper – could get a boost fromjust a few weeks of fieldwork in China.
- What is the micro-impact of gold farming? That kind of fieldwork could fairly easily be extended to feed knowledge about the impact of gold farming on individual workers; framed using either a quick-and-dirty livelihoods assets model (see Section E1), or more comprehensively using the overall sustainable livelihoods framework (DFID 1999).
- What is the meso-impact of gold farming? The fieldwork could also take a set of foundational enterprise measures, and help us understand quantitatively about income, expenditure and profits; and qualitatively about capabilities and enterprise strategies (see Section D and Heeks 2008).
- What is the macro-impact of gold farming? From the research just suggested, the fieldwork ought to be able to provide a foundation sufficient for scale-up to inform some macroeconomics: numbers employed; impact on unemployment and poverty reduction; contribution to balance of trade (see Section E). That would be a starting point for sub-sectoral strategy.
- What strategy for existing gold farming? The second leg for a strategy would be more thorough enterprise analysis building on Section D: some qualitative dynamics to help us understand capability-building and progression of enterprises entrepreneurs, and workers; and competitive analysis based (say) on Porter’s five forces model. Together with the livelihoods and macroeconomic analysis, that should help answer the question for developing nations: is this sub-sector worth supporting? And it will begin to answer the question: how should this sub-sector be supported, if at all? That answer can be elaborated by more detailed work on the challenges facing enterprise entry, growth and survival; a SWOT-type analysis might cover this.
- What strategy for new gold-farming countries? If and it is still an “if” gold farming appears to have developmental benefits, then other developing countries may be interested. Analysis of critical success factors for those who have developed the sub-sector can help inform those other countries; Porter’s diamond from Section D4 can form the foundation for such analysis, though will likely need to be modified.
- What can we learn across “shadow industries”? Most of the real-world parallels in the paper are with other “shadow industries” – informal and often illegal activities such as artisanal mining and the drugs trade. As noted in the Introduction, gold farming represents one of the first ICT-based examples in developing countries but this type of liminal employment seems likely to grow as the ICT infrastructure spreads. What, then, can be learned from other shadow industries for the future of ICT-based employment?7
But will it be worth exploring these and the other blank spaces on the map? Put another way, why undertake gold-farming research: what can it teach us? At a basic and descriptive level, it can illuminate a sliver of our modern world. From a pragmatic perspective, we can find out whether or not gold farming is worth supporting as a socio-economic strategy for developing countries. In conceptual
terms, it can add in a small way to our understanding of globalisation and of development. More specifically, it can be utilised to flesh out or revise some particular conceptual models: information failures, international value chains and competitive forces would be three potential examples.
Most specifically, this research can tell us about virtual worlds. We can learn more about the economics of the virtual, the sociology of the virtual, and the growing and reciprocating infections between the virtual and the real. In particular, as ICTs spread to developing countries, we can build knowledge on the relation between the virtual and the pressing needs and non-Western realities we find in those countries.
And most intriguingly, gold farming appears to be anything but a here-today, gone-tomorrow blip. Far from it, gold farming may actually be a glimpse into a much, much larger future; one in which our work, our commerce and our lives are not just online but immersed in the new virtual worlds of cyberspace. Could it then be one more eddy in a current towards a new model for international development: network-based development or, more simply, “development 2.0″? If so, the call for research on gold farming is all the more urgent and important.
One final point. Credible analysis of gold farming can only be undertaken by researchers who play the games, and have engaged in real-money trading. With that, back to Azeroth for some more “research time”.
1: Though some differentiate their work content, preferring the relative freedom of gold farming against the need to play someone else’s character when power-levelling (Dibbell 2007).
2: Castronova (2002) discusses this from an economic perspective (see Lehdonvirta 2005). A most-basic perspective would say that real-world work is a source of disutility (which requires compensation) but that leisure activities are a source of utility (and therefore would be paid for). From this perspective, gameplay is a utility!adisutility hybrid because it is paid for by players but it alsocompensates those players by producing virtual goods (currency, items, higher-level characters) that have a real-world value. Thus players can talk of “play” in disutility terms: “it was more like work than fun” (Yee 2006b: 69) Gold farming, too, becomes a utility!adisutility hybridbecause, for producers, it is a supposed-utility/leisure time activity that is compensated by real wages. Purchasers, meanwhile, are willing to pay money to forego a supposed utility/leisure time activity. The explanation for these conundrums lies partly in the differential value that different people give to leisure time, and the
differential utility of different in-game activities (e.g. “grinding” vs. other gameplay).
3: For a bit of gold-farmer “fight back” on this issue, see Wang (2008).
4: In Lineage II, gold farmers often chose to play as girl dwarves (as a race these were particularly good at money-making). This group came to be associated with gold farmers, meaning it was less often chosen by regular players. A “virtual racism” arose such that regular players would then harass or refuse to group-play with girl dwarves (Steinkuehler 2006).
5: For example, videos of gold-farmer killings talk of “extermination” and of removing the “cancer” of gold farmers (Steinkuehler 2006).
6: Pre-handover Hong Kong residents who thought they would be treated as full British citizens but, instead, found they only had second-class status could consider themselves well and truly nerfed.
7: Pre-handover Hong Kong residents who thought they would be treated as full British citizens but, instead, found they only had second-class status could consider themselves well and truly nerfed.
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