In the book, For The Win, the one of the most important concept, Cory Doctorow brought up is Gold Farming. He relates it to the real world labor condition, and economic issues. Even though the book was totally based on game stuff, and MMOG, but it also has great relationship with some problems like social issues, game addiction, gold farming, labor union, and economic issue that were caused by MMOG. Gold farmers faced unacceptable condition, and the unfair sweatshop situation for gold farming turned out to be the reason people turn around and decided to go for rebel.
The most important issues in the book are gold farming. Gold Farming is a game business in which some bosses try to make real money by selling items, game currency, game character, and whatever worth to players. The bosses order their labors to earn game currency, and game rewarding. But the condition is really harsh. It would sound really cool because people can make money by playing, and enjoying game. However, the labors couldn’t find themselves enjoying the situation, because of bad work condition. The sweatshop for gold farming was the one of main problem in the book.
Even though the book was fiction, gold farming, and almost same stories is happening in the real world. I know a lot of Chinese people have their own PC café where owners, I’d say “bosses”, run more than 50 computers, and give their workers job about earning game currency, and rewarding by cheating the game or using hacking programs. Lots of corporation declared a war fighting with the gold farmers. Blizzard, NCSOFT (the maker of Lineage), and Gravity (the maker of Ragnarok) are known as good game to do the gold farming, and it’s quite easy to find a hacking program from it. Probably most MMORPG game companies have a team or department specialized in dealing with the gold farming problem. For example, lots of Chinese abused Koreans’ social security numbers, so they have no problems to make their login ID, and they use hacking program to make a lot of currency in short time which is generally impossible for normal users. This actually results in chaos to game itself because just like real world economy, if too much money is brought to the market (in this case, game market or game trade system), there will definitely be an inflation, and game company will not be able to control the game market. Therefore, now lots of Korean companies block users playing in china, and open Chinese server where only Chinese players can play within.
Before I look at the book, I wasn’t that familiar with the gold farming concept and how badly it could happen to the real world. it was interesting, and good enough to realize that we’ll face different kind of problem that interact with real money, and virtual money.
Here are my questions for you guys, have you ever heard someone working for gold farming, and made a lot of money from it? Then is he still happy doing it? Or just doing it for living?
I've never heard of anyone doing it. I always though it was just random people who sold gold to a company which would sell it at a higher price. But this book helped me learn that gold farming is an actual thing.
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