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Chinese Gold Farmers in the Game World

steven on July 23rd, 2007

In China, there is a new kind of factory that hires young people to play online games like World of Warcraft and Lineage day and night. The gaming workers produce in-game currency, equipment, magic spells and even whole characters, which are sold to players from the US, Europe, South Korea and Japan etc. who want to raise their level in the game world immediately. The people who play games for real money trade are called “gold farmers” in the game world. Since gamers often refer to the Chinese gaming workers as “Chinese farmers” and the gaming factories as “gold farms,” I will adopt their terminology. From August 2005 to January 2006, I conducted research in four Chinese gold farms and investigated how the farm owners manage the production and distribution of virtual commodities across the border between the virtual and the real as well as the border between nations. I also tried to find out what this job, combining work and play, means to Chinese gold farmers and how it feels like to live at this peculiar intersection of the virtual and the real.

China is currently the world factory of virtual commodities. According to some news articles (1), there are gold farms in Romania, Indonesia and Tijuana. These, however, do not approach the scope and scale of the gold farming industry in China. The large scale Chinese gold farms have hundreds of computers and employees, located mainly located in Si Chuan Province, Fu Jian Province and Dong Bei area. There are also many small ones with 3 to 10 computers. In a small city called Li Shui in Zhe Jiang Province, I found hundreds of such small gold farms. It is almost impossible to find out when the first gold farm emerged in China. The most experienced gold farmer I met started farming in 2001 in a farm that served Korean and Japanese gamers. In 2003, Lineage II launched its American servers and became extremely popular in America. This suddenly expanded the markets for virtual commodities and gave rise to thousands of gold farms in China.

This industry has developed to such a level that the Chinese government is looking for ways to tax and regulate it. Donghua, one of the gold farms I visited, has registered with the local government of Jin Hua, a small city in Zhe Jiang Province, as a formal business and started to pay tax. It was difficult for the government to figure out a way to classify this kind of business. At the end, Donghua is classified under the communication and information service sector. There is also a new gaming service company in Jin Hua: 5173.com. 5173.com is one of the largest brokers of virtual commodities for the domestic market in China. According to an employee of 5173.com, the local government of Jin Hua directly invested in 5173.com as a way to boost local economy.

The largest international brokers of virtual commodities are websites like IGE.com and Virdaq.com. IGE is like the Wal-Mart of virtual commodities. One can shop for virtual commodities from most of the popular online games easily with an international credit card. IGE has its headquarter in Hongkong, and according to several gold farm owners, most of its virtual commodities are made in China. Most gold farms cannot reach foreign customers directly, so they rely on international brokers to distribute their commodities. But some of them have foreign partners who provide them with eBay accounts, Paypal accounts and foreign bank accounts so that they can trade directly with foreign customers. The transactions of virtual commodities are completed in the game world: after the seller receives the payment and the name and location of the avatar (virtual character) of the seller, one of the avatars of the seller will meet the avatar of the buyer and hand over the items “in person”.

Typically, the large-scale gold farms provide meals and dorms so that the farmers live in the farm and work on a 12-hour shift with short breaks. There are usually twice as many farmers as computers so that the game is on 24/7. The salary for farmers ranges from 40 USD to 200 USD per month, I even found some particular ones in which the farmers are willing to work for free as long as they have a place to live and they can play games for free. The Chinese gold farmers are sometimes referred to as “gaming sweatshop” (2). This term captures some characteristics of Chinese gold farms. The gold farms reflect China’s current role in global economy, which is mainly a source of cheap labor. The gold farmers are being exploited by farm owners and international brokers. They are also working long hours. Sitting in front of a computer and killing monsters for 10 hours a day can be detrimental to their health. However, “gaming sweatshop” is also an oversimplifying term that obscures the complexity of this phenomenon.

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 from it, which is rare in any other sweatshops. Most of the gold farmers I met do not have better alternatives. All the gold farmers I met are male, usually in their early 20s. They were either unemployed or had worse job before they found this job. Many of them were already game fans before they became “professional”. In some sense, they are making a living off their hobby, which is an unachievable dream for many people. What’s more, 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. This is a reason why they are so addicted to their job. 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.

However, the virtual lives of gold farmers are not perfect either. Many gamers are hostile to gold farmers. For many gamers, the game world should be a place of pure immersion and a level playing field. Eric Anderson, the founder of NoGold (3) organization, told me that the gold industry causes inflation and inequality in the game world and creates sweatshops in the real world. The NoGold organization attempts to get fansites and resource sites to not display gold advertisements, thereby, limit the exposure that players have to the gold industry and make them less likely to make purchases. While the NoGold organization does not put the blame on gold farmers, many gamers see gold farmers as spoilers and intruders of their game world. Nick Yee (4), the founder of the Daedelus project–an online survey of MMORPG players, pointed out that many gamers assume gold farmers are Chinese and often call them “rats”, “disease” or “commies”. There are even gangs of gamers who systematically harass and massacre suspected Chinese gold farmers.

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. They are proud of their achievement in the game world but they are also sensitive to the fact that they are playing to provide a service to some wealthier gamers. In the game world they are simultaneously the “master” and the servant. Power relations do cut across the virtual and the real. 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 the bread earners for real bodies.

I have here offered a brief description of what I observed in my field research. My project on real money trade in the game world is still at a very early stage. Currently I am looking at the following research questions, which are interdisciplinary by nature. First, how should we understand real money trade in the game world? Is it a new virtual economy that should be allowed to grow or should it be banned in order to preserve a pure game world? Second, how should we understand the labor practice of gold farmers? What does it mean when labor can be so perfectly transferred globally and embodied in play? Third, how does living at the intersection of work and play, virtual and real, affect one’s identity formation and worldview? I’m also making a documentary on this subject, which you can preview here:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH1LGdjZUKQ[/youtube]

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What’s the Gold Farmer?

steven on July 23rd, 2007

Gold Farmer: A person who collects in-game currency in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) for the purpose of selling it to other players for real world currency.

Synopsis:

Multiplayer online games have given rise to a virtual economy, in which all kinds of virtual assets from in-game currency, magic shield to whole characters are traded against real world currency. In China, there are tens of thousands of gaming sweatshops that hire people to play games like World of Warcraft and Lineage. The gaming workers kill monsters and loot treasures for 10-12 hours a day to produce virtual assets that are exported all over the world. They are called Chinese gold farmers by western gamers and many myths about them are circulated in the game universe.

Tietou went from Shanghai to Amherst College in the US to study computer engineering in 1999. However, he felt very alienated in the US and spent most of his days playing online games in his dorm, often trading virtual assets on Ebay. One day in 2002 he suddenly realized that he could use cheap Chinese labor to produce virtual assets, so he quit college and came back to China to establish gold farms. Although he was very successful at the beginning, now his gold farms have collapsed because of the fierce competition in this business…
Xiongxiong used to work in Tietou’s gold farm. Since Tietou’s gold farm collapsed, he invited several co-workers to live in his small home and keep playing games for a living. Since they don’t have a distribution network, they are barely making enough money for food. But they cannot stop playing…

As the stories evolve, you will also hear diverse views on this mysterious and controversial business. In China, we interview families of some gold farmers, government officials, a Chinese female gamers’ club, doctors of game addiction etc. In the US, we interview gold brokers, game designers, activist gamers who established the NO Gold organization, and gamers who bought virtual assets etc. Particularly, we present why gold farming is so controversial amongst gamers. While some gamers happily buy gold as a way to enhance their virtual experience, some gamers are strongly against it. They think that the game world should be a level playing field, that it should be a magical circle free of the corruption of the real world. The game companiesa€? response has been ambivalent; some outlaw it but some incorporate it. We interview economists, law scholars and social scientists who debate over the social implications of gold farming. How big will this virtual economy become? Who owns the virtual properties in the game worlds? What will IRS say about your income from virtual trades? Can we tell the virtual from the real after all? How do we distinguish work from play? In the end, this film is not about massive online games, but about life in our global village. The virtual interaction makes the world smaller, but does it bring us closer?

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25 Things You Didna€?t Know About WoW

steven on July 23rd, 2007

The WanderingGoblin.com staff recently came back from Blizzarda€?s World Wide Invitational (WWI) tournament in Seoul, South Korea. While there, we spent a rather large amount of time with various Blizzard executives, developers, employees, PR people, and various other personnel. This occurred in Q&As, during various public announcements, informal gatherings, and personal conversations.

The WWI, like BlizzCon, is basically a long weekend in which Blizzard games are talked about at length. The kind of information that comes out during these times is actually very interesting. Although these little tidbits, factoids, and pieces of trivia arena€?t Super-Highly-Classified Blizzard secrets per se, they are definitely the kind of thing that youa€?ll never see in an official announcement or a formal press release. And yet….a whole lot of this stuff turned out to be pretty darned interesting. So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are some of the things we heard said, implied, whispered about, or mentioned off-hand.

1. Mike Morhaime, Blizzard President, co-founder, and overall grand high warlord, said something very interesting about WoW. When speaking about the limited projects that Blizzard was capable of working on at the same time, he indicated that there were definitely two that Blizz teams are devoting their time to: Starcraft II and the next WoW expansion. To be honest, I at first thought Mike had made a mistake, and had inadvertently let slip a secret. You see, Blizzard has never officially announced that theya€?re working on another WoW expansion.

Mike Morhaime at the announcement of Starcraft II.

2. I explored this a bit with a Blizzard representative. He advised me that yes, Blizz is definitely working on a new WoW expansion. A few insights on that topic:

One, Blizz never made a big announcement about it. They are not, however, treating this with the characteristic Blizzard secrecy. In short, everyone knows ita€?s being made, and they are willing to talk about the fact that ita€?s being made, even though ita€?s unannounced.

Two, they dona€?t expect the expansion to take 18 months to 2 years in the way that The Burning Crusade did. Instead, they are hoping for a much shorter development cycle.

Three, the delays in bringing TBC to market were a result of two problems. The first was that WoW grew into massive proportions so quickly it overwhelmed the company. Plans for TBC had to be shelved for months while the entire company worked on dealing with how quickly WoW itself was expanding. The second is that, when WoW shipped, it wasna€?t a€?donea€? in the mind of many of the companya€?s developers. It was polished, sure, and it was a complete and workable game. However, while developing WoW they had wanted to include features and zones in the game that didna€?t ship when the game was released. The devs spent months (and longer) working on putting that stuff into the game even after WoW was released. After that was done, working on the expansion proceeded full bore.

3. More specifically, nobody really devoted any time to The Burning Crusade for about six months after WoW went live. Quite simply, every available Blizzard employee was working on WoW.

4. After about six months had passed, WoW had achieved a kind of stability. This allowed some personnel to begin working, full-time, on TBC.

5. Blizz expects that WoW is going to have a nice, long life cycle. By long, we mean 10 years or more. At first, this struck us as a bit odd, but remember: Starcraft I is 10 years old and is selling well. And UO is now 10 years old, and that MMO is going strong.

Sure, the kid may look like a quest giver. But he’s really just an extremely polite direction giving dude at the WWI.

6. A Blizzard source advised me that while Blizzard is, in fact, large amounts of money on WoW, ita€?s not as much as has been reported. For example, I brought up the whole a€?billions of dollars a year in revenuea€? thing from WoW sales and subscriptions, and he indicated that this isna€?t accurate. This is due to the operational costs involved in keeping WoW going.

7. The same Blizz source also stated that, in some parts of the world (namely China) WoW doesna€?t sell for $40 a box, and there are no subscription fees at all. Chinese players buy time-cards, and play WoW by paying an hourly fee. This is done for several reasons. First, asking a Chinese guy to pay $40 for a computer game is preposterous; many people make one dollar an hour in pay, and theya€?re not going to blow a weeka€?s pay on a game. Also, Chinese players are used to playing MMOs a€“ ones wea€?ve never heard of — for free. The client is free, and the subscription costs nothing. Other financial models keep these games afloat. If Blizzard brought the western model a€“ buy the box, pay a monthly fee a€“ to China, this would have failed miserably.

You’ll never meet nicer booth babes than the ones we met at the WWI. Sure, they didn’t speak a word of English, but they were exceptionally polite!

8. These financial realities jack up any estimates about how much money WoW is actually generating. Blizzard is a global company, he stated, and has marketed WoW to China in a way that appeals to Chinese gamers.

9. On that note, it should be mentioned that China is World of Warcrafta€?s biggest market.

10. This same business model wasna€?t applied anywhere else. WoW is sold almost everywhere else in the same way that we are all familiar with. That model: buy the box, pay the subscription fee.

Even if Blizz isn’t making gazillions of dollars a year from WoW, they are still the only game company we’ve ever known that can afford their own hot air balloon.

11. A good number of the English-speaking EU servers have evolved in unpredictable ways. These have become unofficial a€?Czech serversa€? or a€?Polish servers.a€? What started as a small phenomenon a€“ some Russian players, say, congregating on an English-speaking EU server a€“ rapidly expanded, actually marginalizing some of the Brits playing on those servers.

12. Blizzard Europe responded with significant insight to this trend. Instead of getting all strange or heavy-handed about the entire thing, the company simply offered free server migrations. In many cases, the English speakers simply left the servers to their non-English speaking friends and migrated to servers where English was really being spoken. J

13. Despite the fact that WoW may not be making the gigantic profits that some have estimated, it is probable that ita€?s still the most profitable game in history. Although this kind of thing is hard to pin down definitively, I broached this topic with a Blizz rep, and he agreed that this was “probably true.”

14. On the very last day of the WWI we had a chance to interview Chris Sigaty, who’s done some very substantial work on both WoW and is now heading up the team for Starcraft II. Prior to Starcraft II being announced, he was very aware of the buzz, speculation, and rumor surrounding what the new game might be. We asked him if he’d read the recent and quite definitive report, on a prominent gaming site no less, that Blizzard would be announcing a Starcraft MMO. Chris indicated that he did read that report. And when he did, he laughed out loud.

Question: In the pure oxygen atmosphere of a Terran battlesuit, wouldn’t a lit cigar cause your face to catch fire?

15. Mike Morhaime stated that Blizz is completely focused on the PC as the only vehicle for its games. He indicated that making console games is simply not on the agenda. Later, a second Blizz developer echoed this sentiment. While not ruling it out forever, it seems that console games are not in the companya€?s immediate plans.

16. Obviously, the above has a rather profound bearing on the rumors that a WoW port for the Xbox 360 or PS3 is in the works. It seems thata€?s just not going to happen.

17. There is no specific budget, according to Mike Morhaime, when producing a new game. He went on to say that Blizz doesna€?t set out a budget a€“ say $10 million dollars a€“ and then expect a title to be completed. He implied that Blizzarda€?s system is one in which ongoing evaluations are conducted as a game is in production, and that a budget isna€?t allowed to hamstring a game into mediocrity.

18. The idea of producing excellent games a€“ and nothing less a€“ was repeated a number of times during the WWI tournament and conference. Until a game is perfect, Blizz wona€?t release it.

19. A Blizz employee told me that the real problem with Starcraft: Ghost was actually twofold. First of all, it was good, but it wasna€?t excellent. This meant that the game would require additional time to hone it to exceptional quality. The second problem was that the Xbox 360 was soon to be released (and the original XBox discontinued). This meant that Starcraft: Ghost would have to either be released before it was truly exceptional (something Blizz simply wona€?t do) or be perfected over time, only to be released for a dead console. It was a lose-lose proposition, so Blizzard cancelled the game completely. In a nutshell, it was timing that killed this game.

Nova, doing what she does best. Enjoy this peek, cuz you’ll never see her in-game.

20. Mike Morhaime stated, clearly, that Blizzard is not an MMO only company. Obviously, in producing Starcraft II, theya€?re serious about this. Another dev stated that RTS and action RPG games are the bread-and-butter of Blizzarda€?s success, and those will very likely be revisited in the future.

21. Although Blizzard likes its three main IPs a€“ Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo a€“ it has explored the possibility of introducing new IPs in future games. The problem is that Blizzard is only able to work on a limited number of projects at a time. Since there is much more in terms of the three main IPs yet to be explored without the games getting old, and it takes years for a title to be released according to Blizzarda€?s high standards, those new IP ideas just havena€?t made it beyond the planning stages.

22. During conversation, several Blizz people indicated that they still go home from work and play WoW every day. This was the same kind of thing we were hearing from developers during E3 2006, and from other Blizz employees since that time.

23. Blizzard, apparently, just loves the people who play its games. Practically every Blizz person we talked to oozed this feeling. They want their customers to be happy.

Yes, Blizzard loves its customers. Apparently, there are a few customers that love Blizzard right back.

24. At least one senior developer indicated that WoW is one of only a handful of company’s he’d want to work for in the world. The working conditions are excellent, and highly conducive to making games.

25. Blizzard is still committed to providing lots of free content to WoW-heads. The big patches, new zones, new dungeons, etc are Blizzarda€?s way of giving free mini-expansions to its customers.

And that, my friends, is it. We did a bit of brainstorming when writing this one, in an attempt to recall every little WoW or Blizzard-related tidbit we could think of that was said during the exhaustathon that is the WWI. While I’m sure there was lots more that, quite simply, we forgot, we hope you found this interesting. Above all, we hope you enjoyed reading it.

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