The room is crammed with Chinese workers stripped to the waist. Poorly paid and exhausted from their punishing shifts, they chain-smoke and rub their eyes, while their colleagues sleep two to a mat on the floor.

But this Shanghai sweatshop is not churning out T-shirts, trainers or children’s toys. Its workers are known in the computer games world as “gold farmers”. They are playing online games and winning virtual gold, which the owners of the gold farms then sell on to cash-rich, time-poor Westerners for real money.

Ge Jin, a PhD student at the University of California in San Diego, has filmed these scenes for a forthcoming documentary on the economics of internet gaming. He believes that hundreds of thousands of people in China are now dependent on gold farming for their income.

The gold farmers spend most of their waking hours in front of computer screens, immersed in complex, three-dimensional virtual worlds known as massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...371221,00.html

 

I work for a Gold farming business, and we have an office in china where chinese workers play games. It's nothing like this article suggests. The workers get $100/month (which is like $1000 a month here) plus we supply living quarters. the office is like an apartment with a bunch of computers set up, air conditioning, and even has couches and shit. Sound like a sweatshop? I think not.

 

You make it sound like a legitimate business.

 

it is, you'd be surprised on the income we can get. If you sell it, people will buy.

 

Have any pics of said Gold Farming Office?

 

What's punishing about playing video games and mining virtual gold for 8 hours or so? It's sounds like a better way to make money than working in the dangerous Chinese construction industry or slaving away in a factory. Am I missing something here?

 

ive wasted so much of my life on a text based mmorpg...

I hate myself

 

For some reason I think that they work more than 8 hours and probably don't follow US style labor laws.

 

the one in china? or the one here? My boss just went on a trip there earlier this year, so I'll ask him if he has any pics.

keep in mind that's only our gold farming office, others might be much less... civilized.

 

True, but how stressfull and taxing can it be to harvest online gold? Can someone explain how this whole procedure works?

From the above mentioned article:

Professor Edward Castronova, an American specialist in MMOG economics, agrees that gold farmers are bad for gaming, but says they may enjoy better conditions than other sweatshop workers.

“When some lawyer’s kid has a more powerful character than mine just because daddy let him buy enough gold online to get him a set of über armour, that stinks for me as a normal game player. Everything I know about low-wage labour markets tells me that the wages they are making equal or exceed local market wages.

“Working in a room made safe for computers is going to offer better conditions than working behind a plough in some field.”l

 

basically what most online farming places do is kill monsters and loot the stuff they drop, then sell it off to in-game merchants, then sell the gold they get from that.

I think gold farming is great for gaming. it gets rid of a lot of the monotony while keeping the game fun for people that don't have time to play for 30+ hours a week.

the cost of some of the stuff in game is rediuous. As an example in world of warcraft there are "epic mounts" which are basically the most pimped out forms of "mounts" which are like horses so the character can run around faster. The cost of these mounts is 1000 gold plus you have to do a special quest which takes about 2 hours. the time it would take an average player to get 1000 gold would be 200+ hours of gameplay.

I think wow is fun, but no way in hell am I going to play that much for something. I agree some people abuse the shit out of buying gold and buy like 5000 gold and deck the shit out of their character with it, but can still hardly play the game.

I think it's ok in moderation.

 

this sounds pretty much exactly like what I wrote in the GT thread regarding the "pay as you play" option.. I don't want to spend hours and hours on the game getting cars, I'd rather pay a little for the ones I want and blam, they're in my garage.