GOLD FARMERS

"ZOMG that is leetsauce! I lewt teh hammer"

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) like Everquest, City of Heroes, and Anarchy Online are games that many people play at the same time from around the world. Each player has a character they play at any given time and these characters can interact in a computer simulated world. The world's content is designed by a gaming company and provided for a monthly fee, and the players simply do what they wish in the game.

Such games, according to the New York Times, earn more than three and a half billion dollars a year, which explains why so many are coming out. With over one hundred million players around the world paying a monthly fee and buying the original game and the expansions that add new content, this is a major, and lucrative industry.

There are goals, quests, monsters to fight, items to obtain, areas to explore, and so on, but there's no real limit to what you can do in the game. If all you want to do is chat, feel free. If you like to dance and listen to music, City of Heroes even has dance clubs and a feature that allows you to turn on your personal boombox and listen to dozens of tracks. The variety and freedom is astounding, and with this freedom has come people who play these games in order to make money.

It started small, with people finding items then selling them for real cash on E-Bay. Game companies hated this, banning accounts when they found out who it was, but the desire to have items and in-game money was stronger than the fear of being banned. And the profits from these efforts far outstripped the cost of buying a new copy of the game and starting up again with sales. Real Money Transactions (or RMT), they are called. Actual dollars (or yen, kruggerand, kroener, etc) are spent on virtual items.

Want that Krol Blade but aren't willing to kill hundreds of monsters hoping it drops? Maybe you can buy it, with your (or your parents') hard-earned cash. Need money for that in-game house? You can buy it with real life money. They'll even advertise with in-game mail and messages sent to you while you are out hunting!

Gaming companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Sony Online, and PlayNC hate this process, because it changes the play of the game. For example, you can be in the dread Eastern Plaguelands trying to finish a quest, when you see one or more players move to a specific spot, wait til something spawns (shows up, monsters are generated at predetermined spots in most cases, with a timer after they die before showing up again - called "spawning"), and kill it, loot it, and move to the next site. All the spawns are dead, because this character is methodically killing every one of them for money and the random, rare treasures they can have.

Now how do you finish your quest? What does it do to the sense of imersion - the feeling you're in the game world that helps suspend disbelief - when you see this happening? What about your chances of getting the rare "drops" of these monsters? This effect can interfere heavily with the enjoyment of play for some, although some don't care much about it. What's more, this system actually allows major companies, such as IGE to influence, if not manipulate in-game economies by setting prices for items and changing what is more readily available.

But while companies ban thousands of accounts and issue dire warnings, there's really no way to stop it. Some recent games are even trying to control and profit from the system. Project Entropia, for example, allows purchase of money in their game through a credit card, and the uber chat engine Second Life provides in-game cash for real-life payment as well. Everquest II has specific servers set up isolated from the rest of the game where controlled auctions can be engaged in as well as a new auction site. The effort is to control the cost and value of items in the game, to have some handle on the in-game economy as well as make a profit.

But how can they do it? If the items drop rarely and require play to gather, if in-game money can be earned only through hours of effort, how do they gather the cash? After all, you have to pay for each account that you play on, and while it's cheaper than a night out at the movies, that still is an expense added to the actual hours of play. Here we turn again to the New York Times, interviewing a young Chinese player:

"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day."
...
Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these "virtual sweatshops."

"It's unimaginable how big this is," says Chen Yu, 27, who employs 20 full-time gamers here in Fuzhou. "They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers."
...
The Chinese government estimates that there are 24 million online gamers in China, meaning that nearly one in four Internet users here play online games.

Massive magazine, a new publication about these MMOGs, has more details. Chinese players work 12-hour shifts and are paid as much as a dollar an hour but in the game World of Warcraft must earn 15 gold a day. As an experienced player, I can assure you this would take very specific, constant effort to maintain. 12 dollars a day doesn't sound like much, until you realize that the average worker in China makes around 5 dollars a day according to the World Bank; that's a pretty sweet deal for a kid to play video games all day.

Gold in World of Warcraft sells pretty cheap, relatively speaking. For around 10 dollars you can get 100 in-game gold. The exchange rate goes down the more you buy, cheaper per gold piece. Items sell fairly cheap as well, making a modestly wealthy person in real life able to outfit their character with extraordinary gear without any in-game effort. You can even get their character leveled up to 60 in about 15 days for a fee. Naturally such a character has little actual experience in play and with their character, so they will not know what they can do, nor how they should do it. Such a character is usually easy to identify and is almost universally despised in the game by more experienced players.

What does it all add up to? No matter what you do in life, someone will find a way to make a profit off of it. Greed and competition are powerful motivators - that's in part why President Reagan said it was good in a sense, because it is one of the most effective ways of driving an economy, encouraging action, and rewarding proper behavior. The desire for more things and better stuff is not in and of its self evil, it is why and how you go about this that matters. The Biblical quote is not "Money is the root of all evil" as many say, it is "the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil."

Leave people to their own devices, and in a short time, some will be earning money from the others by providing goods and services those people desire and aren't willing to take the time to do themselves. And that's the flip side of greed. Maybe the reason you're charging for these things is bad, but it's equally bad to be lazy.

Online Games