Chinese farmers? what?

Okay, this is one of those posts that isn’t gonna make alot of sense to alot of you, but just roll with me.

I play a game. It’s called World of Warcraft. For you visuals, here’s the logo:

In this game, you create a character which you control and take through the world, online. Thousands of other players interact with you, played by other people. The world is considered persistent, that is to say, if you do something, its permanent, and if you log out and log back in the next day, your character will have all the stuff you had the day before.

It’s immensely popular, with over 5 million players at the moment. It’s also incredibly addicting, but thats a topic for another post/series of posts.

So the currency in this game is gold. As in, gold pieces, pieces of gold, you get the idea. And the players seek after this gold, and spend long periods of time trying to accumulate it, so they can get all manner of fun things.

Now, since we know that when people want something bad enough, they’ll pay real money for it, and in some odd sense of an economy, people will pay a decent wad of cash for some of this in-game currency. And, to add another layer of just oddness, people have created businesses that solely exist to earn in-game money, and then sell it and distribute it to, uh, clients.

Still with me? People play game, online, they want gold which is ingame currency, gold hard to get, enterprising businessmen find a way to get lots of gold, then sell it at whatever price the market allows.

So what’s the point Eric? People have too much time/money on their hands? Well, clearly.

So how do they get this gold? Chinese Farmers!!!!1 What? Well, according to urban legend/lots of odd news stories, basically there is a distribution system in place, where there are the equivalent of digital sweatshops, where people (generally asian) play this game in shifts, earning as much gold as they possibly can, and earning a wage from doing so. They log on, and play the game like its a job.

Now you may be thinking, “sweet, they play a game as their job!”…eh, not really. Unfortunately, the best ways to earn money involve finding one lucrative action, and repeating it over and over and over, in the same place (which, by the way, is where the term farming comes in. Since they do one thing over and over in one place, its kinda like what a real life farmer does). It’s incredibly dull, which is why people pay money to have these nice asians do it for them.

So anyway, this whole system is pretty amazing to me. I wish I had thought it up.

Here’s the “leader” in this industry’s website, IGE.

FL: Street Installations – just scroll down through them, some good stuff in there.