Gold Farming V.S. The Reality
The mistreatment of young Chinese workers in MMO games and the reality they face.
When we typically play MMO games, people play it typically for entertainment and the enjoyment. However, on the other side of the country, there are many people who “work” for wages by gold farming. Gold farming is the practice of playing a MMO to collect in-game currency and sell it for real-world money. Over 80% of gold farmers are located in mainland China, totaling to 100,000 full-time gold farmers in the country as of 2005. (Barboza) Typically, gold farming is done in Internet cafes, private homes and many more, which is organized into small informal businesses. Although this may seem a gamers dream, workers are forced to play long hours with minimal breaks and standard working conditions, that lead them to suicide and health conditions. With this statistics, we wonder what exactly benefits the government from regulating this, as well as understanding the corporations that allow such low-standard working conditions.
One primary example of a large gold-farming production is in the game, World of Warcraft. Like stated, gold farmers take the money to sell to other people through websites for real-world money. However, it is against the Terms of Service. Although the company, Blizzard, and the Chinese government can regulate accounts, it is impossible to eradicate them forever. Players can easily buy another account and repeat the process. Similar to the comic book, In Real Life, it considers a perspective between reality and virtual world, where a small town girl comes in contact with a gold farmer from China. Throughout the months of contact, they have come to trust each other and open up to their difficulty, which eventually leads to the gold farmer to describe his working conditions at only 16 years old. The comic book describes the hardships that the gold farmer faces, which include health concerns and long hours. For example, the gold farmer was forced to take a week off of work because he was caught sleeping in the bathroom. However, that did not benefit him, as he had to make up the hours he missed, which lead to him sleeping for only six hours in the past three days. Although this is a comic book, we wonder how much is this similar to the reality we face today, not knowing what horrible conditions that these gold farming companies have.
There is a fine line between these two worlds, as one player may come to just play for fun and make friends, while another may be working at a very young age to support their family. We assume to buy a game for the purpose of playing with friends and unplugging from reality, but reality is hidden behind these characters. These gold farmers do whatever they can to support their families, which means they do not speak up to authorities about their working conditions. Most of them become terribly ill due to lack of sleep and unhealthy eating habits, with no health care to provide them the services they need. Back when this was discovered, we had no means of technology that could reach this to a wider audience. But now, we have a strong social media outlet that could project their views and opinions, while showing the corrupt capitalist corporations have done to their people. The only thing missing is their voice.
BARBOZA, DAVID (December 9, 2005). “Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese”. The New York Times. Retrieved 13 September 2016.
