Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html?ex=1339732800&en=1676d344608cb590&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

by pg • 19 years ago

21 43 19 years ago

nytimes.com

palish2• 19 years ago

Sad. I work in the game industry, and it's sad seeing a work as nice as World of Warcraft perverted in that way. The designers never intended for such a thing to happen.

The future seems like it's going to be a balance between freedom to entertain and moral standards. With the way movies are going, games are in danger of becoming morally questionable too (think of a Saw game or a Hostel game where your main objective is to torture someone). Time is a valuable human resource, and a game like World of Warcraft wastes a lot of it. But it does give people satisfaction. So if it's morally wrong to waste a valuable resource, is the game morally wrong?

Maybe everyone has ways of perverting everything, and we shouldn't worry about it. But it must be painful to watch your creation destroy lives like that.

Tichy3• 19 years ago

I think there are worse things in the world. After all, they don't really harm anybody, or do they? In WoW you can't really harm other players, I think.

euccastro3• 19 years ago

You can harm someone indirectly through the in-game economy.

Out-of-game virtual goods trading can kill meaning of progress in a game- whether there was much meaning to begin with is another debate.

This economic link between worlds breaks the "magic circle" that separates game from real life. This can hurt or kill the experience of a game, depending on how much it relies on suspension of disbelief. Then again, this also opens opportunities to explore, both in game/experience design and in business.

Goladus6• 19 years ago

I haven't finished reading the article yet, but I suspect this problem is a little blown out of proportion. The designers most definitely did plan for this, and the game is built to be resiliant to gold farming. The player economy is huge and important, but nevertheless a marginal aspect of the game. You can accomplish virtually anything without using it.

I suspect most of the millions of people who play Warcraft have fun and are not addicted to it.

palish2• 19 years ago

Uhh, excuse me, but the designers didn't expect sweatshops to pop up and waste asian people's lives farming gold. That's what's sad about it, the waste of time. I'm not talking about the people having fun, I'm talking about the people having to work for next to nothing doing something they hate and wasting their time on it.

cmars2322• 19 years ago

On that note, here's a hilarious link to a South Park episode which nicely illustrates your point.

http://video.glath.com/view/southpark.Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft

Alex3917• 19 years ago

The problem isn't that Chinese gold farmers are "cheating." Rather, their behavior undermines the efforts of Blizzard to exploit those so needy for social status that they'll spend eight hours a day clicking on pictures of digital rats in order to feel like a hero.

You only see this type of neuroticism where people are competing for zero-sum social status that is arbitrarily handed down from on high.

You would never see people paying Chinese to, say, write their blogs for them or do anything else where social status is derived from bottom-up respect for the intrinsic quality of one's work.

/Sold his UO account eight years ago for $620 and hasn't touched that stuff since

Goladus6• 19 years ago

Warcraft is actually fun to play even when you discount the in-game rewards system. It stays that way for much longer than most of its predecessors. Everyone I know that bought gold online for Warcraft did it for the fun of it, not in order to increase social status. This is in marked contrast to Everquest, where the items you had were a huge part of social status within the game.

Warcraft is not an especially social game as far as MMOs go. You are relatively free to play it in your own little bubble of friends. Competition is largely via PvP, which is almost entirely avoidable. This is unlike UO, which forced PVP, and unlke Everquest which forced intense competition for in-game resources.

zx76• 19 years ago

Well irrespective of which way you see these businesses, it's inevitable that as more people sign up to virtual worlds the amount of money spent on trading virtual items is going to grow from the current "$1.8 Billion" market. www.sparter.com don't seem that worried!

rms4• 19 years ago

Thanks for the link, that was a great article.

lupin_sansei8• 19 years ago

I wonder if some of the tedium in Gold Farming could be automated away with bots, or some kind of macro recorder?

euccastro3• 19 years ago

Sure, automating the grind is easy; the problem is other humans noticing you're a bot. Turing Test anyone?

The surest way to make a game less automatable is to link progress to social factors. It would also make the life of everyone more interesting- including sweatshop workers. If someone is making my game more interesting and meaningful through human interaction, they're legitimately earning their dough in my book.

Of course, easier said than designed.

gyro_robo3• 19 years ago

The blame here lies squarely at the feet of Blizzard. Any game that CAN be automated deserves to be.

Instead of making a game that is interesting, they made a glorified Skinner box, because that's the proven formula to rake in the bucks via addiction. Like rats pressing a lever to get a pellet, the game substitutes repetitive, mindless activites for actual plot or compelling narrative.

Then they cracked down on bots. They install spyware on your machine called "Warden" and snoop what you're up to. They even nailed people using macros, programmable keyboards, and the commercial version of Wine (to play on Linux).

It's relatively easy to automate various game activities, but it's hard to make a bot that can convincingly fake being a human, especially if an admin starts asking questions or if they CAPTCHA you in some way.

Thus they try to make sure an actual human is sitting there doing the mindless activities all day long. This creates pressure to use the cheapest human labor possible to get these repetitive, mind-numbing tasks out of the way.

The sweatshop element could be eliminated by simply allowing scripting. Of course that wouldn't fix the game's inherent design flaws -- UO, EQ, and WoW all suffer(ed) from the same ones.

euccastro3• 19 years ago

[Disclaimer: I work for a MMOG company that is not Blizzard.]

I'm with you, and still I can see how it makes business sense for Blizzard to discard your suggestions:

- WoW is doing well, gold farming and all. If Blizzard can contain the problem in tolerable levels by playing whack-a-mole with the most ostensible farmers, then it's not a huge deal for them.

- Actual plot and compelling narrative aren't what Blizzard brands are made of. The more personality a world has, the harder it gets to keep it appealing for everyone. Stereotypical/generic/mildly cartoonish themes are easier to mass market.

- I believe allowing scripting would make any MMO better (long story, and this is not a game design forum; email me if you want to discuss this further), but it would favor programming savvy players, discouraging the vast majority of your audience. This would also make problems like security or game balancing harder to deal with.

I believe you could make an interesting MMOG that has mass appeal, but unfortunately it's a harder design and execution problem than if you relax the 'interestingness' constraint.

I wouldn't want to come across as cynical, though. I'd rather make something I love even if it makes less money, and I can see how smaller studios can make a niche for themselves, and even get a shot at big time eventually, by committing to outstanding game design.

But WoW? They won't mess with their cash cow, and it makes full sense.

Goladus6• 19 years ago

You can't bring a shovel onto a soccer field. You can't drop kick a basketball during a game. Why shouldn't Blizzard prohibit tools and activities that are not deemed fair?

My only problem with the Warden is that they did it without telling users it's there and what it's doing.

Goladus6• 19 years ago

I don't understand why this post is getting so many points.

Any computer game can be automated if you can implement an AI that is good enough. Saying that "any game that can be automated deserves to me" seems kind of silly to me.

Calling WoW a glorified Skinner box seems like a similarly useless thing to say. At that level of lexical precision, news.yc is also a "glorified Skinner box," as is driving to work in the morning and going out for dinner at night. I don't really see the point of the analogy.

It's easy to automate "various game activities," but certainly not all game activities and not most of the ones that really matter. It would be more accurate to say that there are some specific activities that can be automated, but the expense of that versus the reliability of a human operator is not worth it. MMOG environments are too volatile, even without considering admins.

Warcraft actually allows a great deal of scripting. Coming from a game like Everquest, the level of automation Blizzard allows is mind-boggling.

gyro_robo3• 19 years ago

The point you are missing is that WoW becomes more enjoyable if its repetitive, mindless parts are automated. There would be no point to automating News.YC discussion or going out to dinner, but driving to work surely would be a candidate for automation for most people. The Skinner Box analogy is directly applicable to mindless, repetitive behavior like clicking to kill monsters over and over again, while thoughtful discussion does not fit into that category.

Similarly, you could create a robot to watch movies for you or go on dates for you, but there'd be no point, as you'd be missing out on the enjoyment. The statement about whether something can be automated refers not to mere physical possibility, but to whether it improves your subjective human experience. Thus you can't really automate watching movies or going out on dates because you can't have someone else live life for you. The benefit you gain is all in the experience of it, not the accomplishment of it.

The mindless activities these MMOGs subject you to are all of the accomplishment variety. Those shouldn't even exist, but if they do, they deserve to be automated. Then people enjoy the experience of being able to engage in the non-mindless activities.

The amount of scripting WoW allows is trivial compared to what you can actually do.

fireandfury• 19 years ago

I like this post because it shows what it's like in a different part of the world. Reminds of Bill Gates's recent talks on global inequity.

I liked this quote: 'I have this idea in mind that regular players should understand that people do different things in the game, he said. They are playing. And we are making a living.'

Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer

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