I Don't Think this is What Kanye West Had in Mind

During Middle School, I played fantasy baseball on smallworld.com. Each participant got something like 50 million dollars and would have to put together a a team that fit all the position requirements (the key was to have a pitching staff full of closers). Once the season started, you could only make a limited number of roster changes--maybe three a week.

I remember that one year, Smallworld introduced a feature in which you could purchase extra waiver moves. For a dollar, you could make one more trade than anyone else. This completely undercut the idea of fantasy baseball; it's supposed to be about knowledge, not money. Of course, people in my league did buy trades, though I'm sure I ended up winning.

Anyway, by way of The New York Times Magazine comes an incredibly bizarre and disturbing article about how online gaming has followed this same, capitalist path to a remarkable extent.

Titled "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer," the article describes the sale of virtual money in "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" such as World of Warcraft.

It details the lives of professional gamers in China who work for twelve hour shifts, 7 days a week, collecting gold coins in World of Warcraft, only to be sold to those who are too lazy to collect the coins themselves. The workers get paid as a function of the coins they collect and have "daily production quotas."

There is apparently a multi-million dollar business for virtual money. Multiple websites are devoted to the exchange of real money for money that which can only be seen on computer screen. Thousands of companies in China are devoted to collecting virtual coins, guns, and gear to sell to the highest bidder.

"For players lacking time or patience for the grind, there has always been another means of acquiring virtual loot: real money. From the earliest days of M.M.O.’s, players have been willing to trade their hard-earned legal tender — dollars, euros, yen, pounds sterling — for the fruits of other players’ grinding," author Jullian Dibbell writes.

This practice has been given an official name: Real Money Trading (R.M.T.), and the workers have been dubbed "Gold Farmers."

In probably the most entertaining portion of the article, Dibbell describes how the Chinese Gold Farmers are often hunted down in the game by regular players who know that they're collecting gold later be sold.

"In part because gold farmers’ hunting patterns are so repetitive, they are easy to spot, making them ready targets for pent-up anti-R.M.T. hostility, expressed in everything from private sarcastic messages to gratuitous ambushes that can stop a farmer’s harvesting in its tracks. In homemade World of Warcraft video clips that circulate on YouTube or GameTrailers, with titles like 'Chinese Gold Farmers Must Die' and 'Chinese Farmer Extermination,' players document their farmer-killing expeditions," Dibbell writes.

I would love to know if some professional athletes are dishing out hundreds of thousands of dollars for the virtual money.

If you want more, check out the slide show that comes after the article. It presents the players of interactive online games alongside the characters they play as.