Future Now
The IFTF Blog
"Gold farming, virtual style"
New York Times Magazine has a long article by Julian Dibbell on Chinese gold farming, people who play online games (mainly World of Warcraft) for a (meagre) living.
To sit at Li’s side for an hour or two, amid the dreary, functional surroundings of his workplace, as he navigates the Technicolor fantasy world he earns his living in, is to understand that gold farming isn’t just another outsourced job....
Gold farming has been talked about for a while, thanks in no small part to Dibbell's previous writing, but he some interesting detail. Like, the economic problems with getting killed:
In farms with daily production quotas, too much time spent dead instead of farming gold can put the worker's job at risk.... But there are times when death is more than just an economic setback for a gold farmer, and this was one of them. As Min returned to his corpse...