Slashdot Mirror
Third-World Sweatshops Producing Virtual Goods
prostoalex writes "MSNBC points to the court cases spawned by virtual worlds. Recently, Tom Loftus notes, a virtual island in one of the MMORPGs sold for $30,000, enough to attract commercial attention. Apparently, some businesses create third-world sweatshops, where low-wage laborers are being paid to play and accumulate enough virtual merchandise, so that an eBay sale of it makes the operation profitable. 'One such business, Blacksnow Interactive, actually sued a virtual world's creator in 2002 for attempting to crack down on the practice. The first of its kind to center on virtual goods, the case was eventually dropped,' MSNBC says." Update: 02/06 18:59 GMT by Z : We ran a story about the sale of the virtual island, and Terra Nova has a lot of commentary on the sale of virtual goods. For comparison, the economic impact of this phenomenon is roughly equal to that of Namibia or Macedonia.
people in america pay to play these games
Considering relatively affluent people in the US pay money to play these games for hours on end, I don't think you could describe paying third-world citizens money to play the games as a "sweatshop" work environment.
Where's the signup sheet for this "sweatshop"? I'm sure there's plenty of Slashdot readers that would gleefully sign up.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I really don't get how being paid to play MMORPGs constitutes as sweatshop labor. Here in the U.S., people pay money to online services to play MMORPGs. Besides sweating in an unairconditioned room, I don't see how such would violate any human rights laws. In fact, it creates more jobs in a new industry to aid third-world citizens who otherwise might be unemployed. There really is no case there.
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
I mean, playing games all day is such tough labor. There has got to be laws against this! *Gasp*
Those poor guys in the sweatshops playing games all day... It must be very very hard blue-collar work. *sigh*
Life is not for the lazy.
Damn it, those sweat shop workers aren't supposed to have fun deskjobs. Get them back into the backbreaking and toxic exposure occupations. Geez, this whole world is just falling to peices.
Sweatshops==gameplaying?
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
OMG, I can't believe that. People are spending real-world money for virtual merchandise?
Video game addiction is becoming an epidemic. I swear my roommate's job is World of Warcraft... he plays it enough. I tell him that he should go eat or go to the bathroom, but he insists on leveling his wizard or something. I think its funny (perhaps because it's unfathomably pathetic).
first, paying for something like this is just strange, in my opinion.
But then the whole thing of having 3rd world sweatshops to produce virtual real estate is like something out of a science fiction novel. But I doubt any SF novel has ever dealt with that subject. SF is really not all that original or truly predictive of our real world, in my opinion.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
for creating a system where uneducated people in uncivilized countries can stop their endless cycle of backbreaking labor, to play video games, for 3. Profit!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Apparently, some businesses create third-world sweatshops, where low-wage laborers are being paid to play and accumulate enough virtual merchandise, so that an eBay sale of it makes the operation profitable.
Those poor kids... Being paid to play games... Hey, wait a minute!
The only significant thing about this story is the attidudes it reveals about those writing it. The inherent idea that employers are evil and employing someone is akin to rape. Sweatshop, Hmm how about third worlders now have a chance to earn money and gain computer skills while participating in recreational activities.
So let me get this right.
...
... what? Who the fuck would buy with REAL money something in a video game that they could just sign up for and get themselves?
;-)
1. Create virtual world
2. Buy virtual island with REAL money
3. Pay REAL people REAL money to play in virtual world
4. Sell accumulated virtual wealth for REAL cash money on ebay...
I mean I bought minish cap for 40$ [cdn]. I wouldn't pay someone money for a savegame so I could beat the game quicker. That kinda defeats the purpose doesn't it?
As a side note I see the REAL accumulation of things as kinda pointless as well. I mean I do have cool shit [e.g. 500W 5.1 stereo, 17" LCD, amd64, etc...] but you won't find a shirt in my room worth more than 10$ nor diamond encrusted watches, etc...e.g. I buy practical stuff I can actually use and benefit from...
I hope they sell it for a lot of cash money and I hope whoever buys it gets exposed for the dork they are.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
From my perspective isn't this almost like being jobless?
I know people who sit around all day doing nothing but playing games and for various reasons don't have a job.
If this we would have people who sit around all day doing nothing but playing games and make a couple bucks literally.
Exploiting people for so you can pretend to be powerful seems like a pretty poor way to live.
The only thing that's scarier to me than the existence of virtual sweatshops is the possibilty, remote though it may be, of the existence of a virtual Kathie Lee Gifford. Yikes!
There was already An excellent thread about the rational behind this
Ya gotta love it, where there's a dollar to be had somebody will figure out a way.
Let's think about it. What makes these goods more "virtual" (ie not-real) than MP3 music or videos? No, really?
Here's a link (think there might be a commercial to go through, but there it is:)
s _game/index.html
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/15/anda
A story about what MMRPG's might be like in the future, and the repercussions of that in our lives, including the "sweat shop" idea. The first half made me go "Eh, another story about MMRPG's and the evils of playing all the time", but then when the meat of the story came in it had me thinking.
Seems the future is now.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
This only goes to show that our world is full of opportunities (as stupid as they might be) to make money...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Time is money
This is a new market.
They should be encouraging this.
I mean what is the difference between going to a casio, exchanging real money for chips and playing games?
video games are the natural means to take this idea to the next stage.
Anybody around here selling mod-points? Karma? 4-digit accounts? What is the going price? : )
My bank account is represented by a bunch of 1s and 0s in some database in the sky. There's no real paper behind it. It's virtual. Now, if someone wiped out the 1s to 0s, I'd have grounds to sue.
Value and money doesn't exist in the physical world. It's a contrived social concept that we humans have created. It's an illusion. So if it's "virtual" in the real world, seems perfectly logical that it can be virtual in the virtual world, too.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
On late night TV with Sally Struthers: "This is Juan. He's 14. He works in sweatshop in Thirdo Worlda producing Evercrack virtual goods. For just $2 a day, your contribution could ensure that Juan no longer has to do this to survive. Won't you please help?" (Contribute now and receive a Juan screen saver with RSS feed from Juan's blog. You can make a difference.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Not only will people in countries around the world organize demonstrations protesting the effects of globalization, soon the denizens of places like Norrath and the World of Warcraft will be doing it too.
Maybe that's what happened to the Frogloks: they're all locked in factories making soccer balls.
I know this is going to come off as flame-bait; so I'll apologize in advance. But given the cheating, the internet fucktard factor and every other shitty factor (people who are working irl will take over your area according to one post here? wtf is that all about?) ... why bother playing online?
... there are not anywhere close to enough measures in place to be able to insure a fair and pleasent gaming experience for the casual gamer (read: someone who actually has to work for a living)... ...is online gaming just some jackass "omg we're so hardcore" avocation or am I missing something that makes the cheaters and invaders and general assholes worth paying cash money to put up with? Because from where I sit (outside, looking in) it looks really, really crappy -- and i certainly wouldn't be willing to pony up any cash to join the crapfest which is online gaming, that's for sure.
Between that, and the people who are out in the FPS games who deliberately spoil people's games
I play the mmo's...
We call them chinese farmers. They will get on and create macros that will let their characters run around and kill all day long. This farms gold for them to sell on ebay. It ruins the game economy which takes away from the overall experience that we pay for.
The best example of how it ruins the game is Lineage 2. Everyone quit the game due to the farming. It was also a player vs player game and the farmers would swarm you if you came into their area. They would open up trade windows over and over or try to invite you to group with them 100 times a minute (this will cause you to not be able to fight back).
We are seeing the problem in World of Warcraft now as well(the farmers).
Getting dangerously close to some trademarks there, boyo. you don't want to end up like Lindows, do you?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
I think it depends on a variety of factors. While it might seem like a dream come true to work at such a place doing such a thing, I can only imagine what it would be like for it to become an occupation. And that factor alone does not make it a dream job.
For example, if for some reason, you were 'forced' to do this for less pay than is needed to survive -- it's no less slavery than if they were out picking cotton as a sharecropper. The situations exist and while this might certainly be a preferable occupation to one that might require bending one's back, I can see where even this could cause hazzards if, for example, they were forced (required) to do this for far too many hours under uncomfortable conditions. Hasn't any of you gamers ever played ridiculously long hours and then paid for it in fatigue the next day? Consider if it were required of you to do that EVERY day.
Now I'm merely stretching my imagination here and not assuming these ideas are facts, but when someone says "sweatshop labor" and attempts to tie it in with game play, I don't automatically call bullshit and I don't think anyone else should simply because they think it might be fun to earn a living this way.
Now on to the poor bastards who would actually PAY all this money for virtual crap... those people need some serious psychological assistance. I mean really. All that to gain dominance in a virtual world? It seems very ridiculous to me.
I think the game company supporting games that this could potentially should include a license agreement that says "your account can be erased for any reason including suspicion that you are not the original owner of a given character." When they spend an assload of money only to have their character erased, I think a LOT of that market would suddenly disappear.
It is really a matter of time value of money.
If bob works 60 hours a week and gets to play his mmo as a hobby on the weekends. Paying 10 bucks for 100 gold is not a big deal to him. It would be no different than going to the movies, and buying popcorn and a drink.
Virtual items are tangible and have value.
Or maybe phish attacks? "Our records indicate that someone has tried to gain access to your World of Warcraft account. Unless you contact us immediately, we will be forced to suspend your account for security reasons. Please click on this innocent looking link and give us all your logon information."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Since Salon is quite restrictive in access, I put a DRM-free txt/html version on my blog along with a review.
The story itself is here(txt) and here(html).
A review of the story is also on my blog
It's a "sweatshop" because the working conditions are really bad, and the pay is really low. The work itself is not as arduous as, say, sewing raincoats for 30 hours at a stretch, or soldering 5 thousand LEDs into Christmas light cables before being allowed to clock out. And they can quit, with many people dying to take their jobs when they do. But the physically demanding nature of traditional sweatshops isn't their defining characteristic, or steelmills would all be sweatshops in more than just a colorful description of their atmosphere.
Sweatshop labor is more of a commentary on the rest of the local economy. People don't quit, though they are "free" to, because there's no alternative labor available. That's almost always because there's no capital available to entrepreneurs, no competition among labor buyers, no real value applied to their labor. All of which is usually due to some political repression, a command economy, company towns - all the conditions we had in the US before labor organized in the 20th Century do protect our rights to work in human conditions. Which is why it sounds familiar to Slashdotters slaving away in cubefarms, wishing we could get paid to play games instead of write Java DB reporting systems.
--
make install -not war
Just wait until all the sweatshop MMORPG labor jobs are shipped to India...
How about if the gaming companies hired those cheap workers to run their NPCs? Rather than shopkeeper bots and such, they could give the roles a human touch. (If they don't speak English so well, hey, welcome to the real fantasy world!) If they do well, they could be promoted to more important virtual jobs, like Lord British's secret service bodyguards or something. Or perhaps sell their services on the open market, like in Diamond Age.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Let me also pre-empt the replies that will say playing a game should be about enjoying the experience and the ride, not a power-trip toward getting an uber character and the ultimate foozle power: I agree. I'd never buy something in an MMORPG. That doesn't mean time doesn't have value and that buyers are necessarily evil.
Some MMORPGs recognize that this is bad for their game and take steps to prevent it. World of Warcraft, as far as I know, will "bind" some items to whoever picks them up. Technical solutions do exist, but as long as the economic conditions described in my first paragraph exist, I expect people will have a power incentive to get around the restrictions.
yep and i say leave them too it :)
The guy who runs Blacksnow Interactive is quite a jerk. Feel free to contact him, his ICQ is 149-210-517.
After all, one Fippy Darkpaw (who drops a PGT) can feed a family of 4 for a week.
And Jboots? now you're talking about opening your own hotel.
Some people think that as dreadful as the conditions may be, the sweatshops are still good for the workers because the alternatives are worse.
However, they fail to consider that a big part of the reason why the alternatives are worse or nonexistent is because of what the sweatshop owners and big corporations have done to the environment and economy.
For example, corporations pollute a river and kill the fish and the fishermen go out of business, so some of the former fishermen end up working in a sweatshop. Or they use their money to cut off or otherwise influence the distribution channels of the small farmer, and the farmer can't find anybody to truck his tomatoes to market. Or they buy up lots of land and drive up the land values so the young adult can't start his/her own small farm with a couple of cows and chicken coops.
Other tactics involve blackballing any employee who quits so no one else will hire them. The sweatshops also deceive prospective employees about how terrible the conditions are. They train every current employee to speak wonderful things about the company, then when a new worker is hired they have to work so much that they don't even have time or energy to look for another job. They also can't outright quit because their pay is so low that a week without pay could lead to starvation.
Similar trends are emerging in the US; the big corporations are progressively taking away the ability of the small business to succeed. For example, it is practically impossible for the 2-person software shop to sell any game for any of the popular game consoles, because they have to pay licensing fees just to make a game that will work with a console without the owner having to hack it. If "trusted computing"/Palladium gets a stronghold, it will also become infeasible for new and small software companies to sell anything that will run on an unhacked computer, so developers who want to stay in the industry will have no choice but to work for a big corporation, probably with EA-sweatshop conditions.
Sweatshops aren't doing the workers a favor. The alternatives are worse only because the sweatshops helped to take away the better opportunities.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
On Phantasy Star Online, Sega got it right - better than everyone else, actually. Money abounds and item storage is limited. What do players do then? After getting more powerful weapons, they give away their older, less powerful ones to newbies, who put them to good use. And everyone has fun together doing what is actually fun: killing monsters.
No, it is not a MMORPG; it is a multiplayer (not massive) online action RPG. It actually demands skill, not just tons of levels and clicking on the monsters. And it is actually fun to play solo. It is not a virtual fantasy world; it is just a damn good game - and it is good for not trying to be anything else.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Cory's short-story must be prophetic unless slashdot is posting old news which seems unlikely...
When I read the first few posts, my first thought was that TFA must a fictional, deriative work based on the short-story.
BTW Cory is a http://boingboing.net/ poster boy. Read his other shit at http://craphound.com/
Selling technology-laden products is not liberating, but technology training would be.
The main problem with those "sweatshops" is that over time, they eventually increase the chance for the in-game economy to go comepletely FUBAR.
By flooding the market for certain items, or controling drops on certain monsters , a small group of Farmers like these can effectively deny the rest of the online world's population of something that they need ( for they character's job) or simply monopolise the market on some items ( after all, they can organise shifts easely so they can camp for 24 hours at a time).
Add to the mix the fact that there is a good percentage of these people botting ( aka, having automated scripting tools that will autoattack/target rare monsters, or farm items without human action) and Eventually over time you get to the point that MONEY BECOMES WORTHLESS in the online game.
And the problem is that it keeps on getting worse and worse. The Final Fantasy XI Online economy was showing the signs of this about 5-6 months ago, and now, since then there has been about a 100% inflation on all costs in-game ( for player-sold items). It's getting so bad, the developpers are putting a tax on ALL ITEMS being bought ( so they could reduce the crazy amonts of money lying around).
Developpers don't realise how badly their economy might go down unless they start to actually monitor the online world's economy. Usually by the time they start doing that, they are already getting to the point that things are getting too crazy to be fixed.
Peace and happyness to you, by LullySing
the onset of youthful diabetes, induced perhaps by the sweetshops just outside the 500 m sugar-free zone at her school.
...No. I'm assuming that "youthful diabetes" means Type I Diabetes (which is associated with younger people), which has nothing to do with your diet. While it's not known for sure what causes your immune system to go berzerk on your pancreas, it's thought to be genetic. Type II Diabetes, on the other hand, can be caused by your diet & living conditions. Having the same name for these two completely different diseases (the only similarity is the symptoms) is incredibly misleading.
Being a Type I diabetic myself, I hate hearing people assume that I had a poor diet when I was younger.
What will you give me for mine?
I forget what 8 was for.
What most have said is that playing games all day isn't labor really, nor could one consider it a sweatshop.
Consider then that this is how these people make a living; a "living" that literaly consists of a few U.S. Cents per hour. They have to work for 14 hours a day to make the change lost in a couch. All of this amounts to being lucky to feed oneself and maybe be lucky to live in a big room with 30 other people.
In other news, it's a nice day outside, the sun is shining, the air has a crisp chill to it. I think I'm gonna go for a walk.
This is more than JUST a Chinese thing, there are people in the States who do this sort of thing... and it spreads across far, far more than just one or two games. Companies like IGE have been trying to set up systems across all MMOs to generate currency they can sell.
The end result of all this is inflation.
On most FF11 servers, for example, the Archer Ring is dropped by a single monster in the game, and there are people who work shifts camping that thing. To sell at an inflated rate to generate income. To sell by their company. To players. The result is a feedback loop that creates out of control inflation.
Some games make it harder for botters to play. Others become a bit more up front. World of Warcraft PvP server players have started compiling lists of known farmers working in shifts and are going around pounding them flat whenever they can (more power to em).
Meanwhile, IGE's mouthpiece can sit back in an interview and smugly say that his business is the wave of the future and has no ill effect on any game it's involved in, all the while watching his bank account climb.
Certainly, mashing farmers is cathartic... but the real solution is to NOT patronize these people.
these guys deserve lots of latitude.
But then, I realized that when you pay $50 for the Sword of Gondron (or whatever), you're paying for somebody's many hours spent "leveling up" to GET the Sword of Gondron. If those many hours are boring tedious drudgery, maybe you're better off paying somebody else to do this (just this particular part of the game) for you.
This is not much different than paying somebody to shovel snow or mow the lawn. And the product is at least a little more permanent.
Now, the part I don't get is, if a game has such significant portions of drudgery that you would wish to hire it out, doesn't that start to sound more like work than fun?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
All the info I need to decide that blogs are definitely not going to replace anything important anytime soon.
I'm not at all surprised to hear this. I recently gave a try to one of the popular multiplayer games. It is pretty fun, but much of the play involves monotonous gathering and processing of natural resources in the world to build structures, items, etc. For those of you who have never played, a typical scenerio would involve gathering two materials (say hay and mud) which are not located in close proximity. So you must walk 10 minutes back and forth gathering small quanties of each. Then you mix them and leave them on the ground for 5 minutes until they form building bricks. you then use these bricks (sometimes hundreds or thousands) to build some other structure. The other structure allows you to build bricks even faster, etc, etc.
There is a certain amount of fun you can have, but i could see that there was a new level of play once you had built a certain amount of stuff. This level could only be reached with, literally, weeks of repetitive play. I use the term "play" loosly because it is only a little more fun than, say, a data-entry job.
It was obvious to me that i would never be able to put in the time to get there. I can easily see paying for the labor to build your empire. i wouldn't myself have paid because i wasn't planning to get that involved in the game. but, i know there are people with much more spare time and money than me. so it's not at all surprising to me.
TODO: come up with a clever sig
I don't think the production of these virtual goods can be compared to sweatshops. The company mentioned in the article, Blacksnow Interactive, ran two sites, camelotexchange.com and aoexchange.com, since defunct, which operated as an auctionhouse for gamers for "Dark Ages of Camelot" and "Anarchy Online" to trade goods. The virtual goods sold and produced were made by gamers themselves.
The fact is, the players who can put in long hours and succeed well at these multi-player games to produce these virtual goods are those with the best gear, broadband connection, and free time. I.e., affluent middle-class teenagers from the developed world.
The concept of a third-world "sweatshop" producing these goods is ridiculous. Why would someone spend a large amount of money buying expensive gear and paying for difficult to obtain broadband connections in the 3rd world, where they'd be experiencing substantial delay lags with the servers running online games in the U.S.? He can get the same goods from idle american teenagers looking for a little extra cash who already have all the latest gear, without spending any money himself.
Saying that suburban north-american teenagers playing video-games work in a "sweatshop" does a grave injustice to the millions of underage children who are forced to work in actual sweatshops in degrading conditions for little pay. A better description of the people running these businesses is that they are virtual brokers, handling transactions between gamers.
Everyday low price with Chinese labors? ;)
for the sake of all those who never got to choose
Serves the gamers right for trying to set up an alternative economy. This sounds like another victory for good old free-market economics!
Some trading sites, like IGE mentioned in the article, are willing to buy money and items from players who have excess. So if your idea of fun is to spend hours every day killing the same things over and over again to collect the gold and magic swords they drop, and don't mind throwing the game's economy out of whack even more, or the risk of getting banned for violating the games Terms of Service, then go ahead, sell your excess for profit.
I've gotten some gold myself through these services, so I suppose I'm rotten too and adding to the problem. But I'm just spending that in-game currency on items in the game, and to improve my character's skills. I play the game until I get bored with it, then unsubscribe, removing my character and his ill-gotten gains from the system. And can game inflation really be blamed on the players, when the game itself is actually the one virtually pressing new coins left and right?
I like to play games, I have a group of friends I've played online games with since the infancy of online MMORPGS (DarkSun Online nearly 10 years ago now) and unlike the olden days, I can no longer play as many hours as I used to. I have a kid, wife, a company to run, etc, so my play time isn't that "much".
So I'm left with staying a "newbie" forever, for example in WoW it takes "roughly" 300+ hours of real play time to get a character "maxxed" out, playing 3 maybe 4 hours a day, I'm looking at 3-4 months to get maxxed out so I can join in the "high level" fun stuff. By then most of my friends will be on their 3rd or 4th maxxed char and hell by then most of them will be quitting for the next game and I'm sitting there going "damnit".
So what do I do? $300 for a maxxed char off Ebay, $300 for enough gold from one of those gold selling services that I can afford to buy enough "good stuff" to be able to join in those high level shenanigans, and I'm set. Obviously if I were working for $8 an hour this would be stupid, but $600 is maybe 2 days income for me, call it 15 hours of work to make that cash, 15 hours of "real world labor" to save myslef 300+ hours of "game time grinding"? I'll pay it. Now I'm able to join in all the reindeer games.
As for the "sweatshops" are these people supposedly being forced to work for these companies? What is these peoples' alternatives? Where would they be working if they weren't doing this? As I understand it there isn't just a glut of "good jobs" in many of these locales so is playing an online game all day for a boss 'that' bad of a job or is it a pretty decent setup for these folks? I think fast food restaurants are HORRIBLE sweat shops and any time I see some teenager being browbeaten by a 20 something manager I just thank the gods I no longer work in fast food (I did during high school and some of my college times).
--- www.f-theocean.com
If you try and sell an island, it will first become infected with rabbid biting moneys, and then sink into the sea, not with a amagnficent effect or fanfare, but that annotin "gwpfffit" noise that comes with windows.
Then your nickname will be "I was pwned, and all I got was this t-shirt" at which point your character will be wearing a T-shirt with "Pwn3d!" written on it.
Take care of your island, and it will be nice to you.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I work in Hangzhou on behalf of a small manufacturing outsourcing company. Conditions for workers here in China are much better now than in the past, but there are still problems. Perhaps one of the biggest hardships for them is that most buildings in Hangzhou are not heated in winter, and it gets fairly cold here, dropping below freezing outside several times per month. Often even areas where the white collar workers are located have no heat, and sometimes I think they have it the worst, because at least the unskilled laborers are constantly moving instead of sitting motionless at a computer.
The point is, in a developing country some hardships can not be avoided. Unfortunately China's thirst for electricity is much more than can be supplied, thus it is not feasible to heat most buildings here in the south during winter. As it is, there are frequent scheduled blackouts in many areas to solve the problem that there is not enough electricity to go around. But they can't just all stop work and wait for spring. Sometimes I think people don't realize this when they get mad about working conditions in developing countries. Yes conditions are less than ideal in China, but they are improving, and it isn't possible for everyone to just quit working and wait for conditions to become like they are in the West. Change has to happen gradually and economic growth is the only way that it is going to happen at all.
Manufacture in China
Is the alternative to sweatshop work unemployment? Homelessness? Starvation?
It may suck, but reality is that it isn't the video game industry's job to change the world. If they're playing a MMORPG or making Nike's shoes, the fact is that in third world countries the job market isn't what most of us would describe as good.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Has anybody seen Project Entropia's screenshots. Take at these shots at some of the women in thongs. Now, the game readily converts in real currency to game currency, but NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
I propose a business plan whose time has come. Take a look at the graphics of men and women in WoW. Take a look at these gfx. The 3D engines have reached the point where the next big sim is Sex World.
Bondage camps, all kinds of lingerie and toys, fully animated and adjustable genitalia, special "attacks", and the PvP area can fufill mud wrestling or something.
Proximity to other players can trigger VOIP, for the phone sex angle and most importantly, you can convert game currency BACK to dollars or any other world currency through a partnership with a large enough bank like Citibank.
It's the natural next step after the Sims, right? It would make the sweatshops start teaching english, german, swedish, french and russian to local women real fast. If the environment was as immersive as WoW, and not some cheesy 3D engine, it would be probably be a big moneymaker.
And, since I'm fleshing (no pun intended, ok... intended) let's add gambling and a formal auction house for the bling bling, like stretch hummers (cars, people, keep your mind outta the gutter a bit) Ferraris, Porsches, diamond rings, Glock pistols (gotta have a ranged combat system in the PvP areas) maybe even have the real bad boys carrying Uzis.
It would make GTA look like a PBS kids show. Encourage the sweatshoppers, make it a real way to have a virtual economy. It can't be far off now.
Money is a medium of exchange, it has no value itself. It's simply easier to sell something for money than it is to barter. I can see how an infinite flow of large amounts of gold would cause hyper-inflation in the prices of items. However I haven't seen anyone look at the underlying cause of this problem. To get the gold you kill a monster, but how did that monster get the gold in the first place? Did it kill a player and take his gold? No. It spawned with gold like freshly printed interwar period German Marks. What I'm saying is that every time a monster spawns the game is 'printing money'. To avoid the natural consequence of hyper-inflation game developers need to find a more complex and realistic method for paying characters. Perhaps an online fur trade? I see nothing wrong with the exchange of one currency (REAL money) for another (Online Gold, Gil, whatever). Perhaps the game developers should hire some economists to solve this problem! And for the record, Sweatshops are bad, and it is inconceivably easy to turn a game that was meant to be fun into a form of labour.
Immigrant Laborers Hired To Delete Spam
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Normal IP, as it's defined under the law (at least as it is supposed to be defined, these days it seems anything goes) has to do with a creative process. Wether it's music or a book, or a brilliant new manufacturing process, someone expends effort to create something new. Doesn't mean it's 100%, from nowhere with no insparation from prior works, but it's still creative.
That's not the case with money in MMORPGs. All you are doing is incrimenting a value in a database. If the company that ran it wanted, they could change that value arbitrarly. There's no creative process, and there's no new creation as a result. The number just goes up.
I'll pay for a video game or for music or for a book because of the creative value. Someone has a talent and used that talent to create something I like. Even though it's non-tangible, they still deserve compensation, so they'll hopefully keep doing it.
Money in a game lacks that, a person sat there going through the process the game has to incriment a number in the database. No creativity. The other thing is the whole reason I play these games is to have fun. It's an enjoyable way to spend my free time. Paying someone else to play, therefore, seems really stupid. If the game isn't fun, I shouldn't be playing it in the first place.
That's all aside from how this can screw up a game's economy. Final Fantasy 11 apparantly really suffers form this. You cannot get some of the best items in the game by playing it. They are continously camped by these "sweatshops". The only way to get them is to pay real money for them, a lot of it. Well talk about a way to screw up the game for those that play it for fun. What if you happen to LIKE the really hard quests and battles that take a long time? Maybe that is fun to you, I know a lot of people for who it is. However oh, no, can't do that, because there are people locking you out to attempt to get money out of you.
Basically, I don't mind paying the company who made and runs the game a fee to play. As far as I'm concerned, it's a service fee for entertianment, just like my cable bill. I give them money, they give me entertainment. It's also necessary, because there's real costs associated with running these games (bandwidth, support, hardware, etc). I am not willing to pay to have someone else play the game for me, or for their permission to do something I want to, and should be able to, do in the game.
For a more thorough discussion of virtual property "ownership" than the links given in TFA try:
"Pitfalls of Virtual Property" by Dr Richard Bartle
Links:
Original PDF
HTML version from google's cache
Pick up the bread knife and carve your way into forensic history
" ... For comparison, the economic impact of this phenomenon is roughly equal to that of Namibia or Macedonia. ..."
Okay, I'll bite (didn't see anyone else post it yet).
These are virtual goods that, in about two years, have transformed themselves into a real economy (the things sell for hard currency) already as big as whole countries?
Sure, they're small countries. But, they have lots of real people eating, working, making stuff. Probably a few rich ones, fattening the offshore bank account in the usual ways. Trust me, my own personal economy isn't that big, by a long shot.
Put another way, are we seeing a phenomena that would have doubled these economies, while making "goods" that didn't even exist a couple of years ago?
If I were the "Benign Dictator" of Nambia, I'd be getting right on it. Pronto.
I understand your annoyance -- I have different family members who fall into either category (Type I or Type II). In the story case, the protagonist is told she's in danger of developing Type II diabetes, even though she's not yet an adult (due to a poor diet and lack of exercise). She initially responds with denial and rationalization as she struggles with her problems in the game world and the real world. The story's well worth the read, IMHO.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
People don't want to buy better weapons in game to have a valuable weapon in the game. The want to leverage their real-world working efficiency to replace virtual world work. The fact of the matter is that these are GAMES and should not feel like work. If paying a premim for the +1 mace on thursday helps them do whatever they wanted to do with it (i.e.make gameplay more interesging), the great. The premise that the in-game weapons if sold in the outside world should always have the same value is rediculous. Not even real items do that. When you buy a car its value drops 30% or so just driving it off the lot. What people want to pay for is time. They don't want to spend 15 hours a day for a month just to keep up with their in-game friends who live in their mommas basement or somesuch. The game companies should capitalize on that, under the obvious restriction that the money is not really buying a +1 mace. it's buying a time enhancement that has no real-world value and may be in week's time anyway.
These people are ultimately insecure at some level and exerting this power over other people - making them frustrated - makes them feel in control of their lives, and thus better about themselves.
Does believing that make you feel more in control of your life and thus better about yourself?
A lot of people in this topic seem to be thinking that these people are being paid to have fun in a videogame like so many Americans do on a nightly basis.
That is not true.
These people are being paid to, in videogame speek, "pharm" items and money. To "pharm" something is to mindlessly acquire the item(s) at the expense of any other activity (IE: fun). For example, in World of Warcraft to "pharm" gold (currency) at level 60 for most of these workers means staying in one zone and killing the same type of enemy ("mob") for hours upon hours. Imagine killing the exact same bird in a game for literally 8 hours.
Find bird.
Kill bird.
Loot bird.
Repeat for six hours.
These people are not grouping, questing, raiding, interacting with other players, or doing any of the other activities that make these games fun. They are doing the digital equivalent of screwing bolt #3572 into a car chassis on an assembly line.
Also, beyond that, I have so far seen no mention of the damage these currency sellers do to in-game economies. These companies obliterate game economies with their actions.
For example, Bob wants Super-Item-of-Monster-Slaying, but Super-Item-of-Monster-Slaying costs 5000 gold, and Bob only has 10 gold. So, Bob buys 10,000 gold online. Now Bob is super-rich by in-game standards and decides that he wants Super-Item-of-Monster-Slaying *right now*. So, what does bob do? He offers 10,000 gold to the first person he sees with the item just because he can. The seller, along with every else, realizes he can start selling Super-Item-of-Monster-Slaying for twice the previous price and people will still pay for it.
This begins a downward spiral for the server's economy. People cannot pay the newly doubled price, so some of them pay real money for game money and pay even MORE. The price for goods rapidly increases, and the value of the currency plummets. In the end, players who want to buy anything in-game are forced to pay for fake cash or spend their own hours pharming the money for the horrifically overpriced goods.
Think this is too extreme and won't happen? Check out the Bazaar in Everquest 1; it already has happened.
It ruins the game economy which
Ruins the game's economy? Sorry, it's already broken.
Monsters spawn continuously from an undepleteable source, and they carry gold (currency). This means new currency is being continually minted.
What happens when a government mints new money continuously? Ridiculous inflation and economic collapse.
That is exactly what happens in all of these games. The amount of currency available in-game is always increasing. These games are starting with a broken economy, and that won't change until some game designers take an economics class.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
One of the weakest parts of MMORPG's has been the lack of emmersion. Everone want's to be the kick ass jedi or whatever. No one want's to be the bartender NPC or innkeeper. So what you get is a bunch of bots with limited responses and an empty simulated city. I say if these people in third world countries want to get paid for it then let them play the NPC's. It's a much more useful and less boring job than making items. The game will be much better and being a bartender in Everquest sure beats sewing sneakers all day. Think of all the Chinese political prisoners we will save from sewing volleyballs with their teeth. I personally think it's a win-win situation. They become actors in a sense. It could even become entertaining. We have fun being Neo and kicking ass. Just imagine the whole NPC social underclass that would be created. Their interactions alone could feul a psych thesis.
effects.
I played Final Fantasy XI for a total of 79 RL days. I recently quit the game because it was taking up too much mindshare and RL time. The Chinese "sweat shops" were also a factor in my quitting.
The selling of accounts in and of itself causes certain issues in-game. While other posts have noted that it's a time-saving measure for some, that is a problem. Those of us who managed to build up a character to a high level through the tedious level grind and crafting learned the nuances of our jobs. Someone that buys a level 50 character, on the other hand, has saved all that time but doesn't know those finer points of playing the job. Thus, you get parties with schmucks that don't know what the hell they're doing. No one gains from this. The new player gets embarassed, the seasoned players get killed and lose experience, causing them to spend even MORE time in game.
There's also the problem of the sellers that rush through levels trying to build up a saleable character. They also don't know their jobs and really don't care that they don't know how to play. So, yet again, you get seasoned players that get killed due to the ineptness of the sellers.
Even more of a problem were the Chinese gil sellers. These people would lock down an area and "steal" as many mobs as they could that dropped certain, high gil items. They would corner the market on these items and raise the prices to astronomical levels. One example for a piece of equipment that was highly prized for my main class (Monk) was the Ochiudo's Kote. They went for nearly a million gil on the auction house. Try selling them to an NPC and the going rate was three thousand gil. Sure, they would be more than the NPC price naturally, but they wouldn't have been nearly as much if it weren't for the gil sellers. The gil sellers, and most players eventually came to know who they were, they used similar names and were on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, became a serious problem and contributed to my quitting the game.
Another side effect of the gil sellers were the steps taken by Squenix to try to thwart them. They instituted game changes like the likelihood of catching certain fish going down considerably after being in a particular zone for a certain length of time. Sure, this had an effect on the fish botting players and gil sellers, but it also became a pain in the ass for the honest players. And after the fishing nerf, they did the same thing to logging, mining, and excavating. I can't blame Squenix for trying to slow down the gil sellers, but the steps they took ended up screwing everyone, not just the people they were going after.
Of course, there are soultions to a lot of these problems. But Squenix was never all that receptive to the obvious solutions.
Near the end of my play time I tried to organize some things to cause the gil sellers some grief. I could never get enough people together to make an impact. Partly because a lot of the people that I recruited considered what I proposed griefing, which would have put their accounts in jeopardy. I didn't think it was, but that was the perception. In essence, the people that I was playing with were FAR more moral and decent than the gil sellers and that was a stumbling block in getting the players involved in an effort to take a stand against the gil sellers.
At any rate, this IS a problem and it's one that won't go away until people quit supplying the gil selling companies with cash by buying accounts or in-game money. And just for shits and grins, I decided to see what my account would bring in when I decided to quit the game. Based on other accounts with similar or lower stats/equipment, one could expect to spend a couple of hundred dollars for my account. The amount I was offered was a whopping $47.00. So, when you're thinking of how much these guys must be paying the "sweat shop" workers, take that huge profit margin into account.
Of course, soon we'll start hearing about the lawsuits against the creators of these games. I.e. they knew Everquest was as addictive as crack. So their target will be: Big Sim.
What? You paid 30,000 dollars for a game character, from someone you don't know, on a online universe that may not be around perpetually?? That's about as dumb as the guy who bought a house from crooked lawyers..
Just say no to license servers!!
Amen to that...
/shouts in Jeuno that you are doing this. If you can get a bit of a history built up in the Auction House, you can usually knock the price down so far that it'll take months to build it back up.
Reading your post, I have to wonder whether you were on the Odin server, which I'm still on now. Certainly, we have the ls* and kuang* people on Odin, who are all known to be gilsellers.
I do actually feel the problem is perhaps slightly in decline now, actually. People started getting smart to the tactics the gilsellers were using and adapted them for use right back at them. The "train hordes of mobs onto rival campers and warp out" technique can be used quite effectively on gilsellers, as so few of them ever get past level 50, as they can't get the high level help they need to complete the first level-cap quest (which is a complete pain in the posterior) in a reasonable amount of time.
My own contribution to fighting the gilsellers came through undercutting heavily on the items they relied on for their income. This can be painful, as it means depriving yourself of a good bit of cash, but I think it's worth it in the long run. Basically, you and your linkshell camp the same mobs as the gilsellers (usually stropher chyme of valkurm emperor) and get a few of the drops. You then sell these for several hundred thousand less than the (usually artificially high) prices that the gilsellers usually sell them for and send a few
I once had a 10 minute conversation with a gilseller who I was refusing to give a raise. I'm not sure how far I can trust what he told me, but...
Apparently the way most of these gilsellers work is that at the end of each day, they send all the gil they've made (keeping a small reserve for Auction fees etc) to a "gangmaster", who then decides how much they get paid. If they've failed to reach their "quota" for that day (which they often aren't told in advance), they don't get paid at all. Obviously, this adds a touch of desperation to the mix. However, before you start feeling too sorry for them, most of them are students or otherwise employed and are only relying on gilselling for "pocket money", rather than the essentials of living.
It sounds more like when I worked at a "Big 5" consulting firm.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
... but Namimbia is a country while Macedonia is a -quite developed- province in Greece. And yes I know that some government has recognized the F.ormer Y.ugoslavian R.epublic O.f M.acedonia (FYROM) as "Macedonia" but I think you should check with Wikipedia and form your own opinion.