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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.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/15/andas _game/index_np.html
not a novel, but a short story from cory doctorow.
Anda's Game by Cory Doctorow: http://www.authorama.com/andas-game-1.html/
There was already An excellent thread about the rational behind this
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).
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.
I actually live in Asia, a lot of these 'sweatshops' are bloody nice work environments! Just as nice as anything you'd find in Australia - the difference is the workers are paid a little higher than average wages most times. If the company is foreign owned or 'bankrolled' - then conditions have to be compliant with all health and safety regs. The exact same pair of jeans sold in america for $100 will cost around $5-$10 here, on the street (shopping centers)
Workers get breaks, medical, dental, nobody under 18, the law is enforced pretty well since failure to do so means big government fines.
It all works out in the end.
These offshore 'call centers' are staffed by college graduates mostly, just looking for a good income - problem is a few 'Americans' think they are 'stupid' in many instances, and hate talking to them. (I have a neice working in one, I hear the stories every day) Can really screw up ones day. These people are smart, they just don't speak english fluently.
Just my 2 cents. (Excluding China, I don't know anything about that place - so previous poster might be right)
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.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
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.
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.
The problem is that normally once someone gets a "Sword of Pwning" they are done and move on. When people are farming an item for real world value they usually set up a group of bots to perma-camp the quest/spawn, thereby cockblocking REAL players from obtaining the same.
These groups also tend not to play the game as it was intended and rather seek to exploit the system to reap massive gains. They are quick to exploit scripting/cheating systems to achieve results contrary to what a normal player could achieve. (ie profitable tradeskill combines, fishing in wow)
So the people who use these services tend to be casual people who could care less about their fellow players or (in a more valid case) higher level guilds looking to bolster their numbers on low pop/skill servers Most of these games have built in methods for selling/trading and don't need these "evil corporation" type third-party entities controlling resources and breaking the ingame ruleset.
I do feel free here, yes. I suppose that might change if I were to get into some kind of trouble, like being wrongfully accused of a major crime, but I think the chance of that is incredibly small. The Chinese government rarely intrudes on the lives of ordinary people, especially here in Southern China. In fact, I often wish there was more government regulation and law enforcement here. For example, it would be nice to see them crack down on the theft, blatant violation of traffic laws, illegal waste dumping, and unsafe food production that is so common here. But unfortunately the police just turn a blind eye on all but major crimes.
Yes it's true that a few websites are blocked from China, including the BBC. But I don't think this is a really big deal compared to the other problems China has.
Also, it's easy to blame the Chinese government for all of these problems, but I feel the root cause is Chinese culture itself. Westerners see the Chinese government as horribly authoritarian, but similar structures of strict hierarchical control can be be seen everywhere in Chinese non-government groups as well, including businesses, schools, and families. The corruption and crime prevalent in China can also be explained by culture. The Chinese have experienced generations of having to struggle to survive, and the result is a culture where individuals do not value the welfare of anyone besides self and immediate friends and family.
Anyway, these are just my opinions developed after living in China for a total of over a year. If anyone disagrees with me I'd love to hear their reasoning, but please don't flame.
Manufacture in China
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.