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.

Comments

Sweatshop?

[bigtallmofo]

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.

Re:Sweatshop?

[Photon Ghoul]

Yeah so all the comments here are "oh wow being paid to play games is considered bad"?

Slashdot or the submitter shouldn't have used the word "sweatshop" because it focuses attention on the working conditions away from the fact that there are companies who really game the system in MMO's for profit. It gets to the point that their actions ruin the in-game economy and playability.

Consider Everquest2. There supposedly exists a group of people who work for one "Boss" (that's actually his in-game name). These people run teams of bot-driven characters who farm items, drive up prices, intrude in other's playing space etc. Supposedly a lot of their items end up being sold on online auctions.

Re:Sweatshop?

[hanssprudel]

However, if they can't leave it IS slavery.

Of course they can leave, but the "fair trade" people always conveniently forget that in their quest to justify protectionism. The fact is that the people who work in these "sweatshops" (whether they are making sneakers or RPG characters) are there by choice because they decided the alternatives they had were worse. And if the "sweatshop" was to dissapear, what would happen? They would be left with exactly those alternatives.

Of course it sucks that their are people in world who are so poor that working under awful conditions is a step up for them. But denying them this step up does not help their poverty - instead it locks out their societies from the prospect of economic development.

You can point this out to the left as many times as you want, though, and they won't listen. The reason is that their motives for wanting protectionism have nothing to do with concern for foreign workers. Like all other protectionism, it has to with protecting ourselves from the possibility that others are able to do our jobs better and cheaper.

Re:Sweatshop?

[rhsanborn]

Have you ever seen the EverQuest economy? It cut the 'normal' or casual player out. Prices were so inflated it was darn near impossible to get anything without killing the mob yourself. Not much for a player economy.

Virtual Goods?

[ceeam]

Let's think about it. What makes these goods more "virtual" (ie not-real) than MP3 music or videos? No, really?

Doctorow wrote about this

[Dark Paladin]

Here's a link (think there might be a commercial to go through, but there it is:)

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/15/andas _game/index.html

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.

Re:meanwhile... - prophetic SciFi

[aacool]

Cory Doctorow wrote a short story, Anda's Game about this not too long ago - this is quite interesting.

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

As is par for Cory's work, the topics are cutting edge - dealing with ebay-driven in-game economics, dietary restrictions on kids,anti-globalization criticism, puns on the Bradbury/Moore controversy and female rights a la SuicideGirls(?). In another time, a little girl might play with a golliwog, a Barbie or a teaset. In this post-modern age, she is a skilled character in a game that borrows from Everquest, Ray Bradbury, Quake and Tolkien - more a killer than a wayfarer. Her participation in, and then disavowal of, an in-game conspiracy to terminate characters who produce in-game gold to be sold for real money on ebay, is bracketed with the onset of youthful diabetes, induced perhaps by the sweetshops just outside the 500 m sugar-free zone at her school.

Sega got it right with PSO

[Stormwatch]

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.

The main problem with these ? the economy.

[LullySing]

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.

Ok I've Bought virtual goods

[Grimster]

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).

Difference is in creativity

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Selling items and characters has many detrimental

[samdu]

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.