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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.
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.
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).
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/15/andas _game/index_np.html
not a novel, but a short story from cory doctorow.
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
I think it would depend on the labor conditions.
If it's "Work 8-10 hours a day with a couple of breaks and an hour off for lunch, and a wage that a person can afford to live on (assuming third world country costs, this might be $5/day or so)", then yes, your sarcasm is met.
If it's "work eighteen hours with no breaks, no air conditioning and if you get carpel tunnel that's your own damned fault, and if you miss a quote you miss pay for the day (which might be just enough to buy food at $0.25/day) , and we employ the twelve year olds who's other choice is prostitution so the constant threat of 'perform or die' is hanging over their head 24/7" - then your sarcasm might not be met.
It's all in the scale.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Well, in a MMORPG, a good item (like say, the Sword of Pwning) might be really useful for your character, when your clan is fighting someone else. However, it might take a 10 hr quest to get the Sword of Pwning, and this busy first-worlder has a high paying job, so that can't skip that. So you buy the sword for real cash, because you get enjoyment out of the sword, just like you benefit from your 500Watt sterio that was probably built by some other third-worlder.
No...you don't understand...they make them play with 5200FX..5200FX!!!!
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.
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.
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...
I really just can't understand the morons in online FPSs who go around TKing etc. I've tried talking to them sometimes, asking "why do you do this?" in as nice a way as possible, but of course never got an answer. The idea of playing an MMORPG, where the potential number of morons available to piss me off is so much higher, doesn't appeal to me much.
I have sat and watched someone spend half an hour stacking planes on an aircraft carrier deck so no one could take off (Coral sea,BF1942) before an admin joined and kicked him. What kind of mentality must a person have to waste half an hour doing something incredibly dull and repetitive (enter plane, taxi forwards, exit plane, wait for new plane to spawn, repeat) purely to piss off people he doesn't know who are trying to have fun?
It basically means only servers with admins are worth playing on. I have about five servers in my favourites list that I know have good admins and decent auto-kick settings. I occasionally play on other servers, but I always regret it.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.