The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nBy JULIAN DIBBELL
Published: June 17, 2007<\/p>\n
It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly wooded mountain terrain, studded with castle ruins and grazing deer, in which warrior monks milled about. Li, or rather his staff-wielding wizard character, had been slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m., mouse-clicking on one corpse after another, each time gathering a few dozen virtual coins \u2014 and maybe a magic weapon or two \u2014 into an increasingly laden backpack.<\/p>\n
Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does \u2014 for a living. On this summer night in 2006, the game on his screen was, as always, World of Warcraft, an online fantasy title in which players, in the guise of self-created avatars \u2014 night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters \u2014 battle their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning points for every monster slain and rising, over many months, from the game\u2019s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the highest (70). More than eight million people around the world play World of Warcraft \u2014 approximately one in every thousand on the planet \u2014 and whenever Li is logged on, thousands of other players are, too. They share the game\u2019s vast, virtual world with him, converging in its towns to trade their loot or turning up from time to time in Li\u2019s own wooded corner of it, looking for enemies to kill and coins to gather. Every World of Warcraft player needs those coins, and mostly for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.<\/p>\n
At the end of each shift, Li reports the night\u2019s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in \u2014 two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor \u2014 along with a rudimentary workers\u2019 dorm, a half-hour\u2019s bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.<\/p>\n
…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The fact that this underground meatspace economy exists in parallel to the cyber economy of World of Warcraft indicates that the “money” of this game is not properly valued. What’s an economist’s take on what is going on here? The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer By JULIAN DIBBELLPublished: June 17, 2007 It was an …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[973,1087,1016],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-gaming","category-international-commerce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}