Title: Gold Farmers
I.
It’s 2005 and you’re taking a break from whatever it is you normally do to play some World of Warcraft. You’re playing an undead warlock, and you’re about to reach level fifty-six. It’s not all fun and games though; as especially at these higher levels the game can often be a real grind. You spend hours on end killing the same monsters in the same spot, just to gain a few experience points or a few gold. So you get fed up and decide to speed things up a little. You open your browser and enter your credit card details into a website selling in-game currencies. You spend $25 USD and in return you receive 250 gold. With this you can repair your armour, buy that new staff you’ve been eyeing off, and still have enough left over to buy some extra potions.
II.
What you may not have realised was that before this gold reached your account, the online company that you bought it from purchased this gold from a gaming workshop. One such operation is the Donghua Gaming Workshop based in Jinhua, China. The company employs 80 ‘gold farmers’ to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, earning gold on World of Warcraft. The workers are given a 45-minute break for both lunch and dinner, and can take one day off per month. For their efforts they receive 30 yuan, or $3.80, per day1. In their two to three hours of daily leisure time, many go downstairs to the internet cafe on the first floor of the building, and continue playing World of Warcraft. Once they have finished gaming, they head back upstairs to sleep in dorms adjacent to their workplace. Some of these workers are young peasants who came to the city seeking employment, while others are urban youth from average families - often already game fans2. Like the workers in the gold farming industry, the kinds of companies that employ these workers vary widely. Some gaming workshops are small businesses, owned and operated by a few colleagues of equal footing3. Some are mid-scale operations like the one in Jinhua. While others are gargantuan multinationals, such as industry front runner Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE).
III.
In 2005, IGE, a Hong Kong-based company co-founded by former child movie star Brock Pierce, moved into their new offices on the 19th floor of Oxford House; a glass skyscraper that was also home to CNN Hong Kong. At this time IGE was generating millions of dollars in monthly revenue, however it faced one looming issue: Blizzard Entertainment, the owner and operator of World of Warcraft, prohibited the trading of real-money for gold. As Blizzard began to shut down accounts used by gold farmers, IGE began to employ a series of techniques to avoid detection. The company would spend $20,000 per month to receive internet from a dial-up phone service that connected to servers based in the U.S. This meant that if IGE’s farmers were outed, they would be traced back to computers in the U.S., rather than in Hong Kong. Further to this, the World of Warcraft accounts that IGE used were created using names and addresses taken at random from a U.S. phone directory4. While this surreptitious behaviour allowed IGE to continue gold farming, to expand further the company needed to persuade Blizzard to legitimise real-money trading. For this express purpose, IGE invited Steve Bannon - then an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, to become the company’s vice chairman. In this role, Bannon secured for the company $60 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and other investors. However Blizzard remained steadfast, and their measures to stop real-money trading only escalated. By April 2007, IGE abandoned virtual-currency trading before rebranding entirely. IGE’s game workers were now once again simply game players.
IV.
For the American gamer who can trade a day of pay for many days of would-be grinding, purchasing gold makes sense. Yet this trade is only viable because the worker who accrued the gold has a much lower wage than the American gamer. Gold-farming is thus a form of offshore outsourcing: the same activity that Bannon would later position himself as diametrically opposed to. In this way the very existence of the gold-farming industry is predicated on the exploitation of global income inequalities. Indeed as the chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign, and as President Trump’s chief political advisor, Bannon claimed to be a defender of blue-collar manufacturing, as well as a staunch opponent of globalism. And yet it was the work done by Blizzard’s programmers and technicians in Irvine, California, that IGE - a company that Bannon spent six years with, was exploiting. Companies that trade in virtual currency not only benefit from the work of their own, poorly-paid gold farmers, but they also take advantage of the work of those developing and maintaining the games.
V.
It’s late at night in Jinhua and Lao Liu and a few of his colleagues are at the internet cafe after their last Warcraft shift. Liu’s a level 60 orc rogue, and as he runs around killing satyrs and helboars, he’s removed from the troubles of his daily life. Another character runs up to him and starts speaking in a language that he can’t understand. Liu minds his own business and chooses not to respond. Eventually the other player gets fed up and calls him a ‘f**king chinese farmer’, a phrase that Lou is intimately familiar with and understands acutely. This quickly takes him out of the game. Even in a world of night elves and trolls, he can’t escape his ethnicity. It’s one thing for workers like Liu to build the computers we play on or the clothes we wear while playing, but for them to be a part of our community is something else entirely. This interaction sticks with Liu as a reminder that the virtual world is not as far removed from his own as he might like to think.
[1] Julian Dibbell, Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
[2] Jie Gu. “Gold farmers part1.mov,” last modified March 12, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3cmCKjPLR8
[3] Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-And How They Don't (London: Yale University Press, 2014)
[4] Shawn Boburg and Emily Rauhala, ‘Stephen K. Bannon once guided a global firm that made millions helping gamers cheat’, The Washington Post, 2017
I.
It’s 2005 and you’re taking a break from whatever it is you normally do to play some World of Warcraft. You’re playing an undead warlock, and you’re about to reach level fifty-six. It’s not all fun and games though; as especially at these higher levels the game can often be a real grind. You spend hours on end killing the same monsters in the same spot, just to gain a few experience points or a few gold. So you get fed up and decide to speed things up a little. You open your browser and enter your credit card details into a website selling in-game currencies. You spend $25 USD and in return you receive 250 gold. With this you can repair your armour, buy that new staff you’ve been eyeing off, and still have enough left over to buy some extra potions.
II.
What you may not have realised was that before this gold reached your account, the online company that you bought it from purchased this gold from a gaming workshop. One such operation is the Donghua Gaming Workshop based in Jinhua, China. The company employs 80 ‘gold farmers’ to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, earning gold on World of Warcraft. The workers are given a 45-minute break for both lunch and dinner, and can take one day off per month. For their efforts they receive 30 yuan, or $3.80, per day1. In their two to three hours of daily leisure time, many go downstairs to the internet cafe on the first floor of the building, and continue playing World of Warcraft. Once they have finished gaming, they head back upstairs to sleep in dorms adjacent to their workplace. Some of these workers are young peasants who came to the city seeking employment, while others are urban youth from average families - often already game fans2. Like the workers in the gold farming industry, the kinds of companies that employ these workers vary widely. Some gaming workshops are small businesses, owned and operated by a few colleagues of equal footing3. Some are mid-scale operations like the one in Jinhua. While others are gargantuan multinationals, such as industry front runner Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE).
III.
In 2005, IGE, a Hong Kong-based company co-founded by former child movie star Brock Pierce, moved into their new offices on the 19th floor of Oxford House; a glass skyscraper that was also home to CNN Hong Kong. At this time IGE was generating millions of dollars in monthly revenue, however it faced one looming issue: Blizzard Entertainment, the owner and operator of World of Warcraft, prohibited the trading of real-money for gold. As Blizzard began to shut down accounts used by gold farmers, IGE began to employ a series of techniques to avoid detection. The company would spend $20,000 per month to receive internet from a dial-up phone service that connected to servers based in the U.S. This meant that if IGE’s farmers were outed, they would be traced back to computers in the U.S., rather than in Hong Kong. Further to this, the World of Warcraft accounts that IGE used were created using names and addresses taken at random from a U.S. phone directory4. While this surreptitious behaviour allowed IGE to continue gold farming, to expand further the company needed to persuade Blizzard to legitimise real-money trading. For this express purpose, IGE invited Steve Bannon - then an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, to become the company’s vice chairman. In this role, Bannon secured for the company $60 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and other investors. However Blizzard remained steadfast, and their measures to stop real-money trading only escalated. By April 2007, IGE abandoned virtual-currency trading before rebranding entirely. IGE’s game workers were now once again simply game players.
IV.
For the American gamer who can trade a day of pay for many days of would-be grinding, purchasing gold makes sense. Yet this trade is only viable because the worker who accrued the gold has a much lower wage than the American gamer. Gold-farming is thus a form of offshore outsourcing: the same activity that Bannon would later position himself as diametrically opposed to. In this way the very existence of the gold-farming industry is predicated on the exploitation of global income inequalities. Indeed as the chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign, and as President Trump’s chief political advisor, Bannon claimed to be a defender of blue-collar manufacturing, as well as a staunch opponent of globalism. And yet it was the work done by Blizzard’s programmers and technicians in Irvine, California, that IGE - a company that Bannon spent six years with, was exploiting. Companies that trade in virtual currency not only benefit from the work of their own, poorly-paid gold farmers, but they also take advantage of the work of those developing and maintaining the games.
V.
It’s late at night in Jinhua and Lao Liu and a few of his colleagues are at the internet cafe after their last Warcraft shift. Liu’s a level 60 orc rogue, and as he runs around killing satyrs and helboars, he’s removed from the troubles of his daily life. Another character runs up to him and starts speaking in a language that he can’t understand. Liu minds his own business and chooses not to respond. Eventually the other player gets fed up and calls him a ‘f**king chinese farmer’, a phrase that Lou is intimately familiar with and understands acutely. This quickly takes him out of the game. Even in a world of night elves and trolls, he can’t escape his ethnicity. It’s one thing for workers like Liu to build the computers we play on or the clothes we wear while playing, but for them to be a part of our community is something else entirely. This interaction sticks with Liu as a reminder that the virtual world is not as far removed from his own as he might like to think.
[1] Julian Dibbell, Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
[2] Jie Gu. “Gold farmers part1.mov,” last modified March 12, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3cmCKjPLR8
[3] Nick Yee, The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-And How They Don't (London: Yale University Press, 2014)
[4] Shawn Boburg and Emily Rauhala, ‘Stephen K. Bannon once guided a global firm that made millions helping gamers cheat’, The Washington Post, 2017
World of Warcraft Inventory (image made using Blender)