Gold Farmers in the World of Warcraft

Slate.com today features a moderately interesting article by Luke O'Brien about cheating in video games, and how it has evolved from the classic "left, left, right, right, up, down, up, down, B, A" to things with real-world implications, such as gold farming in the World of Warcraft.

For those of you unfamiliar with this term, gold farming is when players spend hours working to earn as much gold as quickly as possible--rather than being interested in getting really good armor or leveling up. They then sell this gold to other players for real world money (such as U.S. dollars) so that these other players can buy super-expensive items in-game. Often, these "gold farmers" are workers from China, working in sweatshops to earn as much gold as possible as quickly as possible.

And yet, when people talk about the cheaters in World of Warcraft, they don't talk about those who buy the gold, or even the companies that profit from gold farming--they complain about the "Chinese farmers." This has led to a disturbing trend of racism in the game, where those who don't speak perfect English (on US servers, at least) are accused of being farmers and then shunned from groups.

This can be seen in O'Brien's Slate.com article:

Compare Contra with World of Warcraft, the 9-million member online game, where a hue and cry has ensued over the practice of gold farming, in which players, many of them Chinese, earn virtual gold through drudging labor (by killing the same monster over and over again, for example). The farmers then sell their gold to lazy players, many of them American, who use it to acquire coveted weapons and armor they don't have the time or dedication to earn the hard way.

Most gold farmers haven't hacked the game. They're only doing what any player could do, given the time and inclination. But their efforts foul up the game's economy, and Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft, has banned tens of thousands of them.

What makes me really angry about this whole situation is that it's the farmers who are portrayed as the "evil cheaters" in the World of Warcraft, rather than those who buy the gold. If you read the rest of O'Brien's article, he talks about "Easter eggs" and hidden levels put in by developers as things that are kind of cool; the player is the one who has to decide whether or not to use them and cheat. This completely reverses the logic of his arguments about WoW, where it seems that those buying gold have little or no choice about buying gold--it's completely the fault of the farmer. It's "their efforts" that "foul up the game's economy," rather than the choices that players make to buy the gold.

Pardon my French, but what bullshit. If this were any other situation, there would be an outcry about the working conditions or wages of the gold farmers, or a rally against the company, or even, a call for people who use the product to boycott it until the working conditions are fixed. For products like clothes, coffee, and soft drinks, working to improve the working conditions of those who make the product or challenging the customer to use some other product seems to be the SOP, rather than vilifying the workers for making such cheap products.

I think the language of O'Brien's article is particularly telling, as well. Americans are described as lazy, and the Chinese farmers are "just doing what any player could do." Yet the farmers are the ones who are in the wrong.

Yes, I know there's the terms of the EULA, but that works against both the farmer and the player who buys gold. I have a really hard time coming down hard on someone who's just trying to do his job, put food on the table for his family, and have a place to live. I think that more of the focus of the discussion on gold-farming needs to be put on the "lazy American" who chooses to disobey the EULA and buy gold. These are the people who are the ones who are really destroying the in-game economy; if they stopped buying gold, there would be no market for the companies who farm gold.

If we're going to call someone in the World of Warcraft a cheater, let's make sure that we think it through, and place the blame where it belongs--with the consumer who chooses to buy gold, or the company that makes money off of sweatshop labor, not with the individual farmer who's just trying to earn a living.