Oh my god, who fucking cares? Online gaming is an odd, odd world, and it's not cheating to let other people play when you aren't. Let's not make a big deal out of this. What we should really be disturbed by is not the industry but how seriously people take online games.

Nothing tangible is produced and a massive amount of effort is being put into producing nothing. 

I shouldn't say nothing is produced, there are people who actually make large profits off of the playing of on-line games, and many of them are American.  We are quickly becoming a country where the uber wealthy make their money by producing nothing of value for our economy and only want to syphon off profits of workers of other countries all the while reinvesting nothing back into our economy.  And this 3rd world foreign labor pool are treated no better than, and in reality they are nothing more than, slave labor.

The new global economy of the 21st century...productionless wealth accumulation which only benefits the top 2% of earners.  Is this "the world is flat global economy" that was supposed to be a panacea of opportunity for the American worker I've heard so much about?

This should so be part of the immigration bill just so I can watch Michelle Malking explode.

They're willing to play the levels that Americans just won't play!

Also, we should have H1-G visas to bring in gamers who can beat super tough bosses at high levels.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I've played these games before. There's alot of stuff the happens in real life on the games.
The reason why peaple pay money for gold is because the games are designed that way. getting gold is boring, repetitive and time comsuming. if you have a full time job it's easier to just buy the gold.
Another funny thing is peaple complain about the chinese workers, and harass players who speak chinese thinking they're workers even when they might really be regular players.
wierd.

It's a service, it's a service for people who like games but don't want to spend their leisure time at the drudge part of the process. This is something that turns some people off morally, but is that so much different than paying an illegal immigrant to take care of your yard and going to the gym for your exercise instead? Or paying for snow removal and going to a gym while it's being done? Or paying for sit-down service at a dinner rather than doing a buffet line? See, I do my own yard work and think people are stupid for paying to go to a gym, and they think I don't "get" the true proper health benefits of gyms. Ever since we invented money, we've been making these trade-offs of labor, labor we want to do, labor we don't want to do.

What was really interesting, if you read the whole article, is that several of the gold farmers he spent time with liked to play the game themselves after work. One even paid for gold from another farmer!

Mainly the descriptions of what they do reminded me of assembly line work, terribly, numbingly boring (except for the one instance where an employer tried putting together a group to play at a higher level,) but with much less physical risk than a factory assembly line.

An "end-user gamer pays $20 for..." 100 of nothing. Now, who is being cheated?

Great point, Kozmik.

A job handling some of the routine functions of a game is probably far more stimulating and humanizing than a job at McDonald's.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Something else struck me about the story. The Thomas Friedman model is an annoying variant on Ricardo, that other countries benefit not from low wages but from something they do better; hence his calls for education as a remedy. It seems contradicted by the evidence, including shortages of educated labor abroad. But you know, for once he lucks out. Here most of us over 18 honestly don't know how to do their job (and don't care to). I sure don't.  This isn't exactly progress for developing nations, but I'm not sure it's the worse test case for free trade either.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

I'm sorry, but Mr. Newman uses some supremely defective logic.

"So what does this mean? That American games are so pathetically lazy that they would rather steal from the labor of Chinese workers than play honestly? Sure."

Americans aren't "stealing" from Chinese workers, they're paying them (in your own words) "tens of millions of dollars...for virtual gaming goodies." It's not stealing if you pay for it.

"But the sad part of the story is that you have often relatively educated Chinese workers taking these virtual sweatshop jobs-- work that produces nothng of value for their own countries and nothing of real value at all, a net loss of wealth across the board."

There are so many false assertions in this sentence, it's hard to know where to begin.

First, these are far from "sweatshop jobs." These are jobs that allow people to sit in a chair all day and play video games. People enjoy playing video games. People who are good enough that other people will literally pay them to play video games all day almost certainly enjoy playing video games (otherwise how did they get so good?) Americans are paying Chinese people to do something that they enjoy! Cue the outrage!

Second, their jobs aren't producing "nothing of real value." They're producing something that American gamers value: virtual gold in computer games. Not only do American gamers value virtual gold, but they're also willing to pay for it. I don't particularly like paintings and I think purchasing paintings is frivolous and wasteful, but that doesn't mean artists produce "nothing of real value." You don't get to decide what's valuable and what's not.

Third, it's not a "net loss of wealth across the board." American gamers are getting something they value (virtual gold), and Chinese laborers are getting something they value (money). If the Chinese laborers could get more money doing other jobs, they would. So if this "global labor exploitation" ended and the Chinese laborers got different jobs, they would lose money. Taking away high-paying jobs (relative to what those laborers could otherwise make) just because you don't deem them honorable enough is an odd way of helping third-world workers.

"A Chinese worker takes about four hours to get 100 virtual gold coins and gets paid $1.25 for that effort-- or 30 cents per hour -- yet an end-user gamer will pay $20 for those coins, meaning middle-men take 96% of the value of the Chinese workers labor."

$1.25 per 100 virtual gold coins seems like a tiny number and is certain to cause outrage among American readers, but $1.25 is worth a lot more in China than it is in America. Someone making 30 cents per hour makes $624 per year. The median household income in America is roughly $44,000 per year, so $624 per year must be an outrage! In reality, however, the median income in China is only roughly $900, which means that these Chinese laborers are making 70% of the median national income. For the sake of comparison, 70% of the median income in America is roughly $30,500. So while the Chinese laborers mining for virtual gold aren't making upper-class wages, their wages certainly have some purchasing power. But why use legitimate arguments when you can win with misleading statements and deceptive statistics?

I play World of Warcraft. I'm not fanatical about it, but I probably put 10-15 hours per week into it. I can understand why people choose to buy in-game commodities for real money, though because I work in the U.S. labor market such a choice is beyond my means even if I were inclined to spend my money that way. ($15 per month for the subscription is enough for me.)

As for gold buying and selling, I think a number of posters in this thread have addressed the economics of it. In terms of labor exploitation, well, that's almost laughable. But whatever blows your social economic justice skirt up, I guess.

I guess it is "cheating," though technically it is only against the Terms of Service and the End User License Agreement, which are documents written by corporate lawyers who have been with tasked with claiming the universe for the corporation. It remains to be seen whether these TOS and EULA documents would hold up if challenged. They're so rife with double-speak and internal contradictions that probably the last thing the software companies want is a serious challenge.

Are gamers who buy gold "lazy"? Is that even a question worth asking? Playing the game is a recreational activity. Within the game the exchange of certain commodities is possible. People trade gold and goods all the time, and many people trade time for gold as well. It's only when medium of exchange is so-called real world money that anyone gets huffy about it. But what is real world money but a means of attaching value to something, like, say, one's time? So if I say to you, I will spend my time helping you do X in the game for Y gold, that's okay, but if I say, I will give you X dollars for Y gold, that's not. Even though both are essentially an exchange of one kind of time value for another.

The thing is, in many ways these games are poorly designed. In order to do things which are most enjoyable, you often need to spend an inordinate amount of time doing things which aren't enjoyable at all. You "farm" commodities to enable you to succeed at various game challenges. The challenges can be fun, the but farming? Not so much. That some people maximize their enjoyment in the game by trading real world time (in the form of money) for in game time (in the form of farmed commodities), strikes me as really sensible. The real key is that each party is getting value.

A more genuine issue with the selling of in-game commodities is one of intellectual property. Who does the gold belong to? The company who publishes the game or the people who spend their time generating it? Superficially it might seem like the answer is obvious, but maybe not. Certainly it's a question around which debate remains.

So we're left with, um, what? Some people pay money for something that other people think they shouldn't pay money for. There's something new . . . not.

I don't play on-line games (unless one counts commenting here at TPM an online game) so I can't comment on this, except that it befuddles me to see a level of passion here usually reserved for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  But I will have to say this:

It's a standin metaphor for how obscenely off-kilter inequality in the world tilts workers in developing nations away from production that would actually benefit their fellow citizens and instead act as virtual butlers for the silliest luxuries of the developed nations.

is worth the price of admission alone. It may be the TPM sentence of the week, and it is only Monday.  The image is positively Wolcottian. 

aMike

In this context, globalization sure does sound like a big joke...online pachinko parlors, that's all this is...

Actually, this post is interesting for several reasons- not the least of which being that it gives us a glimpse into our own country's potential future.

As manufacturing and (to some degree) technology shifts overseas and income inequality continues to grow, we will become a nation of many who make burgers for, mow the lawns of, and yes- maybe even play video games for, the very wealthy few.

Have none of you ever heard of the concept of fair trade?

Oh I've heard about it, all right.  It's just an inherently bullshit concept.

How do you know when trade is "fair"?  Who are you to decide that this particular instance is not "fair"?   

Is it not fair because there's a wide difference between wage cost of the production workers for this particular commodity and the price of that commodity?  Since when does the wage of a production worker necessarily have any link to the value of the product being produced?  Should a factory worker manufacturing airplanes, which sell for tens of millions, be paid more than one manufacturing cars, which sell for much less?  Is a Wall Street stock analyst who makes $500k a year being "unfairly" exploited because the fruits of his labor enable the firm where he works to reap millions in profits?

If you look at the economic rise of Asia in the last 50 years - first Japan, then Southeast Asia, Korea and Taiwan and now China - which is an astounding human achievement responsible for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, it was accomplished in no small part by the growth of jobs similar to this one.  Jobs that leftist numbskulls like you would have them turn down.

Just so long as we're careful to point out Newman represents the fringe left. Not the broader left, left center, and moderate-left.

Ah yes, I've written multiple times about Chinese repression of labor rights, I note specifically that this issue is a "standin" for a broader set of concerns, but you can read my mind and I'm just offended by computer games (which I actually quite enjoy myself).

The rationalizations of those who deny concerns over global labor rights is neverending.

But you're talking about GAMES! It's all CARTOONS! That means it's FUN!

All this talk about icky unions just makes me think of people 100 years ago losing arms and getting black lung. That doesn't happen anymore! That's why we don't have any more unions! Labor exploitation is a thing of the past, and only happens in black and white photos!

If it's shiny and flashy, it can't possibly be bad!