"Sack" is the only name I'm given for the person I'm supposed to contact. He lives in the Fujian province of China, but his place of business is online—he plays Lineage II. He's paid about 56 cents an hour to work in a videogame "sweatshop."
Sack is the low man in these operations. "I work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on the U.S. Lineage II server," he says. He works long, boring hours for low pay and gets no holidays. Carefully constructed macros do most of the work; Sack is just there to fend off the occasional player itching for a fight or game master who's hunting for these automated farming programs. "Everyone knows where the good places are, and GMs know that your account has been online for a whole month," he says. "[A GM will] message me asking, .Hello, what level are you, please?' I know he isn't asking my level; he just wants to know if [there's actually a person at the computer]."
How does it work? The macros for World of WarCraft, for example, control a high-level hunter and cleric. The hunter kills while the cleric automatically heals. Once they are fully loaded with gold and items, the "farmer" who's monitoring their progress manually controls them out of the dungeon to go sell their goods. These automated agents are then returned to the dungeons to do their thing again. Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150.
That is the first step. It isn't too difficult from there to make the leap into creating your own sweatshop. All you need is the ability to write game macros or the money to purchase them. That's right, if you know where to look, they are on the open market. A macro that uses a teleportation exploit in WOW is currently going for $3,000. Then just hire cheap labor to monitor the bots.
For every reseller of gold, there's a wholesaler who supplies it to gamers with real money to burn. And the biggest name in gold resale is IGE, or Internet Gaming Entertainment. "It's not that they pay the best; they are the most well known, and so [stuff] sells fast," says Smooth Criminal. He knows sales are good because resellers can track profits in real time—and because IGE is one of the biggest fish in the secondary gold market. In fact, IGE has been on a buying spree. It is acquiring the competition and creating a virtual monopoly in this market.
But finding and shutting down these farming sweatshops is a hard thing to do. Kiblinger says that IGE's customer service is based in Hong Kong, its employees working for sweatshop wages. IGE's response: "The reason we have customer service in Hong Kong is because it's the gateway to Asia, and our customer service reps earn a fair salary in relation to the profession in that country." This is the same rationale for major companies shipping their customer service desks to India.
For all the so-called virtual sweatshops discovered, a lot of these young men and boys don't mind their jobs, and they aren't exactly working in sweatshop conditions. There's a world of difference between making sneakers and watching bots fight all day. However, they are underpaid, or as Smooth Criminal puts it, "They get paid dirt. But dirt is good where they live."
I'm not sure what the focus of the article is. Is it to expose the fact that people farm stuff in MMOs? Hell, players have been doing that in games for a lot longer that MMOs have been around. There is little harm to farming unless by farming the farmer is denying you the opportunity to obtain the same things.
Is it that they are "underpaid"? Underpaid for who's standards? Look at the last quoted sentence. Farming wouldn't work in the US for the same reason you don't see white collar workers out tending crops all day. People who are used to a certain lifestyle won't step down from it. For others, such a lifestyle is an upgrade.
MMOs, for many people, end up being a competition. Except for a scant few MMOs, you have to play around your character's level. If your friends or your guild outlevels you, you feel left behind. You want to play catch up. It becomes a competition if anything to just stay even. If you can't devote the game time to it, but you have the income, you can buy your character loot and/or levels. It's all about having more money than time.
EDIT:
Heartfelt condolences go out to the victims of the Terrorist attack in London today.
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