Real Sweatshops Making Virtual Goods
from the paying-someone-else-to-play-games-for-you dept
It has been fascinating to watch the virtual worlds of MMORPGs, such as EverQuest, Worlds of Warcraft and Star Wars: Galaxies, grow very real economies. Millions of dollars change hands in the trade of virtual goods giving some of these worlds GDPs equivalent to Namibia. With such a burgeoning economy, enterprising folks are now setting up "virtual sweatshops", where laborers are paid to "farm" these virtual worlds for gold, rare items, and characters. These laborers are paid miniscule wages to monitor and cultivate characters through automated scripts which are tuned to accumulate gold and exploit certain routines designed to collect large amounts of sellable goods. Game administrators frown upon these practices since an influx of capital into an economy could cause inflation and affect quality of gameplay (or quality of "life"). Sweatshops, inflation, monetary policy -- all of a sudden, these virtual worlds don't seem so virtual anymore, do they?
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Where's the sweat?!?
But yeah, lets shut them down so the poor, abused, game players...uhm, button clickers... uhm...oppressed workers!..yeah...can go back to selling themselves on the street
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