An hour before 12 midnight, 3 hours into the big night shift with still nine more to go. A workstation in a very small, lightly fluorescent-lighted square office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sits shirtless and heavily chain-smoking, steely gazing purposefully at the hugely popular online computer game in front of him World of Warcraft. The PC screen showed a lightly wooded mountain terrain area, softly studded with castle ruins and several grazing deer, in which the warrior monks milled about.
Li, or rather his hero staff-wielding wizard character, had been busy slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m that night, his mouse-clicking on one dead corpse after another picking up the loot as they call it, each time he is busy gathering a few dozen virtual coins — and maybe a magic weapon basic or expensive or two — into an increasingly laden virtual backpack.
12 hours a every night, that means seven nights a week, with only 2 or 3 nights off per month, this is what Chinese Li does — for a sole living. In 2006, the game on his screen was, as always, World of Warcraft or WoW for short, an online fantasy game title in which players, in the guise of self-created avatars — night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters — battle hard and find their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning some points for every monster slain and rising, over many many months, from the blizzard made game’s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the very highest (70).
More than eight million people around the world play this World of Warcraft — thats one in every thousand on earth — and whenever Li is logged on, thousands of other players are, as well too. They share the game’s very vast, virtual world with him, converging in its towns to trade their big loot or turning up occasionally from time to time in Li’s own wooded corner of it, looking for their enemies to kill and coins to gather. Every World of Warcraft player needs those coins, and mostly for one reason: more coins pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the big points or experience to reach the next level.
there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual coin or money as the game requires: they can spend many hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.
Finishing each shift, then Li reports the night’s haul to his shift supervisor, and at the end of the week, and his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. Every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25 per bag, earning a wage of 30 cents an hour. The supervisor boss, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American,European or Australian player) for as much as $20.
The very small commercial space Li and his colleagues tend to work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers’ dorm, a half-hour’s journey away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to avid gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.
The market for massively multiplayer online role-playing games, known as M.M.O.R.P.G’s, is a fast-growing one, WoW / World of Warcraft being a big one - with no fewer than 100 current titles and many more under development, all targeted at a player population that totals around 30 million worldwide. World of Warcraft, produced in Irvine, Calif., by Blizzard Entertainment, is one of the most profitable computer games in history, earning close to $1 billion a year in monthly subscriptions and other revenue. In a typical M.M.O., as in a classic predigital role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, each player leads his fantasy character on a life of combat and adventure that may last for months or even years of play. As has also been true since D. & D., however, the romance of this imaginary life stands in sharp contrast to the plodding, mathematical precision with which it proceeds.
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