
Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer - pg
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html?ex=1339732800&en=1676d344608cb590&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
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gyro_robo
The blame here lies squarely at the feet of Blizzard. Any game that CAN be
automated _deserves_ to be.

Instead of making a game that is interesting, they made a glorified Skinner
box, because that's the proven formula to rake in the bucks via addiction.
Like rats pressing a lever to get a pellet, the game substitutes repetitive,
mindless activites for actual plot or compelling narrative.

Then they cracked down on bots. They install spyware on your machine called
"Warden" and snoop what you're up to. They even nailed people using macros,
programmable keyboards, and the commercial version of Wine (to play on Linux).

It's relatively easy to automate various game activities, but it's hard to
make a bot that can convincingly fake being a human, especially if an admin
starts asking questions or if they CAPTCHA you in some way.

Thus they try to make sure an actual human is sitting there doing the mindless
activities all day long. This creates pressure to use the cheapest human labor
possible to get these repetitive, mind-numbing tasks out of the way.

The sweatshop element could be eliminated by simply allowing scripting. Of
course that wouldn't fix the game's inherent design flaws -- UO, EQ, and WoW
all suffer(ed) from the same ones.

~~~
Goladus
I don't understand why this post is getting so many points.

Any computer game can be automated if you can implement an AI that is good
enough. Saying that "any game that can be automated deserves to me" seems kind
of silly to me.

Calling WoW a glorified Skinner box seems like a similarly useless thing to
say. At that level of lexical precision, news.yc is also a "glorified Skinner
box," as is driving to work in the morning and going out for dinner at night.
I don't really see the point of the analogy.

It's easy to automate "various game activities," but certainly not all game
activities and not most of the ones that really matter. It would be more
accurate to say that there are some specific activities that can be automated,
but the expense of that versus the reliability of a human operator is not
worth it. MMOG environments are too volatile, even without considering admins.

Warcraft actually allows a great deal of scripting. Coming from a game like
Everquest, the level of automation Blizzard allows is mind-boggling.

~~~
gyro_robo
The point you are missing is that WoW becomes _more_ enjoyable if its
repetitive, mindless parts are automated. There would be no point to
automating News.YC discussion or going out to dinner, but driving to work
surely would be a candidate for automation for most people. The Skinner Box
analogy is directly applicable to mindless, repetitive behavior like clicking
to kill monsters over and over again, while thoughtful discussion does not fit
into that category.

Similarly, you could create a robot to watch movies for you or go on dates for
you, but there'd be no point, as you'd be missing out on the enjoyment. The
statement about whether something _can_ be automated refers not to mere
physical possibility, but to whether it improves your subjective human
experience. Thus you can't really automate watching movies or going out on
dates because you can't have someone else live life for you. The benefit you
gain is all in the _experience_ of it, not the _accomplishment_ of it.

The mindless activities these MMOGs subject you to are all of the
_accomplishment_ variety. Those shouldn't even exist, but if they do, they
deserve to be automated. Then people enjoy the _experience_ of being able to
engage in the non-mindless activities.

The amount of scripting WoW _allows_ is trivial compared to what you can
_actually_ do.

~~~
Goladus
Scripting via programmable keyboards doesn't make WoW more fun except for a
small minority of people. Most of the repetitive parts are not necessary to
advance, and certainly not necessary to have fun.

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lupin_sansei
I wonder if some of the tedium in Gold Farming could be automated away with
bots, or some kind of macro recorder?

~~~
euccastro
Sure, automating the grind is easy; the problem is other humans noticing
you're a bot. Turing Test anyone?

The surest way to make a game less automatable is to link progress to social
factors. It would also make the life of everyone more interesting- including
sweatshop workers. If someone is making my game more interesting and
meaningful through human interaction, they're legitimately earning their dough
in my book.

Of course, easier said than designed.

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palish
Sad. I work in the game industry, and it's sad seeing a work as nice as World
of Warcraft perverted in that way. The designers never intended for such a
thing to happen.

The future seems like it's going to be a balance between freedom to entertain
and moral standards. With the way movies are going, games are in danger of
becoming morally questionable too (think of a Saw game or a Hostel game where
your main objective is to torture someone). Time is a valuable human resource,
and a game like World of Warcraft wastes a lot of it. But it does give people
satisfaction. So if it's morally wrong to waste a valuable resource, is the
game morally wrong?

Maybe everyone has ways of perverting everything, and we shouldn't worry about
it. But it must be painful to watch your creation destroy lives like that.

~~~
Goladus
I haven't finished reading the article yet, but I suspect this problem is a
little blown out of proportion. The designers most definitely did plan for
this, and the game is built to be resiliant to gold farming. The player
economy is huge and important, but nevertheless a marginal aspect of the game.
You can accomplish virtually anything without using it.

I suspect most of the millions of people who play Warcraft have fun and are
not addicted to it.

~~~
palish
Uhh, excuse me, but the designers didn't expect sweatshops to pop up and waste
asian people's lives farming gold. That's what's sad about it, the waste of
time. I'm not talking about the people having fun, I'm talking about the
people having to _work_ for next to nothing doing something they hate and
wasting their time on it.

~~~
rms
The wage is comparable to other menial jobs in China. I personally would
rather farm gold than work 12 hour days in a manufacturing plant. At least you
can chain smoke and maybe even listen to music.

What's sad is the hundreds of millions of Chinese people that would kill to
have a standard of living as high as a city-dwelling gold farmer.

~~~
lupin_sansei
Well said. If there was better work than Gold Farming they would do it.

I'm with Milton Friedman in thinking that Sweatshops are a good thing, in that
they provide a job for people who've got no place else to work. Remove the
sweatshops and they starve.

~~~
rms
The real problem is that we have an economic system where people would starve
without sweat shops. Capitalism has this nasty little problem of all the
wealth getting concentrated in the hands of the few and globalization
exacerbates the problem. Unfortunately, no one's figured out a better way of
distributing wealth.

~~~
pg
And the alternatives to capitalism have an even nastier problem: absolute
instead of merely relative poverty.

Incidentally, the Chinese wouldn't starve without sweatshops. They'd be
peasant farmers. The reason they work in sweatshops is the same reason workers
chose to work in the "satanic mills" of England in 1800: being a peasant
farmer is a very hard life.

~~~
Tichy
I don't know about China, and not about the satanic mills, but as I have
recently about the industrial revolution: back then actually it wasn't
possible for everybody to be a farmer anymore. On the one hand, there was an
enormous population explosion (which had also been encouraged by Feudalism, I
think, the "owners" of the people had an interest in owning more people for a
while). Then Feudalism was abolished, and nobody took care of the people
anymore. hence the poverty and their willingness to do awful work. In that
sense, I don't think Capitalism was really to blame. I suspect a similar thing
could be going on in China.

~~~
pg
Are you implying that the Industrial Revolution was caused by population
pressure? That would be an amazing coincidence, wouldn't it, if jobs in
factories appeared at just the moment it "wasn't possible to be a farmer
anymore."

In fact the history of every country that industrializes is the same. People
work on farms till jobs appear in factories, and then they move to the
cities-- not because it isn't possible to work on farms anymore, but because
it's such a grim life.

And incidentally, feudalism was over in England centuries before the
Industrial Revolution got started in the late 18th century.

~~~
lupin_sansei
Exactly. The guy above got it back to front. The population explosion was
_because_ of the extra wealth from the industrial revolution lowering the
death rate due to the end of famine. <http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf>

Feudalism ended in England in the 16th century, hundreds of years before the
industrial revolution
<http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0006447.html>

~~~
Tichy
Well then it wouldn't be a coincidence, would it? I mean if population
explosion was caused by the industrial revolution. I didn't mean the
industrial revolution was started by population explosion, only the squalor
was (among other factors) caused by it.

Sorry I don't have the books with me right now (until next week), and I didn't
learn them by heart. I seem to also remember that there were machines before
the "revolution" - maybe it still was a change of political circumstances that
permitted the revolution (free trade between countries, possibility of
ownership giving incentives for entrepreneurs etc.). Certainly several factors
worked in combination, it's not like the invention of a particular machine
triggered it all.

I also seem to remember that China has the fewest farmland per person of all
countries in the world. I don't think anybody can simply be a farmer. I know I
couldn't just be a farmer in my country.

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Alex3917
The problem isn't that Chinese gold farmers are "cheating." Rather, their
behavior undermines the efforts of Blizzard to exploit those so needy for
social status that they'll spend eight hours a day clicking on pictures of
digital rats in order to feel like a hero.

You only see this type of neuroticism where people are competing for zero-sum
social status that is arbitrarily handed down from on high.

You would never see people paying Chinese to, say, write their blogs for them
or do anything else where social status is derived from bottom-up respect for
the intrinsic quality of one's work.

/Sold his UO account eight years ago for $620 and hasn't touched that stuff
since

~~~
Goladus
Warcraft is actually fun to play even when you discount the in-game rewards
system. It stays that way for much longer than most of its predecessors.
Everyone I know that bought gold online for Warcraft did it for the fun of it,
not in order to increase social status. This is in marked contrast to
Everquest, where the items you had were a huge part of social status within
the game.

Warcraft is not an especially social game as far as MMOs go. You are
relatively free to play it in your own little bubble of friends. Competition
is largely via PvP, which is almost entirely avoidable. This is unlike UO,
which forced PVP, and unlke Everquest which forced intense competition for in-
game resources.

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fireandfury
I like this post because it shows what it's like in a different part of the
world. Reminds of Bill Gates's recent talks on global inequity.

I liked this quote: 'I have this idea in mind that regular players should
understand that people do different things in the game, he said. They are
playing. And we are making a living.'

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zx76
Well irrespective of which way you see these businesses, it's inevitable that
as more people sign up to virtual worlds the amount of money spent on trading
virtual items is going to grow from the current "$1.8 Billion" market.
www.sparter.com don't seem that worried!

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rms
Thanks for the link, that was a great article.

